This entire article probably highlights many of the reasons why Irish football is in the doldrums. The focus of the interview is entirely about how Ireland could strengthen its squad by sourcing ready made players. The underlying assumption is that this is the only way to source players. The changes that have been wrought in the academy system of the major English clubs over the past 20 years has meant that fewer young Irish teenagers than ever before go to England for their football education. A glance at recent Irish squads shows that a growing number play for Irish clubs before transferring to the UK in the late teens and early twenties. Indeed many players who go to England as youths return to play in the League of Ireland before earning their move back across the water again.

The gulfs that exist in the game in Ireland badly need to be addressed if the senior international side is to have any kind of strength in the future. The current League of Ireland Under 19 system is a good start but it is inadequate. For instance in Ireland any young sportsman is inevitably pulled in several sporting directions in his teens. Looking towards the GAA he sees a clear path from his local club at Under age into their minor team then into the county minors, the club Under 21′s or Juniors, the county Under 21′s, the club’s senior side and finally the holy grail of the county senior team. The path is clear and unambiguous. In football he will hope to get into the FAI’s emerging talent program at age 11, if he is outside of that his next big hope is to called up to his local Legaue’s representative Under 13 Kennedy Cup side where he night get spotted by an English club. Failing those options he continue in the hope that he finds a spot in League of Ireland U19 side. If he has made it that far once he hits 19 he has to find his way straight into a League of Ireland first team squad, competing with players who have a few years experience to do so. If he is doesn’t get that far then he is out of senior football. Many of those players who are good footballers drift out of the game at that point, unwilling to take the plunge back down into the depths of Junior/Sunday league football. For some there is an option to join a LoI First Division side but it is not an attractive one. This is an eight team league with sides spread all over the country. The prospect of a fortnightly trip to or from Ballybofey to Athlone or Waterford is not exactly appealing. So players go and standards drop.

So what if League of Ireland standards drop? The strength of what is above is often governed by what is beneath it. I have watched Ireland Under 21 sides populated by players from English Conferences teams while players from League of Ireland sides pay at the gate to watch them. I have seen very good league of Ireland players never get a whiff of an Irish representative side until they go to England ( ref. Seamus Coleman). We need to see a complete overall of the structure of football in Ireland – a proper pyramid system with smaller regionalised leagues, a removal of the power of local league administrators to hinder such developments, fully developed career paths for better players to progress through etc etc.

What we will get is, a new FAI genealogy section, trawling through the ancestry of players in the English leagues to see who we can poach. We will see huge spending on the maintenance of an average senior international side. Big salaries to the CEO, senior international mangers, bonuses promised to players for WC qualification. Lip service paid to the development of players locally. Well meaning but often inadequately structured coaching at under age levels.

Of course we might manage to unearth a surprised newly awakened Irishman like Tony Cascarino or Andy Townsend……….. and that will prove that the system works and make everything alright again

He has to least win the European championships, it’s not too much to ask

No offence to the journalist,but why have you got an ex manager of Ireland,who btw was sacked for a very good reason he was crap,giving advice to a manager with O’Neills exp ? Why not just get Noel King or The Gaffer on and totally botch it ? In all fairness if you had Jack Charlton or even John Giles giving it I’d kinda be ok with it. Martin O’Neill is his own man,let him be to do it himself,he doesn’t need the ex manager of the Faroe Islands telling him how to do his job.

Brian Kerr has the highest win rate of any Ireland manager at 54.5%. Charlton had 50.5% (which is arguably better because we played more top teams due to qualifying for tournaments). McCarthy had a 42.5% win rate and Giles was around 38%. I’d be reluctant to knock any of the above.

He should drive his car with the song playing “I AM THE ONE AND ONLY”

People who comment on sport do it because it allows them to pontificate an extraordinary ignorance for which they would lose their day jobs in a flash. Brian Kerr was a great manager we can only hope mon does at least as well.

Sigh…you are a former manager for a reason brian!
We are a small, limited country..only so many irish grannies out there.

Oh my god!

Those who can; Do
Those who can’t, waffle on about what those who can should do

Agree with John Clarke, whole structure has to be changed, though Seamus Coleman is a poor example, he was on the u21 side for 2 years while at sligo rovers, better example would be matt doherty. THink the 8 team first division is pointless, might aswell have 20 team league and it might encourage players to play senior football here

Selecting English players who aren’t good enough to play for England is not the way forward. England are barely even that strong in depth to begin with. If an English player has no chance of playing for them, then he is hardly going to make much of a tangible difference to us, is he?

Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes, Aaron Lennon, Gary Cahill, Rio Ferdinand, Wayne Rooney, even Kyle Naughton; all of those guys could/would potentially improve us but Sean St Ledger, Paul Green and Jon Walters are scarcely better than the Irish born players whose places they take in the team.

Even use Anthony Pilkington as an example. He is hardly any better than McClean, Brady or McGeady.

We should stop depending on Granny rule players and start improving our domestic infrastructure and make soccer a more attractive proposition than Gaelic and rugby to our kids. You can’t make money from Gaelic so the former theoretically shouldn’t be that hard.

Who are these wonderful, match changing Granny rule players Martin O’Neill is scouring by the way? Focus on nailing down Jack Grealish, Conor Henderson and Samir Carruthers and hope that they fulfill the hype because for all of the excitement over them, they could easily end up like Conor Clifford or Stephen Elliott.

whiner

Good luck to Martin and the Irish team but I was appalled to see him and Roy Keane in a recent BBC interview when they took up their posts wearing the poppy. What is it with Irish people? They are Irish, appointed managers of the Ireland team. It was the BBC who requested the interview but they are allowed to insist that the boys wear poppies.
Fair play to the young Derry premiership player who refused to wear a poppy recently and who was dropped from the team How could he ever hold his head up in his native town if he had paid homage to those in the Army that killed so many Irish people there while Irish nationalists are not allowed to remember their dead. Shame on Martin and Roy.

We lose face a little whenever we recruit players with tenuous connections, and were widely sneered at during the glory years for doing so. There will have been some (Aiden McGeady, James McCarthy, or going back much further the likes of Seamus McDonagh and Tony Grealish) for whom the sense of Irishness is very genuinely heartfelt, but the logical terminus of exploiting FIFA’s rules to the full could be a team consisting entirely of English-born players with English accents whose presence in the team owes more to career advancement than national allegiance.
Personally, I think a parent is fine, but once you get into grandparent territory it becomes a bit ridiculous. I’m Dublin-born and could have played for Scotland in the unlikely event of me being remotely good enough to make the team, and would have represented either nation with pride. But a line needs to be drawn somewhere.
You could say that borders and nations are arbitrary constructs in the first place, but if international football is to remain meaningful it should be contested by teams whose players, by and large, were born and reared in the nation they represent.
On a related note, Kerr makes many valid points but I was deeply disappointed with his recent comments to the effect that we should leave Northern-born, Irish-identified players to the North and stop pursuing them. The McCleans and Gibsons are 100% within their moral rights to represent a Republic rather than a partitioned North. And that’s before we even consider players from the ‘other tradition’ such as George Best and Keith Gillespie who have said they would have liked the chance to play for a united Ireland team.

Many people are bit abroad to Irish parents and consider themselves Irish. That’s one thing. Then there are the ones who realise they’ll never play for England and suddenly discover their grandmother was from Mayo. I don’t honesty think Andy Townsend, Mark Lawrenson or John Aldridge ever called themselves Irishmen until Jack Charlton came calling. Then again, John Barnes is Jamaican, and Owen Hargreaves never lived in England until he played for them, so they can’t preach. And let’s not even get started on their Cricket team….

“Born” abroad – spellcheck