....In Green

Recently I have conversed with people I haven’t seen or spoken with in a long, long time. Something struck me about two such meetings. The people involved had turned their backs on football or ‘soccer’ as they are now want to call the sport and had fully embraced the game of rugby or ‘egg chasing’ as I am want to call it. They’ve been to see the ‘All Blacks’ and ‘The Pumas’. I just listened and probably looked perplexed with a touch of boredom thrown in for good measure ,all the while thinking to myself that I should have seen this coming and kicking myself for not doing so.

As long ago as 2007, a good friend of mine met an American in a pub. “So I guess you guys are soccer guys, yeah?”, “No, I gave up on the football” said my friend “I took up the rugby”...”Oh, so which position do you play Mike?” said American fella. “No, no” said Mike “I just watch it”. Now, that was a surprise to all concerned because a)-Mike never watched football and b) no one ever knew he watched rugby either. The rugby bandwagon had obviously been a-beeping outside his front door and he left his home and belief system behind to happily jump on board. It’s a familiar scenario in Dublin right now. Success breeds interest.
Who do kids look up to these days? A Robbie Keane flailing his arms around and moaning at a referee whilst feigning involvement in general play? Or a Brian O’Driscoll taking time out from watching a scrum of men with their heads in other men’s arses for a few moments to score himself a try and win stuff? Unfortunately and reluctantly you’d have to say if you were twelve, you’d want to be Brian O’Driscoll.

Where does the blame lie for the current malaise in Irish football?

You could go for the easy and obvious target in the village idiot in a suit posing as Chief Executive of the Football Association of Ireland, John Delaney, should you so wish. A man who, when turning up at a FIFA event such as a qualifying group draw looking like a Neanderthal scarecrow, would instantly provide comics such as Jim Davidson with a get-out-of-jail clause for their Paddy The Irishman jokes.
A man who fronts an organization responsible for ridiculously over-pricing match tickets for internationals resulting in half-full/half-empty stadiums such as at the Macedonia game just past, where you had to also buy tickets for meaningless friendlies in Lansdowne Road against Uruguay and Cloudcuckooland. Not great business sense is it?
You can go on and on and on about the FAI and their hare-brained nonsensical flights of fancy but the bottom line is, if your team is not successful, bums will not fill the seats. Bohemians may yet prove that theory wrong this season but that’s as maybe. And there are only about a thousand of them.

Can we trace the lack of interest back to Giovanni Trappatoni’s play-it-safe tactics?
About as interesting as watching paint dry, sure, but I don’t think that’s the root of disinterest.
I have heard the argument that he only has a small bunch of eligible players to work with and shutting up shop and hoping for the best is the only route we can take to try to eke out some sort of success.
Again, nonsense, for our good ‘friends’ in The North have beaten Spain and England in recent times with a pool of eligible players smaller than ourselves and it being diminished, it seems, by the week by the Republic legitimately taking players who have no wish to receive death threats because they go to the wrong church of a Sunday.

No, our current predicament is inherently linked back to the 19th October 1988 at Lansdowne Road when we beat a rather poor Tunisian side 4-0. John Aldridge got his long-awaited first goal in a green shirt. Ireland were still flying high from a wonderful performance in the European Championship Finals in Germany the previous summer. We were at the start of our first successful World Cup Qualifying campaign.
But...a rather large spanner had been thrown into the works. And it sat there for years festering. It became a part of the furniture and ended up being hung above the mantelpiece in the stead of many a beautiful oil painting. For that spanner made its debut that day. A spanner with the footballing imagination of a derelict block of apartments. Hoof the ball, if unsuccessful, hoof again. Score by accident from a corner kick and try every time again to repeat this ‘feat’. Somehow go on to play 102 times for your country. When your captain walks out on the squad just prior to a World Cup, assume his mantle. Albeit, with none of the respect (or disrespect depending on which side of the fence you wish to jump down to). He’d have pinched himself to see if he was dreaming only he’d have ballooned that pinch into the air. And probably done it again. And again, until retirement. Ole O-fucking-le.

Said spanner has no need to buy a lottery ticket again, for all his numbers came up on the 12th January 2006 when he was appointed as manager of the Republic Of Ireland.
I’d blame John Delaney but this spanner should never have accepted the job in the first place. I see no difference and will never see a difference between him being appointed Ireland manager and me being put in charge of a major banking institution.

Cyprus was not a surprise to me or nothing else that followed on for that matter. If the Celtic Tiger began as a result of Italia ’90 then surely it died following the frenetic stabbing that was the appointment of Steve Staunton.
For that was the day that I and many like me, lost any modicum of hope.