Men of honour like Coleman need real vision from the FAI
If he turned on the telly in the team hotel ahead of the Republic of Ireland’s friendly against Northern Ireland last Thursday, Séamus Coleman might have taken inspiration from watching Theresa May defend her Brexit deal in the House of Commons.
As confusion reigned and the winds of mutiny began to swirl around Westminster, some praised May for her grim determination, for the fact that despite having campaigned to remain in the EU, she had been doggedly pursuing this hopeless Brexit task for two years now; she was defending the virtues of a cause she surely could not truly believe in, all out of a sense of duty to the job.
Which pretty much sums up the lot of the Republic of Ireland captain in the last week.
After the dismal goalless draws with Northern Ireland and Denmark which brought an end to Martin O’Neill’s five-year reign as manager, Coleman had to front up and hail each result as the best possible deal in the circumstances and a platform to reach the sunlit uplands of Euro 2020 qualification.
“I have to come out and do these interviews, try to say the right things,” said Coleman after the Northern Ireland game. “We have to man up and take responsibility as players… myself included.”
In Denmark, Coleman stuck resolutely to his task when asked about the masterminds of a Nations League campaign which saw Ireland score one goal and muster seven shots on target.
“The management team have been great. You ask any of the lads, they’re behind us,” said Coleman. They’re giving us all the confidence they possibly can.
"Come March, I have no doubt about it that we will be ready, I know this is the thing we have to say but I truly believe we will be ready.”
There’s the hint of Comical Ali about it now, but the annals of managerial sackings are filled with ashen-faced players saying it’s not the gaffer’s fault and Coleman was too honourable a character to do anything different in the dog days of O’Neill’s reign.
But there were verbal clues – “I have to come out and do these interviews…I know this is the thing we have to say” – that the duties of the job prohibited him from saying what he really felt.
The evidence of recent months – from the pitch, from the stands, from the lurid details of a leaked WhatsApp message, from the despair in Jonathan Walters’ eyes in the Sky studio on Monday night – was that this was a cause that nobody believed in any more.
Martin O'Neill defends his Ireland team after a fourth game in a row without a goal.
— Sky Sports Football (@SkyFootball) November 19, 2018
Report: https://t.co/jM57xu9Usj pic.twitter.com/SUrSC3GXgU
Ultimately, that’s what did for O’Neill and Keane, because the international team’s enduring appeal, in fact, Irish football’s entire business model, depends on a great billowing cloud of national optimism atop of which sits a team that might just qualify for the next major tournament and deliver those occasional bursts of pure, weapons-grade joy.
Maybe we are a bit like those delusional Brexiteers, with their yearning for a bygone time of Spitfires, warm beer, and racist comedians on telly, except with us it’s the desperate longing to someday see conga lines on the main streets of Irish towns again.
With season tickets, corporate boxes, and sponsorship deals, the FAI is always offering the chance to get in on the ground floor of this potential happiness skyscraper.
It’s a sales pitch that doesn’t work when the national team is playing like Gibraltar.
The next move at this stage is usually to get that balloon back up in the air again as quickly as possible. Get a manager in and get the positive vibes going again.
Except this time people are wondering if the binge and crash diet by which our international team survives, is really healthy in the long-term.
People have noticed that the squad, for all that it was capable of more than the hedgehog-on-a-motorway tactics seen under O’Neill, is historically weak.
They look at the governance of the FAI and wonder about that too.
They wonder if the entire purpose of Irish football needs to consist of more than cobbling together whatever mixum-gatherum of players the system has haphazardly produced into a doughty unit able to sneak into the odd international tournament.
And they wonder about the idea of the magic man who comes along every few years, weaves a spell and suddenly everyone’s doing the conga again.
The professionalisation of elite sport in recent years has not escaped them either.
It might seem strange for a sport that has been a full-time vocation at the highest level since its very earliest days, but soccer has changed more in the past two decades than in the preceding century.
What jarred with many as things turned sour under O’Neill was how amateurish it all seemed: the last-minute team selections, the comedy improv approach to tactics, the Cloughie-isms.
And, best of all, Cyrus Christie: International Midfield Player.
People look at rugby and GAA and rival international football set-ups and see that the basic best practice these days is that whatever players you do have are given the best possible chance to do well.
They look at Gareth Southgate’s time served with the FA, how Michael O’Neill’s job with Northern Ireland also sees him act as chief technical officer of the IFA, or how Ryan Giggs’ assistant manager is also the Welsh FA’s technical director, and see that if you have a bit of a plan, it helps if everyone is on board with it.
Whether the next manager is a greybeard elder like Mick McCarthy or a younger, shop floor graduate like Stephen Kenny, the cause that Irish football people are asked to believe in has to involve something more than the odd backs to the wall giant-slaying and an occasional boozy sing-song in a European city square.
The FAI may have acted with more ruthless efficiency than the Tory backbench mutineers could muster this week, but now they need to lay out their vision for our proud island nation.
Coleman certainly deserves it.
His honourable defence of the doomed management team brought to mind his predecessor Robbie Keane, who took to the Late Late Show in 2007 to blame the media for getting Stephen Staunton the sack.
Thankfully Keane would go on to help Ireland get to two more major tournaments, score a ridiculous amount of goals and get a farewell match against Oman.
Sunlit uplands indeed.