A special place, with special people made for a wonderful experience as manager but the time came for me to move on, writes BRIAN KERR

I LOVED the Faroe Islands, the beauty of the place, the remoteness, the changing of the weather, the changing of the sky from hour to hour, sometimes from minute to minute. It’s a spectacular place. Every time I went there, when I was walking through the airport, I’d say “God, how lucky am I to be getting paid to come here to do this job?” Genuinely.

When I left the position last year it was, happily, on good terms and I have many friends there now. I got an email the other day from Virgar Hvidbro, general secretary of the Football Association, inviting me to dinner in Torshavn tonight.

I smiled. The contrast between my parting with the Faroes and the end of my time as Republic of Ireland manager was, to say the least, stark.

I got a letter from the FAI saying my contract wasn’t being renewed, with a few other details that weren’t very nice. After nearly 10 years with them, and five as a volunteer assistant manager with the youth team in the 1980s, it was a strange end.

The Faroes people stay in touch, send me emails asking me how I’m doing, it’s just a different relationship. Maybe they just have a different way.

But, yes, a special place. When I’d be driving from the airport on the 50-minute trip to Torshavn I’d feel the same. Each time I came the landscape was different, there might have been snow on the mountains, or just beautiful sunshine, or teeming rain, which resulted in waterfalls flowing down the mountains along the road. Every kind of weather brought its own spectacular beauty. I used to feel I should have been paying to come to this place.

I had never really worked outside Ireland, apart from the odd short contract stuff, like the time I was in Jordan for a couple of weeks. I was always interested in working in a different culture, but I wondered if I’d be accepted. But I think if they see you respect their culture, they accept you better.

By attending their club games, talking to people, listening to them, they felt you weren’t so much of an outsider to them. I tried to get in to it, tried to get to as many matches as I could, see people, be there, be around. schoolboy football, girls’ matches, anything that was on I’d go and have a look. Olympic handball too, their other sporting passion; it was a good way of meeting the people.

There were times I thought I was a bit of an ambassador for the place, and I think they appreciated that. They even used me in holiday promotion stuff, a photo of myself and the players down by the harbour ended up in a brochure at a tourism fare in Berlin, which made me smile when I heard about it.

I enjoyed their passion for football. I would compare it to the way the GAA is regarded in Ireland, especially in rural areas where the club is so important, where everyone has an interest in it and nearly everyone has a relation playing on the team.

There was a loyalty about fellas playing for their area, their local team, and when they moved to the big “city”, Tórshavn, all 14,000 of a population, there was always a pressure on them to come back to play for the local team, even though there were relatively decent contracts available to them with the bigger clubs in Tórshavn, HB and B36. It was kind of like Irish country life in many ways.

It was a calm lifestyle, and while there was a passion for the game there was also a realism about what could be achieved. But it was frustrating. We won two and drew two out of 18 matches. Any team I’d ever been with before – from schoolboy football through to League of Ireland and international teams – no matter how bad they were when I started, within the space of a year I could usually get them in to contention. With the Faroes, it was impossible to make that jump. It was so frustrating not being able to do a bit more.

A lot of the time it was damage limitation, trying to survive without conceding too many goals. Trying to find some way to attack that didn’t leave us too open to suffering a hammering. It was tough because I was used to being with teams that were always in with a chance, and generally had more possession than the opposition, looking to have a go, being on top, getting players forward. I was spending too much time working on the defensive side of the game, being negative really, in many ways, but also trying to convince the players we could win against anybody. It didn’t suit me. I just didn’t enjoy it, I would have liked to have been able to do something more than that.

But there were brilliant days, not least when we beat Lithuania and Estonia. And those days were as brilliant as I’ve had with any team because of the gulf between the standards.

We beat Estonia 2-0. It was Jakup Mikkelsen’s 71st international as goalkeeper and he’d never had a clean sheet, so at 41 he finally did it. It was marvellous.

There was a lovely warmth about the place. Our last match at home was against Italy, it was the first time I saw the stadium full. We played well. We battled through, went a goal down, then hit the post, hit the bar. At the end the crowd were up on their feet cheering, we only lost 1-0.

I obviously wasn’t in the job for the money, but in the end I just wanted to be around home a bit more, I was spending a fair amount of time in the Faroes. It was time to move on. I felt there must have been other challenges for me. A wonderful experience, though.

How would I have felt managing the Faroes against Ireland? Mixed feelings, really. I certainly would have liked to be managing them tomorrow night, I would have been quite happy about that. But I don’t know how happy I would have been managing the team in Dublin. It would have been a strange one for me, in some ways nice, in some ways awkward. I wouldn’t have liked to suffer, have a bad day with the team, I would have been determined for that not to happen for sure, but it would have been tough.

But that wasn’t to be, now I’m back in the Faroes for tomorrow’s game in a different role, an outsider looking in, meeting up with old friends, and being reminded again of the warmth and kindness of the people and the spectacular beauty of a place I was lucky enough to work in.