This Ireland team could and should be the darlings of the country, so why are they so hard to love?
By Niall Delaney
So it’s time again. Another qualifying campaign draws to a close and we find ourselves battling it out for second place in a group that was there for the taking.
For a country of their size and stature, Russia are embarrassingly bad at the moment. When your population is pushing 143,000,000 people and your star player is one Andrey Arshavin, then you know things are not too healthy in the footballing gene pool. Yet, this truly average side made us look like Liechtenstein, both home and away, and this is what ultimately cost us a top spot that was eminently achievable.
Now before everyone goes and says we are hardly world beaters ourselves and to potentially finish the group sandwiched between the collective might of Russia and ahem, Armenia is not a bad outcome, well I, for one, firmly believe this not to be the case. We may not have a good team tonight, but we have good players, some really good players.
In fact, Gio Trapattoni has a luxury that many of his predecessors have not, and that is the fact that he can call on about 25 players that are there or thereabouts (i.e. either automatic first choice and second choice in their favoured position) with Premier League clubs.
Where did our unbeaten record get us last time we attempted to qualify for a major tournament? Nowhere.
If you don’t believe me, then here they are: Given, Westwood, Kenny, Coleman, O’Shea, Foley, Wilson, Reid, Dunne, Clark, Ward, Kelly, Hunt, Duff, Whelan, Delap, Gibson, McCarthy, Meyler (currently injured), Long, Walters, Best, Doyle, Sammon and Cox, with a further three that could easily be playing there in Keane, McGeady and Fahey. And that’s not taking into account exciting youngsters like Conor Clifford, Robbie Brady and Anthony O’Connor, who are about to make a breakthrough to the big time.
You could argue that many of these players are not what that bastion of punditry Jamie Redknapp would call top top drawer but some are (Given, Dunne, O’Shea, Duff, Long, Doyle) and others have the potential to be (Clark, Coleman, McCarthy, Clifford and Brady), but none are being used to make this Irish team a pleasure to watch and a joy to support. I am as most of us are, immensely patriotic and hugely proud of being Irish and when I sit down to take my seat in the Lower West Stand at the Aviva tonight, I’ll be getting behind the team, roaring to the rooftops and wanting us to win.
Numbing mediocrity
But I’m a footballing anorak, sorry an Irish football team anorak and I know the potential that this team has. However, most people don’t – hundreds of thousands of casual Irish soccer fans are being turned off the national team in their droves and even the most loyal, the most patient, the most manically obsessive are having their patience tested to its uppermost limits. Ireland are just woeful to watch, truly awful, and they could not even lift the numbing mediocrity of their play against a pitiful Andorra on Friday night last.
Now, the defenders of the Italian set currently in charge of our national team will no doubt claim that results are everything and that Shay Given’s clean sheets should be in a Daz advert, but that would be foolish in the extreme. Where did our unbeaten record get us last time we attempted to qualify for a major tournament? Well I’ll tell you, it got us nowhere and the song “I remember that summer in Dublin” probably has an altogether different meaning for messrs Dunne, Duff and Keane, who deserve to be playing on the world stage.
Our eight clean sheets are a bit of a misnomer also. Most of these came in meaningless friendlies in the Carling nothing’s Cup against striking luminaries such as Kenny Miller, Kyle Lafferty and Robert Earnshaw. A 0-0 at home to the Slovaks was a bad result, not getting a clean sheet against Andorra would have been a hanging offense and the fact we kept Russia scoreless was down to a crazy display of brazen luck and Richard Dunne having several large bowls of Weetabix that morning, rather than a sound defensive system.
Tonight, we take on an Armenia team who play attractive attacking football and we will start this home game with two hod carriers in midfield, allowing them to take the game to us and attack us at will, while our management team will choose to ignore talented young players such as Shane Long, Seamus Coleman, Leon Best, James McCarthy and Ciaran Clark, many of them not even on the bench, with only the abysmally treated Long likely to see any game time.
Counting the cost
So what has been achieved so far under Trapattoni? Well a lot of money has been spent – over €6.5 million on the manager alone – and I’d say his expenses bill would put John O’Donoghue in the ha’penny place. His hired guns, including that oasis of calm and rational thinking, Marco Tardelli, have cost a pretty penny too and let’s not forget poor John Delaney on his measly €400,000 a year, his customary free bar allowance for close friends, cronies and arse lickers and his allocation of lovely green ties so that he can toast other great Irish performances such as the 0-0 “victory” in Russia. All of this comes while grassroots football is starved of cash and infrastructure.
In terms of results we have qualified for nothing and a victory tonight will only see us in a 50/50 play off which has not been a happy hunting ground for an Irish team over the last decade. We have played turgid football with a good bunch of players available, we have suffered a decimation in terms of our reputation as now we are regarded as not only the most predictable team in Europe but also the least easy on the eye.
Perhaps the greatest travesty of all, lest we forget, is that so many people will not watch the game tonight. So many will not even realise we are playing, so many will get on with their tough austerity-ridden lives and forget what a great outlet for joy and blessed relief that this Irish soccer team could be and should be.
But under this current regime, tuning in to watch Ireland would only add to the gloom.
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