Ireland’s World Cup hopes boosted by ongoing trend towards professionalism

Sarina Wiegman hasn’t had to endure all that many frustrating days over the course of her international managerial career.

She did, after all, become the first coach to win consecutive European Championships with two different nations after leading her native Netherlands to victory in 2017 and then England in 2022. And she led the Dutch to the last Women’s World Cup final. A glistening CV, then.

But on a November night in Nijmegen, three months after the Netherlands had triumphed at Euro 2017, she wore the look of a woman who wanted to tear her hair out, strand by strand.

She had just watched her team enjoy 82 per cent possession in a World Cup qualifying game, have 32 attempts on goal to their opponents’ three, the bulk of them from a PlayStation-esque front three of Vivianne Miedema, Lieke Martens and Shanice van de Sanden. And, somehow, the game ended 0-0, bringing to a halt the Netherlands’ 11-game winning streak.

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While her bewildered players were busy picking their jaws up from the floor at full-time, the Republic of Ireland celebrated in a huddle, goalkeeper Marie Hourihan urging her team-mates to make this the start of something big, rather than just a one-off night to remember. They roared back in the affirmative.

The Dutch accused the Irish of playing ‘anti-football’ that night and of being poxed with luck. Both charges were probably true, but when you’re ranked 32 in the world and you’re taking on the newly-crowned European champions in their own backyard, you do what you have to do. Even if it’s more the Alamo than total football.

That was, arguably, Ireland’s greatest ever competitive result in the 44 years since they made their international debut, and for those who had been following their development – or lack of it – it had the feel of a turning point. Rarely had they shown that much steel in the face of an onslaught from a superior side.

It was only a few months before that Colin Bell had found himself located between a rock and a decidedly hard place. He was Ireland’s manager for only a couple of months when his squad took themselves off to Liberty Hall to protest against their treatment at the hands of his employers and threatened to boycott what would be his first home game, a friendly against Slovakia in Tallaght.

On the one side, then, was a group of players who’d had their fill of being regarded as “the dirt on the FAI’s shoe”, as Professional Footballers Association of Ireland solicitor Stuart Gilhooly put it at the time, on the other an association whose initial response to their impudence was to threaten their futures in football.

The FAI were soon enough put back in their box, the public support for the squad so overwhelming they had no option but to concede that their power over these women had evaporated. Threats wouldn’t wash any more. The more they made, the firmer the players’ resolve. And so, they had to meet some – not all – of their demands, the chief one being that it shouldn’t actually cost them money to play for their country.

Bell was interesting on this. He pointed to a lack of professionalism on the part of the players themselves before the dispute was resolved, most of them, for example, heading for a night on the town after games in Dublin rather than staying in the team hotel for a debrief and any treatment they might have required. There was, no doubt, a vicious circle in operation – if their governing body didn’t treat them as professionals, why would they bother behaving like ones?

But, after they did their deal with the FAI, Bell was able to say to them, “right, you deserve this, the set-up is more professional now – but as individuals and as a team, you have to be too”.

They responded to that challenge “brilliantly”, he said, opening their World Cup qualifying campaign with two solid away wins before that draw in Nijmegen. They’d upped their game.

And there was lots of pressure on them at that stage. Irish Times columnist Karen Duggan, who was a member of the squad back then, recalled last month just how much pressure the players felt going in to that Slovakia friendly “because all eyes were on us” after their Liberty Hall stand. A defeat and/or a poor performance and you’d have had half the country concluding they deserved no more than they were getting.

And for all the talk about the support the team received from the public, only 1,037 turned up at Tallaght for the game. Granted, it was played on a Monday afternoon, hardly a time conducive to attracting throngs, but not exactly a stirring public display of support either. We’ve a soft spot for battlers alright, but we tend not to leave the couch until they turn in to winners.

But was it the strike that kick-started the rise of the women’s national team, as most of us tend to assume?

Duggan agreed that there was “a small bit of correlation” between that stance and the progression ever since, but feels the link has been overplayed, putting that progress down more to the increased levels of participation in the women’s game as it has grown in popularity in recent years, and, perhaps most significantly, the number of Irish players who are now full-time professionals.

True enough, if you look back at the squad picked for that game against Slovakia and compare it with the one now in Australia, there’s a world of difference.

Back then, eight of the 22 were playing as amateurs at home, just four with clubs in England’s Super League – and only one of them, Megan Campbell, was getting regular game time. Nine of the current squad played in the WSL last season, and three more in the United States’ NWSL, more than a team-full of professionals playing in two of the game’s biggest leagues.

Among them, of course, is Katie McCabe whose own progression from a youngster struggling to get any game-time at Arsenal into one of the best players in the business has played no small part in Ireland’s progress.

The same could be said for Denise O’Sullivan’s part in the story. In the first half of 2017, she was kicking her heels at Houston Dash, barely getting any game-time either. Come July she moved to North Carolina Courage and she hasn’t looked back, since becoming one of the standout midfielders in the NWSL.

It’s not that any of these players lacked ambition in the earlier stages of their careers, Bell argued that they just didn’t realise how good they could be. He urged McCabe “to take her talent more seriously” back then and in an effort to push her along that path he made her Ireland’s youngest ever captain, at 21. Look at her now.

Among those who nurtured her talent was Dave Connell, the manager of the Irish under-17 and under-19 teams that, for so long, achieved significantly more success than their senior counterparts. Never more so than in 2014 when the under-19s beat Spain, England and Sweden en route to the semi-finals of the European Championships. Megan Connolly and Chloe Mustaki were part of that team alongside McCabe.

Gradually, then, players who’d enjoyed success at underage level were being promoted to the senior ranks, and bringing their own high expectations – of themselves and the team – with them.

It fell to Vera Pauw to build on those foundations and, having become the first coach to lead Ireland’s women to a major tournament, it’s safe to say that she’s succeeded in the task.

Back in June 2021, that looked an unlikely outcome. A 2-0 defeat by Iceland in Reykjavík extended to seven the team’s losing streak, just three goals scored in those games and 12 conceded. They hadn’t won a match in 15 months. And with Australia up next in a friendly in Tallaght, it didn’t look like things would get any better.

If the draw in Nijmegen had flicked a switch for Bell’s team, the 3-2 win over Australia appeared to do the same for Pauw’s crew. They went on to win 10 of their next 15 games, losing just two, and by the end of that run they had qualified for the World Cup.

Plenty of us doubted Pauw’s choice of higher-ranked opposition for friendlies during that losing streak, reckoning the odd win over a Dog and Duck XI would at least have given the team a confidence boost. But she stuck to her guns, insisting the players would learn nothing from playing weak opponents.

And she maintained the theme when she opted for two friendlies against reigning world champions, the United States, and one against France, ranked fifth in the world, in the build-up to the World Cup. All three games were lost, but again she argued that coming up against opposition of that calibre was precisely the preparation her team needed ahead of meeting Australia, Canada and Nigeria in their World Cup group.

Gutsy, no doubt, Pauw was more concerned with raising the team’s standards than her personal win/loss ratio.

Those standards will, of course, need to rise again in the weeks ahead if Ireland are to enjoy a positive World Cup debut.

But their journey to this point has been a fascinating one, jammed with highs and lows, no shortage of drama, but ultimately featuring a group of players determined to make this the start of something big, as Marie Hourihan urged back in 2017, rather than just a one-off achievement to remember.