IT FALLS TO Heimir Hallgrimsson to somehow pick Ireland up from what the country hopes is its lowest ebb. Defeat to Greece on Tuesday night means Ireland have started their Nations League campaign with back-to-back defeats. Remarkably, it is the fourth-straight campaign – either tournament qualifiers or Nations League – in which Ireland have lost their opening two games.
It was Ireland’s third defeat to Greece in 15 months, and is their 11th defeat in their last 16 competitive games. The only opponents Ireland have beaten in a competitive game across the last two years is Gibraltar, stretching back to a 3-2 home win over Armenia in a game that staved off relegation from League B.
Ireland now look to be in another relegation battle, this time against Finland, who also lost their opening two games. The sides meet in Helsinki on 10 October.
“Nobody told me it was going to be an easy job”, said Hallgrimsson with exquisite understatement after the Greece defeat. He has been consistent and eloquent in pinpointing the root of Ireland’s myriad miseries.
“It’s this confidence thing”, he repeated on Tuesday night. “It feels like the jersey is too heavy for some players. When they put them on, they don’t show the same quality as they do maybe in their clubs.”
Hallgrimsson is also clear on how this lack of confidence is manifesting: he sees it in Ireland’s hesitancy; in their dallying in attacking positions and passivity in defence.
“Confidence comes from knowing if you do something your team-mate will cover you, if you are in a position, you know exactly what your team-mate is doing”, he says.
But how on earth do you improve these players’ confidence, given all many of them have known as Ireland players is defeat and rancour and disappointment? Hope is a rare thing among Irish fans at the moment, but there may be some solace found in Hallgrimsson’s clarity on how to improve things.
His plan is to stick with what was done in this window. While he was non-committal on the notion he will stick with a back four – Andrew Omobamidele’s presence at right-back in that back four theoretically makes it easy to flip to a back three mid-game – Hallgrimsson is clear he wants a consistency of selection until the Irish players can trust those around them and begin playing without such sense of hesitancy.
So anyone calling for dramatic infusion of fresh blood – or at least for more squad rotation – may be disappointed across Hallgrimsson’s reign. He used only 18 players across his first two games, and it may have been fewer had Seamus Coleman been able to play beyond the hour mark of the England game.
“If you play golf and if you change your swing and then you go and play 18 holes the next day, you just return to your old swing”, Hallgrimsson told reporters after the Greece defeat. “You need to repeat things and get stuck in. This is why I was pleased with the way we were for 45 minutes, the structure. Sometimes it takes a long time for a player and for the team to gel.”
Once Greece scored, Hallgrimsson said the Irish structure melted away because of the players’ lack of confidence.
So if you’re looking for his definition of confidence, perhaps it is the ability to remain in his compact structure regardless of what goes wrong.
“We need to play better”, he continued. “I’m not hiding behind that. We need to play faster, make decisions quicker and use the strength we have like Sammie’s speed and his in behind. We didn’t use it.
“Good passing players need to do it a bit faster. It’s just improvements step by step. That’s impossible to do in one step. We need to build what we did well, forget that we lost but improve on what we did badly. Let’s be realistic.
“You need to find confidence in some things. If you can’t find it from winning, then do it from other things and grow from it. That’s the solution.
“We can all agree that Ireland doesn’t have a matchwinner at this stage. We don’t have a Zlatan, Messi or Ronaldo or the high-profile players of the past such as Roy Keane etc playing at the highest level.
“If we want to grow, it has to be collective. That is where we should start and our job is to grow. From there, players will be confident from organisation and structure. Defending without the ball, you feel confident. You can control the game without the ball.
“Once that happens, we’ll start to get points and we’ll grow in confidence.”
Consistency of selection, however, is often a pipe dream at international level, given the vagaries of injury issues and club selection calls. Hallgrimsson largely brushed this off when it was pointed out to him, hinting that he will prize continuity in selection over a player’s club form.
He did say that there will be space for an in-form player to “stake a claim and come in”, but it appears that he sees building consistency and continuity among his original selection will be his guiding principle.
Whether it’s the right course of action remains to be seen. But it is at least an instance of the manager leading in a clear direction, which is what his squad of wan, ground-down players desperately need.
