Gavin Cooney

TOP, TOP CHRISTIAN poet GK Chesterton once warned that the danger when men stop believing in God is not that they will believe in nothing, but that they will believe in anything. 

If he were still around today, Chesterton would say that this is why so many people have ended up placing all their faith in ersatz and disappointing idols, like free market capitalism or Erik ten Hag. 

But Irish football stands timidly as a reproach to Chesterton’s panic: it’s far worse when you have nothing in which to believe. 

This is where fans of the Irish men’s team are now. The vibe has sunk beneath anger or frustration, because those emotions still hold the possibility of things being better. The fanbase is now in despair. 

Tuesday’s defeat to Greece was met by a quarter-full stadium and a wreath of boos, a scene traditionally from the end of a manager’s tenure, rather than the start. But this is just a recognition that the identity of the manager doesn’t really matter.

Since Euro 2016, we tried a rudimentary style, then we tried evolving it, and now we are trying to regress it. We tried a dowdy team of committed old pros, and then we tried a team of exciting young players. We tried exiling technical players and then we tried playing them and now we are beginning to exile them again. To Finn Azaz and Mikey Johnston we now say: welcome to the WesZone. 

We have fumbled about and attached ourselves to ideas whose virtue comes from being different to the previous idea but now we find ourselves out of alternatives. This is how we have run out of things to believe in. 

We have become inured to defeat. Where some teams play tiki-taka and others press high or play on the counter attack, Ireland lose games. This is the main characteristic of the national team now: losing. 

The only team we have beaten in a competitive game in the last two years is Gibraltar so if you take them out, Ireland have lost 11 of their last 14 games.

Gibraltar aside, our last competitive win came 716 days ago, against Armenia. It’s 821 days since we even drew a competitive game, and it’s 1,033 days since we won a competitive game away to anyone not named name Gibraltar. 

We have lost our last four competitive home games, scoring just one goal, and that was a penalty.  We have played six games this year – five of which were in Dublin – and we’ve scored in only one of them. 

Since the 5-1 World Cup play-off defeat to Denmark in 2017, the only teams Ireland have beaten in competitive games have been Gibraltar, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Luxembourg, Scotland, and Armenia. We have played all of those teams at least twice and Gibraltar are the only team we’ve actually managed to beat more than once.

So the rot is deep and our conventional means of renewing our belief, changing the manager, has not immediately worked. 

What else is there to believe in? 

There does not appear to be any gems ready to be plucked with the granny rule. Stephen Kenny has exhausted all options, and England are no longer as ignorant to their eligible talent as they once were. 

Any ambition the current crop of U21s can step up and save us is sicklied over by the fact the current senior team is stocked by young players who were made to carry these same hopes a couple of years ago. 

Plus, any hope that we will soon have a group of underage players prepared to make that step up are at odds with our insufficient, deprived academy structures. 

Polynesian cargo cults have had firmer reasons for belief than any Irish fans turning to the FAI, whose historic fecklessness brought the association to the verge of bankruptcy. 

While the new FAI regime have salvaged the association from extinction, they remain too volatile to chart a coherent path for the game into the future: they are currently hiring for what would be an seventh different CEO since John Delaney stepped aside in March 2019. 

Marc Canham’s pathways plan, the overarching blueprint for developing talent and belatedly dragging Irish football into this century, has yet to get off the ground: no surprise given some of the grassroots have met it with wariness and suspicion. 

There are no Gods among the government either, judging by the Sports minister’s recent comments to Off the Ball that the FAI’s funding ask is not realistic. That funding ask, we must stress, would merely be enough to lift the FAI above a cohort of nations currently lolling about League C. 

It is to that Nations League tier Ireland will likely soon be consigned, and truthfully we have been circling League B’s drain since the competition’s inception in 2018. Ex-players now lament this squad’s lack of fight, but they have battled for their country: it’s just that fight is not enough to bridge the gap to teams like Greece. Their battles have been fought to stave off relegation.

These are dark days and the sun has not yet set.

Through our present twilight Irish fans are looking for something to guide them through to morning, but scanning the full length of the horizon, there appears . . . nothing.