Foul Play: Gripe Almightly

When Aiden McGeady’s precision thunderbolt flew sweet and true into the back of the Georgians’ net, you could hear a pin drop. Deep into stoppage time, a goal of potentially colossal importance for Ireland’s Euro 2016 hopes was greeted with something less than nationwide jubilation. Foul Play erupted in celebration and exhaled a primal roar, but the reaction in the office seemed a little muted.

Online, meanwhile, Irish punters reacted so negatively you’d be forgiven for thinking the goal had gone in at the other end. I’ve expounded before about the relentless negativity and underlying spoilt-brattish sense of entitlement that has come to disfigure the Irish public’s relationship with its national team. If you needed proof, it wasn’t hard to find: more than one self-professed fan openly said he’d been hoping Ireland would lose (in the first game under new management, and with 30 points still to play for).
At best, the general reaction to Ireland’s goal seemed to be annoyance and irritation that it had undermined whatever point the naysayers were trying to make about how crap the Ireland team is. We used to allow ourselves the occasional superior smirk at how swift the English football public were to turn on their team; we’ve more than outstripped them in this regard.
Certainly, in stifling 35-degree heat, the performance had been laboured. There were lengthy passages of numbing mediocrity. But it’s instructive how the people cheering on Roy Keane’s coronation as Ireland’s No 2 last year also seemed to be the first ones to stick the knife in at the first hint of a performance that didn’t match whatever vision they have in their heads of how an Ireland team is supposed to play.
Martin O’Neill, throughout a highly impressive career, has never been one for ‘beautiful football’. He made his name at Wycombe and Leicester by harnessing moderately talented individuals into tigerishly competitive units. Later, at Celtic, he instantly identified lack of physicality as the biggest barrier to the Bhoys supplanting Rangers atop the SPL, and proceeded to stack the team with physically imposing figures who, crucially, could play a bit.
A highly articulate chap, O’Neill has said quite a bit since taking the job, but one quote stands out: “At times there will be some rubbish when we have to grind out a result and it won’t be pretty on the eye. And then there will be times when we do something really good.” The trek to Georgia was a success: the target was three points. We could bellyache all day about the lack of creative fluency, but a swift look at the overall quality of the players we have available might help to serve as something of a reality check. By 1999, Robbie Keane had established himself as Ireland’s top striker: it is a little disturbing that 15 years later, with the great man now 34 and plying his trade in the USA, he still is.
At the other end, David Forde, a journeyman Millwall goalkeeper six months Robbie’s senior, got the nod against Georgia in preference to 38-year-old Shay Given, who hasn’t played a competitive match since the Paleolithic age. Our scarcity of options at left-back is such that the shirt has now been restored to Stephen Ward, who stood out at Euro 2012 as comfortably the worst player at the Finals. It may be worth recalling that an expert selection of that tournament’s worst starting XI, pooled from all 16 competing nations, featured seven Irish players: Given, St Ledger, Dunne, Ward, Whelan, McGeady and (yes, it’s true) Robbie.
Nonetheless, the delusion persists that we should be beating everyone in sight, and doing it in the style Johann Cruyff might have approved of. Trap has gone, so we can’t blame him anymore. (It’s true that the Italian septuagenarian’s footballing worldview was frozen in 1985, and he showed no inclination at all to adapt to changing realities, but it’s also the case that for his first four years, he tended to hoover up maximum points very effectively against our natural inferiors).
Steve Staunton was out of his depth, but seven years on the extent of the odium heaped on him seems unreasonable. Brian Kerr? We lost a gem there, and I remain convinced he would have been easily the best bet to steer the good ship through the choppy waters of the last decade. But when he was in charge, his best never seemed good enough for the keyboard warriors and professional whingers who comprise most of the Irish football commentariat.
Now the buck stops with O’Neill: a new regime, a fresh start, an appointment most Ireland fans in their right minds surely welcomed. Yet if you listen to his detractors, the tune remains remarkably similar. ‘There’s no urgency’ ‘we’re not winning the ball in the key areas’ ‘the passing has to be sharper’, etc, etc.
There has been a depressing deja-vu to the pattern of international matchdays since around about 2002: the low-key build-up, the lack of jubilation and taking-it-for-granted when we (invariably) hit an early goal, the consternation when anything goes wrong thereafter, the recriminations when we (invariably) give away a preventable equaliser, the finger-pointing, the broken-record rantings of Dunphy back in the studio, the speed with which his fatuous observations are regurgitated almost verbatim by Joe Soap: the list goes on.
The need has never been greater for a healthy dose of realism about where we actually stand in the international pecking order. By this, I don’t mean for a minute to suggest that we settle for also-ran status. But we need to acknowledge the scale of the task facing us.
One of the great beauties of international football is that you can’t buy players: this may be frustrating, but it at least prevents it from degenerating into a dog-eat-dog rich-get-richer kleptocracy whereby the strongest teams help themselves at will to other teams’ best players. And it all adds up to a spectacle like the recent World Cup, where champions Spain crashed out in round one while Costa Rica beat a merry path to the quarter-finals.
Harnessed correctly in the service of an effective gameplan, with a manager adept at reacting to situations as they evolve, Ireland’s players can potentially go a long way. But we have a population of five million, and will always be pushing a rock up a hill trying to compete with the Germans, Spanish, Italians, French etc. In the meantime, some hint from the Irish football public that they actually appreciate the national team’s efforts and wish them well wouldn’t go amiss.