What is progress?
If you take one quick glance and make an even quicker comparison of Germany’s last two visits to Dublin, progress is night and day.
If you listen to Eamon Dunphy and all the rest of us whinging about football and being brave in possession and taking teams on, measuring progress becomes a little bit more complicated.
Martin O’Neill is fed up trying to define his progress mid-tenure but he knows one yardstick he can hold it against when his work with Ireland is finished: that he can introduce a new generation of footballers to take over the national team.
“I think I have been asked this question so many times about progression,” O’Neill said. “I think sometimes that it’s very subjective. For instance, if you take the Germany game where we’ve beaten the world champions and the time we played them before in the previous competition and we lost heavily, you’d automatically think that’s progression. There are lots of other points where you might think ‘well, maybe that isn’t progression’.”
But there are clearer points you can look at. At the end of it all.
In the midst of contract talks and O’Neill’s future, the Derry man said he would absolutely be open to staying on with the team. And he seems to be thinking that way anyway.
“I’d obviously like, at some stage or another, to introduce a group of younger lads who are capable of taking over from these older players. Regardless of whether it’s Friday and Monday night, or whether it’s France as their last time, I think there is a set of players here well into their 30s that need replacing – they will not mind me saying that.
“If that’s the case, we want to replace them with really top quality, younger players coming through who can take their place at international level almost immediately. That’s important. In terms of progress, if we qualify, I think regardless of what people say, that will very obviously be progression.
“But it’s subjective.”
