Martin O'Neill and Roy Keane can do it

For a long time, the feeling around here was that Giovanni Trapattoni had miserably failed Irish football – and we said as much. The mauling to which Ireland were subjected in the Euro 2012 tournament should have been the end of the line for the ageing Italian. It wasn’t just that our performance in the finals – three defeats and an aggregate scoreline of 9-1 against, in case you’ve forgotten – was so abysmal. In the build-up to it, the manager made so many bad calls and indefensible decisions that his position had surely become untenable. Or so we argued.

But here was the rub: Trapattoni had already been given another two-year contract before the team left for the Euro finals. As a result, instead of acting decisively, the FAI allowed the situation to fester throughout our subsequent World Cup campaign, leading to an ignominious showing, which saw us stuck back in fourth place in our group behind Germany, Sweden and Austria. Along the way, we suffered our biggest competitive home defeat ever, in a 6-1 tonking at the hands of an (admittedly superb) German side. And at the end we had plummeted to our lowest level in decades in the FIFA world rankings.
What was especially galling was that, throughout his tenure, but especially in its latter stages, Giovanni Trapattoni was horribly condescending – and frequently downright insulting – to Irish football and Irish footballers. He showed no real interest in the players and lacked any empathy with or understanding of them. He was ignorant about our footballing history. He was narrow in his approach. He was authoritarian, in the worst sense, in the way he went about things. What he wanted most was for players to slavishly follow orders. And his orders involved playing the game in a way that was crude, regimented and absurdly outdated. The irony was that, instead of taking responsibility when things went wrong, he claimed the credit for the better days and blamed the players for the worst. The effect was to produce a team that played with fear and anxiety visible in their every move.
The extent of the misery heaped on Irish fans over his final two-year period was hard to take. Now however, there are signs that it may have been worth it.
Because if we had made a new appointment after the Euro 2012 campaign it is highly unlikely that either Martin O’Neill or Roy Keane would have been ready to step into the breach and become the new Irish management team. It’s a bit like the way the cards fell for Michael D. Higgins in relation to the Presidency. He might have run seven years earlier – but would he have won against Mary McAleese? He’d certainly have deserved to, but the cards would have been stacked against him. The 2011 Presidential campaign, as it turned out, was perfect timing and he is now demonstrating just how good a choice the Irish people made, on a weekly basis.
With a bit of luck, the same may yet prove to be the case with the end of the Trapattoni era. Because the O’Neill Keane tag-team could be the best thing that ever happened to Irish football.

I am writing this having seen only the first game under the new regime. And even if we did exceptionally well in Poland, it remains far too early to tell if we are really onto something game-changing. But there were so many positive signs in the team’s first outing under the new manager that the causes for optimism seem manifold.
First, the style of football was completely different. Instead of the grinding negativity we had witnessed under Trapatoni, the team selection emphasised creativity.
Wes Hoolahan, rudely ignored by Trap during what may have been his very best years, started the game against Latvia as a forward-lying, play-making midfielder. Andy Reid, exiled cruelly by Trap at the start of his reign, following an argument about staying up late playing the guitar in the team hotel, came on for the last 20 minutes and showed how colossally stupid it was to have buried his Irish career so unjustly.
There was a spirit of positive, controlled aggression about the way in which the team operated. The wingers Aiden McGeady and James McClean – both of whom Martin O’Neill has worked with before – seemed revitalised. They pressed the opposition high up the pitch. When they had the ball, they ran at the Latvians, took people on and got shots away. McGeady scored his first goal in years and McClean contributed with an assist, in what was a Man of the Match performance.
The full backs also looked as if the shackles had been removed. Seamus Coleman set up Shane Long for the third goal, after a superb passing move. Stephen Ward, restored to the left-back position, looked in far better shape than we’d seen him for a long time under Trapattoni.
Best of all, however, was the fact that the Irish played it out from the back. Instead of every kick-out being lumped forward to a ‘big man’ upfront (we didn’t have one), the central midfielders dropped in to receive the ball to feet. They passed it around. Every player was looking to get on the ball and to contribute. They played triangles, with one touch passing of the kind that Trapattoni said the Irish were incapable of. In the middle of the park, James McCarthy looked like a Ronnie Whelan, or better still a potential Roy Keane, in the making. Even Glen Whelan looked confident and smart, stroking it around, making good passes and retaining possession well. Who said Ireland couldn’t play football?
Take a deep breath: you have to acknowledge that the opposition was relatively weak. But Trap’s Ireland played similar teams, and ended up with the so called minnows calling the shots, dominating possession and making us look like a third division footballing nation: the away game against Kazhakstan in our World Cup qualifying group springs immediately to mind. Our players play at a far higher level than theirs, but they looked far more technically skilled and ran rings around us for most of the game.
“But our players just aren’t good enough,” the Trap apologists wailed. After, inevitably, the manager had said as much himself, by way of making excuses for his own failure.
The truth is that, if you tell players that they are not good enough often enough, then it becomes a self-fulfilling assessment. A team can’t go out and play with belief and conviction if they are made to feel inferior by the man in charge of team affairs.
And so it was wonderfully refreshing to see the team playing with a renewed aura of confidence in their own ability. Round one to the new management team...

There is a long way still to go. Of course there is. But if you get certain fundamentals right it makes a huge difference.
– The first is that you begin by respecting the players – and letting them know that you do.
– The second is that you aim to get the best players onto the pitch and to allow them to express themselves.
– The third is that you encourage them to have confidence in their own ability and to play the game in the right way by retaining possession and by getting into dangerous positions as often as possible, consistent with not leaving the defence unmanned.
– The fourth is that you encourage them to make the right decisions as often as possible – but also to try things, to have a go and not to be afraid of it not working.
– And the fifth is that you motivate them to give everything they have in the cause, beginning with the positive philosophy of working hard individually and collectively to win the ball as high up the pitch as possible.
Does Ireland have players capable of turning that into a winning approach? Here’s what I feel: there are teams going to the World Cup who are a lot weaker than we are in terms of the players available. Both Denmark and Greece (150/1 outsiders) proved in Euro 1992 and 2004 respectively that a team of lesser talents can punch above their weight if they are sufficiently organised and play with the requisite level of ambition, passion and commitment.
Ireland made it to the last 16 in the World Cup in Japan in 2002 and only went out on penalties to Spain, having missed a spot kick during the first 90 minutes. Is there a huge gulf in class between the players then and now? Certainly not. In fact, if James McCarthy continues to grow in stature, Robbie Brady fulfills his potential, Darron Gibson recovers fully from his current injury and Stephen Ireland can be brought back into the fold, then we will have a very, very strong panel. Organised and motivated by the O’Neill/Keane combination, we can become a team to be feared again. And I think we will...

But there is something else. One of the biggest bugbears of the Trapattoni era was, on the one hand, that he was so reluctant to watch Irish players playing for their clubs in England; and on the other that he was so arrogantly dismissive of the League of Ireland.
The fact is that Seamus Coleman, Kevin Doyle, Keith Fahey, Wes Hoolahan and Shane Long, amongst others in his squad, came through the League of Ireland system and learned their trade here. What happens in the domestic game, therefore, impacts on the future of the national team. Both Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane understand this. And the initial impression is that they are willing to do their bit to make sure that the supply lines are kept open.
In particular, Roy Keane seems to understand it as part of his role to work with the underage players as they come through youth and Under-21 levels, with the aim of creating a continuity of approach and philosophy, which will be of huge benefit to the senior international side going forward. If Keane can assist in the progress of James McCarthy, Robbie Brady, Samir Carruthers and Sean Murray, then we are definitively onto a good thing.
Both O’Neill and Keane will be willing to put in the hours watching Irish players in action for their clubs. And they will use their contacts and status in the game to convert potential stars of dual-nationality to the Irish cause.
Everything that both men had to say at the press conferences around their first matches in charge suggested that they were taking the job very seriously; that they were prepared to put the hard graft in; that they were determined to give it their best shot, both individually and together; and that intelligence would be at the heart of everything they did.
Unlike Giovanni Trapattoni, they conducted themselves very well. And they didn’t insult the players, talk them down or condescend to them.
It is for all of these reasons, and more, that I believe there is huge cause for optimism now about the future of Irish football. Fingers crossed. We could be in for an amazing ride...