THE TENOR TO the coverage ahead of Saturday’s Nations League meeting with England would remind you of The Crash.
This week has been the moment we have acknowledge our hangovers; the point at which we have grudgingly admitted to ourselves that we have once again succumbed to a collective outbreak of Notions.
We all partied; we tried to play through the thirds.
We built the Dundrum bypass; we tried to stop bypassing the midfield.
Though Stephen Kenny will argue that nobody was doling out cheap credit in his time.
Ireland tried to join the nations of the earth by evolving their style of play under Kenny, but it delivered a wretched run of results and a brutally bruising experience for the man himself. His line at his final press conference that “ambition can take you to the darkest of places” is among the most elegiac I’ve ever heard in Irish sport.
But it’s all over now. We have been jolted out of our seductive delusions and looked abroad for instructions on how to re-assume our our earlier posture: crouched and afraid, not only of our opponents but also of ourselves.
Heimir Hallgrímsson has finally arrived on these shores and is, in his own words, going to “bring us a little bit back to basics”.
We tightened our belts; we are going back to basics.
So get ready to slip back into the old ways. Pre-match press conferences will dust off the old phrases: Hard to Beat; Compact; Fighting Spirit. Expect an uptick in opposition managers curling their mouths at our “British style”.
We will find another hero who has been discarded because their talent on the ball is just the wrong currency. Finn Azaz is the earliest candidate for our eternal role of exiled artist, even if Middlesbrough is a little less glamorous than Paris or Trieste.
With Eamon Dunphy and John Giles now restricted to podcasting, some new conscientious objectors to this style of play will emerge on the RTÉ and Virgin Media TV panels. The Three Amigos’ successors will strain beneath these nets flung by the consensus, repeating their conviction that we are capable of much more than the manager would have you believe.
These will be the romantics in a land of begrudgers, and the definition of the latter by the writer Breandán Ó hEithir will strike a chord with anyone who watched Dunphy lambast Giovanni Trapattoni or Martin O’Neill.
Begrudgery, wrote Ó hEithir, is characterised by a “deep and abiding doubt about our ability to run our own affairs as well as others might run them for us”.
Well unfortunately, we ran our own affairs there for a few years, and all it delivered was a couple of false dawns prior to Ireland’s worst qualification campaign in 50 years.
We should introduce a bit of nuance to all of this. Kenny’s Ireland did try to play more football but they didn’t always meet the heights of his rhetoric and they adapted after the 3-0 shellacking at Wembley in 2020, swapping to a back three and playing more effectively on the counter-attack.
We are also judging Hallgrímsson solely on his words: he hasn’t taken charge of a game yet. Plus, the approach against England shouldn’t condition what we should expect in our other group games, against opponents spinning around in our own galaxy.
And while the media always refract discussion about the international team through the figure of the manager, the game is about players and so we always overstate and overrate the manager’s potential influence.
So maybe nobody is actually wrong here. Maybe it was right to give Kenny the opportunity to drag the Irish team into modernity, and maybe it was right for the FAI to correct course and hire Hallgrímsson instead. The Association is flat broke: the senior men’s team reeling off a few good results is their quickest route to a payday.
Saturday’s opponents are proof that there is no such thing as an embedded and permanent style of play for any national team. England, once the land of POMO and fourfourfackintwo are now tripping over technical and brilliant midfield players. This is because they have imported coaching ideas from Spain, which itself has reinvented itself from the physical, fast-paced and long-ball days of La Furia Roja by melding itself with Dutch ideas to create tiki-taka.
But of course this takes a vast amount of underage and academy coaching to achieve, and of course Irish football has not done this. Sorry if you feel this column is banging on about this stat, but the average academy budget per LOI club is less than €500,000, which is on par with Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Cyprus, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Northern Ireland, Romania and San Marino.
So it’s hardly a mystery as to why we are now lacking in quality midfield players in an era where much of Europe has got ahead of us with an academy ideology that is trying to transform everyone into a midfield player.
There is nothing unique to Ireland which forbids from playing the kind of progressive football so rewarded in the modern game, but under Stephen Kenny, we tried to do it before putting the fundamentals in place beneath it. Kenny spoke of playing in a style to be mimicked by underage teams across the country, but he lost his job because it works the other way round: the senior team can only be a product of a country’s beliefs. It can’t instigate them.
So as we begin another cycle of lamenting the poverty of Being Hard to Beat, you’d like to think we would learn these lessons. But then again, we have always been better at complaint and flagellation than true self-appraisal.
