Emmet Malone talks to the general secretary of the FAI, Brendan Menton, who insists that the association's handling of the Roy Keane saga leaves nothing to be desired on their part. However, he still feels a stewards' inquiry is neccessary
What a night it was. Robbie Keane's last minute equaliser in Ibaraki against the Germans had kept Mick McCarthy's team firmly in the hunt for a place in the second round of the World Cup. Then back at Chiba, in the team hotel, where the FAI was buying and just about everybody was singing, the news came from back home that the Bertie Bowl was firmly back on the agenda. No, you wouldn't have needed to look at the blazer to spot an FAI official here on Wednesday evening. Everywhere you looked, they were standing out a mile, wearing grins as broad as the bridge that separates Tokyo from Yokohama.
Their appearance suggested that the good times, so often reported to be skulking just around the next corner, had finally invited the association over for a get together. As seems to be the way with the men from Merrion Square, however, it turns out that they may be too busy to make the shindig. There have been rumblings from behind the scenes and by yesterday there were clear signs of new tensions within the organisation.
At the end of yesterday's routine press conference the association's general secretary of nearly a year, Brendan Menton, announced that it was embarking on another of its seemingly endless series of independent and external investigations into how it does its business. The officer board, he said, would be recommending to the Board of Management on July 5th that a review be conducted of the "association's organisation and involvement in World Cup 2002". As he made the announcement he looked like a man who had just heard Roy Keane was lined up for The Late Late Show.
Afterwards he admitted that he felt that the investigation was unnecessary but that "some people felt it should be done". He had, he claimed, no problem with this. The remarkable timing of the announcement, he said, was because word had filtered back that the move had been leaked and so a decision had been made to go public with it.
The decision by the board to investigate something that Menton insists has been handled well suggests, however, that there are growing differences behind the scenes at an organisation whose current leadership has only been in place since the end of the Eircom Park disaster.
There is speculation that the association's treasurer, John Delaney, was one of those who is enthusiastic about holding the inquiry thus putting him at odds with his long time ally through the battle over the stadium issue.
Certainly communications between the pair seemed to break down during the days when a deal aimed at facilitating Roy Keane's return to the squad was being discussed last week. On the night Keane gave his famous RTÉ interview, Menton, who was in Seoul, appears to have learned that a formula of words had been agreed between the association back in Dublin and the player's representative only after journalists based in Izumo had heard of the development.
For all the apparent problems that afflicted the association during those days, when Keane's participation in these finals hung in the balance, Menton remains adamant that the crisis and everything that went with it was handled as well as could have been expected.
"You could say that we suffered because we didn't have what you might call a crisis management plan to fall back on, he says, "but the reality is that we didn't expect there to be problems on this sort of scale, particularly not in Saipan which we always expected to be a low-key week." Too low-key for some as it turned out. But then the FAI man remains convinced that a great deal of the criticism levelled at Mick McCarthy and the association over the way that first leg of the trip was handled was either entirely groundless or, at the very least, unreasonably harsh.
"The thing is that I think we took the decision not to defend ourselves. The issue exploded quite suddenly and our view was that as long as there was a chance of contact continuing in the background and the possibility that it might all be resolved, we would avoid adding to the controversy by defending ourselves publicly.
That, he says, remains the association's broad position although he is clearly still a little stung by some of the accusations, then widely accepted as factual, made by the Manchester United midfielder, both in The Irish Times and in subsequent media interviews.
"Look, there were 12 balls there on the Sunday," he says in relation to the player's claim that the required training gear hadn't arrived in Saipan when the squad went to start their preparations in the tiny Pacific island three weeks ago. "There were balls, bibs, brand new training gear and drinks on the Sunday but Mick chose to have what he described as a blow out rather than a ball based training session. That was his decision to make.
"If somebody really wants to have a go at us they could say that the balls weren't adidas but the fact is that four skips went with the team and others (around 60 of them) arrived in on the Sunday night and were available for the team on the Monday. That was within the schedule promised to us by DHL so I think the criticism of them was unfair as well.
"I think it is fair to say," Menton continues, "and Mick has said this publicly, that the pitch wasn't to the standard requested. He had been out there and gone into some detail about what he wanted. That wasn't delivered and nobody's denying that but I think what Mick has always said was that that week in Saipan wasn't meant to be an intensive week, it was about acclimatisation and judging by the way things are going so far here he made the right decision.
"Look, the thing with Roy . . . God only knows why it happened, maybe it will never be properly explained but I keep going back to the first time Roy went to Mick and said he wanted to go home for personal reasons. Maybe because we all wanted Roy to play we all tried to persuade him to change his mind and a result of that it went through various stages. But there was a lot of talk about the training pitch and all the other issues which Roy was complaining about but other people didn't seem so unhappy with. Roy was obviously just unhappy being out there.
"But I don't want to go too deeply into these things now, it is an issue now for when we get home. Maybe that leaves us with a message to sell when we get there but we'll cope with that. One thing we have learned from this is that trying to effectively deal with the media in two different places separated by an eight hour time lag is almost impossible. Roy was in a much better position to drive things last week because he was more operating in the same time frame as the media back at home." As it happens the association's handling of the media in Izumo was widely derided in these parts, with the string of conflicting messages that were allowed to emerge from the camp on Wednesday at one point having the effect of making McCarthy look as though he had totally lost control of the situation.
Menton feels that he was a little unlucky not to have been on hand to handle the early part of that day's events personally as he had travelled to Seoul for the FIFA congress in the mistaken belief that things on the Keane front had died down. And while McCarthy's press conference that evening, by which time Menton had arrived to join the manager at the top table, appeared to be a farce from where the press were sitting, he maintains that it achieved the objectives discussed between the two men beforehand. The intention, he says, was to make it clear that a way back for Keane still existed and then to avoid being drawn into saying anything that might hinder the talks, already well advanced, aimed at allowing him to return.
"It was a difficult day and I don't think it was helped by the fact that a lot of people had been surprised that some things they had been led to believe Roy would say on television weren't said during the interview. Maybe that led to some confusion and the atmosphere was certainly very tense but Mick definitely knew what we were going in there to do, we talked about it for quite a while beforehand"
On balance, he insists, the FAI has done well with the organisation of this World Cup, particularly in relation to the team itself with McCarthy, he says, getting absolutely everything that he requested in connection with his preparations. In other areas there is a concession that inexperience did prove to be a factor, one contributed to by an almost complete turnover of leading personnel within Merrion Square since the last of Ireland's three previous appearances at a major championship finals.
"That was eight years ago and the world has moved on a lot since then. Maybe with hindsight we would have planned things slightly differently because some things did surprise us. But then I'm not sure, for instance, that we could have been expected to anticipate FIFA turning out to be our biggest competitor for revenue in Ireland."
With the world body retaining complete control of the various logos associated with the tournament and signing major deals with its 16 major "partner" companies like McDonalds, Hyundai and Budweiser worth an estimated €40 million, Menton feels that the competing national organisations are now being badly squeezed in their own attempts to cash in on qualification.
"We don't have access to the television rights so if we wanted to do a post World Cup video we would have to buy the rights. One of our sponsors mistakenly used the logo on the front cover of something they were doing with us and straight away there was a letter over the desk that had to be dealt with.
"If you look around the shops there are FIFA branded t-shirts, bed clothes, books and all the other things that the FAI would have set out to do in connection with these championships. The upshot is that I would say FIFA will make as much out of this tournament in Ireland as the FAI and that's probably not something we would have anticipated."
Still, the association stands to receive slightly in excess of €2.5 million from the world body for getting here, while its commercial activities, co-ordinated with the players in what he claims has been a highly successful manner, will bring the gross receipts up to roughly twice that figure. When all of the expenses have been deducted the hope is that between €1.5 million and €2 million will be left, significantly up on either of the previous two World Cups but a figure, nevertheless, that is pretty much accounted for in its entirety by the post eircom Park financial settlement with IMG.
Overall, though, things are looking up, with the association set to declare a surplus of some €900,000 when its annual accounts to the end of March are unveiled at its forthcoming a.g.m.
Menton seems less sure about the way the association is developing, observing, "the way we handle this investigation will be an important measure of how we are maturing as an organisation. It must be about looking at the good as well as the bad - and I think there has been a huge amount that has been good in the way we have done things - and when it's done we have to make all of the findings public." That much may take care of itself, particularly if Keane and McCarthy end up being asked to provide their sides of the Saipan story.
