Roy Keane said all the right things when he talked to the media in Versailles on Monday morning, but there may come a time when he wants to say different things.
Keane was in warrior mode, sending a message that beating Italy in Lille on Wednesday is not impossible for Ireland and, even if it were, he would probably think it could still be done.
His final words as he left the main press conference at Ireland’s media base were that Ireland needed “players with courage. And balls.”
This was Keane talking in the abstract concepts that tend to be central to his football analysis, a world of hard knocks, a “man’s game” where success is only failure deferred.
Football, Keane said, “is more about setbacks and disappointments than the good days.” And how a player respond tells you all you need to know about him.
On Monday, Keane’s predecessor as assistant manager Marco Tardelli also spoke about Ireland’s players. Tardelli was dismissive of Ireland’s tactical intelligence, but could find nothing wrong with their hearts.
"For them it's normal to play without stopping to think" https://t.co/nQSok3uEo5
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) June 20, 2016
“Their collapse against Belgium?” Tardelli said. “They made too many mistakes, one after the other, but all for the same reason: 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.”
For Keane, football is an emotional matter, a game which reveals character, although Tardelli was more complimentary about those aspects of the Irish player. “They have great qualities in terms of character and physical build, a great drive to learn, and not very much attention to tactics.”
Things might not change much between now and Wednesday on that front. The abstract concepts Keane talked about will be central to Ireland’s game plan for Wednesday’s game against Italy.
The rain that fell steadily in Northern France again on Monday, the pitch and the attitude of the Italians as they have already qualified are the things providing Ireland with hope. All we need to do now is discount the evidence available from the two matches Ireland have actually played and it’s hard to see anything preventing victory.
Keane gave a defiant performance, but the things he didn’t say or postponed saying may be as revealing as the things he did.
On another day, Keane may have been as scathing of individuals as he was in Cork after the defeat to Belarus. When he addressed the media on that occasion, Keane’s frustration seemed to stem from the inability of those on the fringes of the squad to challenge those who were on the fringes of the team.
All that has happened in Frances has been a reminder of the underlying weakness in the 23 selected and what the squad’s limitations says about the state of Irish football.
On a number of issues, Keane said this was not the time for a discussion of those matters. If this was not the time nor the place, there may well be a time and a place.
“There’s no point sometimes in talking about certain individuals through the media. It’s not for today,” he said, conscious perhaps that the last thing a squad made painfully aware of their shortcomings by Belgium on Saturday afternoon was their assistant manager making them painfully aware of their shortcomings on Monday morning.
On another day, Keane wouldn’t have hesitated but this wasn’t the right time for those brutal truths.
Nothing, say, Aiden McGeady has done in this tournament has disproved Keane’s opinion of the player as he expressed it in Cork.
But this was not the day for that kind of analysis. “You’ve got the wrong man,” he said when asked to look back to the Belgium game, portraying himself as someone incapable of dwelling on the past, but who lives only for the future which looks bright, but only if certain qualities are displayed.
But as Keane considered what Ireland needed and what they lacked, it was easy to detect the same kind of frustration building that had led to the criticism in Cork. “Some of our players mightn’t be used to that,” he said of the demands that are made on footballers who have to play three big matches in nine days.
This has been a relentless theme of Keane’s, but this was not the day to expand on it. The problems Ireland had keeping the ball against Belgium, and indeed against anyone over the past twenty years, were unlikely to be solved in the next 48 hours.
This may be the key theme emerging from this tournament. How Ireland changes its culture so that it can arrest the decline is something that will have to be addressed no matter what happens on Wednesday night.
“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.”
Keane explained courage as John Giles would explain courage on the field. “Courage doesn’t mean booting somebody. It means wanting the ball when sometimes you don’t actually want the ball, if that makes sense.”
Of course, there would be a time to boot somebody, there is always a time when booting somebody is the answer. This was another weakness on Saturday when Ireland failed to make the tactical fouls which might have prevented Belgium’s devastating counter-attacks.
“We’re not here to make friends. The fans are doing that. If you smell danger, if you think we’re in trouble here, you do whatever you can do to get the right result. It’s not a crime. You might get a yellow card, you might get a red. You’ve got to make sacrifices for your team.”
But the inability to control the game may be the thing which ultimately undermines Ireland. This is an ancient failing, as Keane pointed out, and it won’t be solved by Wednesday, even if international football is an arena where players get time on the ball, as he pointed out, so maybe people should have been encouraging a different approach all along.
Wes Hoolahan, for example, would have thrived at this level during those years when Premier League clubs were thinking he was too small, but Ireland have only one Wes Hoolahan.
These technical failings were an issue for another day. Keane expected the players to respond on Wednesday, but they would respond by displaying the same old qualities. It was too late to acquire new ones.
“It’s like a boxer. I’ve seen great boxers get knocked out. You get back up. You start swinging and hope for the best.” Ireland will come out swinging on Wednesday. They know no other way which is at the heart of their success, and the reason for their failures.
