HEIMIR HALLGRIMSSON HAS suggested he will not make wholesale changes for Tuesday’s Nations League game against Greece, as he retains his back-seat role in charge of Ireland.
Hallgrimsson says he is leaning heavily on John O’Shea and Paddy McCarthy’s input for his opening two games in charge, and has suggested he will do so again for the double-header against Finland and Greece next month.
O’Shea and McCarthy selected the squad for this month’s games, and Hallgrimsson stuck with the back five system employed earlier this year by O’Shea, and Stephen Kenny before him.
Such is O’Shea’s influence, he will conduct Monday’s pre-match press conference rather than Hallgrimsson. This will flout Uefa’s competition rules, which mandate that the head coach attends the press conference held the day before the match.
“We are all in it together and for sure I need a lot of help in the first one or two camps, not knowing the characters of the players”, said Hallgrimsson after Saturday’s 2-0 defeat to England. “When you come to a new culture, you cannot think you can change everyone – in my case to an Icelandic. You have to adapt to the players, the culture, and what they have been doing, and using what is good.”
Hallgrimsson also said he hoped to have more “authority when time goes on”, but the FAI subsequently got in touch to clarify he instead meant to say “more knowledge.”
The manager’s steady start begs questions of the FAI, given they have said publicly that he was their first choice for the job from as far back as March of this year. Yet fully six months later, Hallgrimsson says he is not ready to be in sole charge of the team and is delegating responsibilities to O’Shea, whom the FAI did not deem suitable as the permanent manager.
Hallgrimsson is also contracted only until the end of the 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign, which may come as soon as November of next year if Ireland fail to secure at least a play-off.
Nonetheless, if there will be change under the new manager, it will come gradually. So in spite of the one-sided nature of the defeat to England nor the home and away defeats to Greece in Euro 2024 qualifying last year, there won’t be immediate overhaul.
“That’s not my philosophy, to jump from one thing to another”, said Hallgrimsson to reporters after the England defeat when asked if his approach will be dramatically different. “There will always be tweaks, but it should be the same principle in how we do things, how we defend, how we attack.”
He said the players will benefit from a consistency of selection around them, having cited a lack of confidence and indecision as being at the root of the England defeat.
“It was maybe because of a lack of confidence, we were more passive than active when we were defending”, he said. “I felt that was the biggest problem [against England], not to believe and take the decision to go.”
He continued, “Play more matches etc, play together more, having maybe more stability in selection, who is playing next to whom, so that feels comfortable. I think we have been rotating a lot of players when you look at the games before, so there is never this connection that you need at the high level, you never get that.
“And if we are not going to finals, again, you are missing this one month or two months of togetherness that is so important for a national team.”
Though if the players’ confidence and ability to take initiative does not improve over time, Hallgrimsson hinted a change of formation may be necessary.
“When we play five at the back, again talking about initiative, sometimes you have three centre-backs against one striker. You need one to step up”, he said. “Once they play better together they grow in confidence to take the initiative to say we don’t know three players and I’ll step into midfield.
“Then if that doesn’t happen, the coach needs to change the formation, take one from here and put in there. We have versatile players so could move players around.”
Seamus Coleman is out through injury, and has been replaced by Festy Ebosele.
Greece currently top Group Two, having opened with a 3-0 win at home to Finland. It was they who did the most damage to Kenny’s reign last year, beating Ireland 2-1 in Athens before then winning 2-0 in Dublin. Gus Poyet is no longer in charge, however, and has been replaced by former UAE and Panathinaikos boss Ivan Jovanović.
“We’ll see how we are compared to Greece, knowing we lost the two Euro qualifiers against them last year”, said Hallgrimsson.
“They have some hold on us so hopefully we can do better than we did in the Euros.
“We already planned in our head how we were going to play Greece. We did our analysis meeting way before this camp happened. And of course given that we have the same coaching staff that were in those matches, they have more experience playing Greece than me. Let’s hope we have learned from those two matches.”
