And so, under the cover of darkness, or, at least, apathy, Ireland’s home qualifiers for the 2018 World Cup begin on Thursday night.
Don’t feel bad if you haven’t noticed, switched off or have been otherwise engaged. It’s tough to get excited about a visit from Georgia, especially when it feels like we’ve been here before. And that’s not just because Georgia played in Dublin last September.
Roy Keane says that, after the European Championships, the feelgood factor is back in Irish football, but if you go along to Lansdowne Road on Thursday night, you might find yourself wondering if this is feeling good, I’d hate to be feeling bad.
There are reasons to be positive. The performances of Robbie Brady and Jeff Hendrick in the summer and the result in Belgrade suggest that Ireland can be competitive in this qualifying group.
It isn’t Martin O’Neill’s style to make promises about some some unknown point in the future. He has sometimes been dismissive when speaking of managers who talk too much about philosophies. O’Neill takes a different approach. The game is about players, he says, and he believes a manager has no future unless he sorts out the present.
“Just win and get your players running for you,” was the advice he gave Paul Lambert when he embarked on his own management career.
O’Neill understands that a manager who doesn’t win won’t be around to see any plans materialise and that has always shaped his approach to the job
On Wednesday at Abbotstown, O’Neill looked forward to the Georgia game and wouldn’t look much further than that.
Georgia would be difficult opponents as they had been in the past, he said, and Ireland wouldn’t be taking them lightly, in case you were worried.
O’Neill may be defined over the next year by how Ireland get on in the qualifiers, but there is an argument that Ireland need to be defined by a lot more.
The manager will, of course, be looking for players who can improve his squad, but it may be time to ask more from the senior manager. O’Neill was hired and works on the basis that the results of the senior team will shape how he is viewed. But as the future looks increasingly bleak for Irish football, it may be necessary for the two most high-profile figures in the Irish game to define their roles differently.
“If I thought I was going to be here for the next 10 years then of course you would not just monitor someone like Hogan, but also other younger players coming through,” O’Neill said recently when he was asked about the future and Scott Hogan.
“These players have still got to prove themselves and have a chance to prove themselves. In the meantime, I can’t take my eye off us trying to qualify for the competition. That’s my job and that’s where I derive the pleasure from.”
The future development of Irish football is not O’Neill’s job. Ruud Dokter is in charge of that side of things, but O’Neill and Roy Keane should be seen as permanent fixtures too.
Next month, O’Neill and Keane will celebrate three years in the job. If Ireland qualify for the World Cup, they will be approaching five years in charge. It is quite a chunk of time for a manager, even one who might subscribe to the John Maynard Keynes maxim that in the long run, we’re all dead.
When he took the job, O’Neill joked about players who were showing potential at U-16 level and how “a fat lot of good” that was to him. Those underage players will now be 17 or 18 and reaching decisive points in their careers. There are coaches in charge of their development, but the senior team needs to be part of the same process or else Ireland will keep making the same mistakes, doing the right things occasionally despite the system.
On Monday, Roy Keane talked about Ireland’s inability to keep possession and flagged it as an age-old problem.
“Irish teams could have been retaining the ball better for the last 30 years, not just three months. It is a big problem in the game for us. You can talk about the things we don’t do well but when you think about the things we do well, the honesty of the players, the desire, two goals away from home – it’s never an easy thing to do. Against Serbia, who are no mugs, that was good. If we went away to a lesser team, and got battered, then that would be different.”
Keane made similar points after the Belgium game in the summer. Ireland weren’t going to transform before they played Italy, these issues were deep-rooted and would need time to fix.
“I’m going back over the last 20, 30, 40 years. You’ve got to be able to deal with the ball and that’s an area we have to improve on. It’s highly unlikely we’re going to do it in the next 48 hours. In terms of the bigger picture from the underage teams, you have to have lads who can put their foot on the ball and show a bit of composure, bit of courage, want the ball.”
But the long-term is just a series of short-terms and it may be time for the management to start thinking as if they are part of the long-term plans not simply charged with getting a result the next time out.
O’Neill and Keane took over from Giovanni Trapattoni, a manager who believed only in victory and who spent five years insisting that he was doing the best he could with a collection of footballers who couldn’t be trusted to do anything beyond the elementary.
This approach was outlined by Marco Tardelli in the summer when he explained Ireland’s mindset, as he saw it. “They have trouble handling the game tactically. They don’t get that football is also an intellectual matter, and not just about attacking and going forward.”
Since 2008, Ireland have played a style where keeping the ball can often appear to be an optional extra. The emergence of Wes Hoolahan under O’Neill has changed the emphasis at times, but the game in Serbia showed that Ireland are still reluctant to be creative when they’re on the ball.
Keane puts this in a historical context, seeing it as a problem handed on from generation to generation, but it may not be completely accurate.
Against Germany at the 2002 World Cup, Ireland had 58 per cent possession. Some might wonder if most of that came when Damien Duff was on the ball, but it suggests that there was time when Ireland tried to play football, something which was continued at times under Brian Kerr.
Possession statistics are often dismissed, so Ireland’s 41 per cent against Serbia last month could be seen as irrelevant were it not for the piece of information that seemed to sum up the game. Ireland completed 94 passes out of 138. Serbia made 409 passes and completed 371.
Match statistics from Ireland's Serbia draw confirm what we all suspected https://t.co/bIglQqMlYR
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) September 6, 2016
O’Neill will think only one thing mattered on the evening and that was the point that Ireland picked up. In the summer, Keane’s solution was that Ireland needed “courage and balls”. Ireland will always fall back on those qualities and then wonder why others talk only of our physical qualities.
Ireland have a management team with the personality and intelligence to transform Irish football. Ireland had a reasonable summer, but it is right to expect more, right to hope that a visit from Georgia on a Thursday night in October isn’t the brightest point on the horizon.
The GAA Hour pays tribute to the unbeatable Dubs and ask where did it all go wrong for Mayo in the All-Ireland final replay. Listen below or subscribe on iTunes.
