Stephen Hunt has said that some supporters shouldn’t be so quick to criticise Ireland’s style of play because we have never played “fancy” football in the past.
The anti-Trap brigade have largely been in hiding ever since our magnificent 4-0 win over Estonia on Friday night, even though the sheer awfulness of the opposition may well have papered over some of the cracks in the Irish performance.
There has been an element of Irish support dismayed with the defensive approach of the Irish team in the current qualifying campaign even though it has delivered results, but livewire winger Hunt reckons that supporters and pundits with such grievances should pipe down because for as long as he can remember, the Irish team have never played with style.
“When we qualified for the first World Cup, Packie Bonner couldn’t get the ball far enough down the pitch,” said Hunt.
“Our style of play has developed since then because we no longer hit it as high as we can.
“We do have a direct style of play, but we have good effective players at it. It’s a bit of a myth, really, and we have just to get on with it.
“It can come across sometimes from the media that we don’t have a fancy style of play, but we never had, we never, ever had.
Hunt continued his point, saying that in the last 20 years, apart from Arsenal wizard turned moaning pundit Liam Brady, that Ireland have had nobody that could claim to be amongst the upper echelons of the greatest creative talents in the game.
To emphasise, he even managed to get in a dig at lovable scamp Jason McAteer and compared them to current greats Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, possibly the only time he has been mentioned alongside them in the same sentence and certainly the last time he will appear in the same paragraph as them on this website.
“We had Liam Brady, who was talented, but apart from that, you tell me who has been Ronaldo or Messi in the last 20 years for Ireland” Hunt added.
“There is no-one (that has) been that good. (Jason) McAteer – good player, works hard, but no Messi or Ronaldo.
“He talks like them, but no Messi or Ronaldo.”
There may be no Messi, no Ronaldo, no Brady or even no McAteer in the current Irish squad, but Hunt believes that it still contains plenty of “very good players” and that Ireland are so effective because the squad is more than the sum of its parts.
“For starters, Messi and Ronaldo don’t have Irish passports,” Hunt said.
“We have some good players – we have some very good players, not just good players.
“We have players who are well capable of producing a bit of magic and playing in the Premier League, and Aiden McGeady plays in The Russian league.
“Look at the Italian manager for England as well, how they are as well now. We are hard to beat and we will be hard to beat come Tuesday as well.”
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