Georgia v Republic of Ireland, Tengiz Burjanadze Stadium, Gori, 8pm (5pm Irish time)
Vera Pauw has a cold. The air conditioning at Ireland’s beach-facing Turkish hotel invaded the manager’s sinuses as she worked herself to the bone last week. Pauw has no worries about similar afflictions in Tbilisi, where the Irish squad decamped only to discover thunder storms in the Caucasus, ahead of tonight’s World Cup qualifier against Georgia.
The squad will not enter the Tengiz Burjanadze Stadium, in Stalin’s home town, until Monday’s warm-up as Saturday’s chartered flight, covering 1700km, was deemed sufficient travel.
“That’s the dilemma,” said Pauw between coughing fits. “You want to train, you want to see the venue, you want to familiarise yourself, you want to train your perception like the size of the pitch with the stands and everything involved.
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“But you need to realise what you give up for that. It’s over an hour by car so by bus it will be close one hour 20 minutes from [Tbilisi to Gori], if not longer, so that means after the travel of yesterday, we would be on the bus at least two hours and 45 minutes today. So the benefit of seeing the stadium is less than the benefit of not having that travel.”
External problems, be they weather or travel, should not deny Ireland three points against the team they thumped 11-0 seven months ago in Tallaght. Gori must prove an efficient pit-stop en-route to crucial September fixtures against Finland and Slovakia but carefully planned logistics and the physical shape of professionals, searching for form in their off season, were overshadowed by Pauw’s reasoning behind results during this qualification campaign.
In short, she does not like Thursdays. Two home matches that yielded wildly contrasting 1-1 draws with Slovakia and Sweden revealed an old Irish failing: stuttering against lesser opposition yet matching the second best team in the world.
“That is exactly what I meant about how difficult it is to play on Thursday,” said Pauw. “If the game would have been the other way around, we would have won against Slovakia but probably not had that result against Finland.
“It is so difficult to play on Thursday, to get the team ready, and if you don’t have an opponent who had another camp behind them, an opponent that just need to stop you playing, then you get what you got.”
Okay, but Ireland performed above themselves in the one-nil home defeat to Sweden last October, on a Thursday, before beating Finland 2-1 in Helsinki five days later. A month later McCabe’s fantastic finish salvaged a point at home to Slovakia, on a Thursday, before trashing Georgia five days later.
“It’s not an excuse, because we need to grow over that, and be able to be as sharp Thursday as we would be on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday,” Pauw continued. “But having [club games] played on Sunday it is so difficult, and to be honest Fifa can rule everything but they don’t want to discuss with the countries before the Fifa windows to have the games all played on Saturday, because that would solve all the load problems for players and it would solve in the longer term many, many ligament injuries and hamstring injuries.”
Much of what Pauw says is presumably supported by data and her deep faith in the Dutch-influenced “football periodisation” but common sense appears to reject the notion that McCabe’s team struggle to reach the heights of Tuesday performances on Thursdays.
Pauw refused to embrace the suggestion that a psychological barrier exists, which has afflicted Irish teams since the dawn of football. Nope. It’s all down to Thursday scheduling.
“Nothing else. And that sounds weird. We will have Finland on a Thursday and that is a huge challenge – a huge, huge challenge – but we will be ready. Finland has the same problem because they play [club games] on Sunday also.”
So, in reality, the Thursday fixture is not a “huge, huge challenge” to secure safe passage to a World Cup play-off, if Finland has the same issue? “If both teams have the same problem then it is equalised.” So, it is more a physical than mental problem? “Yeah, the nervous system is fatigued.”
Any solutions ahead of Finland on September 1st? “Getting the players in as quickly as we can after the [club] games. Maybe rushing to the airport after the game, that is what we can do so the travel is on Sunday, that is the only thing we can do.
“In that sense, what the [club leagues] can do if they have to play on Sunday is to play the games early. What we can do on others, they have to rest, they have to get ready, they have to get sharp. There is between Sunday and Thursday, there is Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so physically you can get ready if the flights are not too long, if there are no injuries, if there are no knocks, and then it is up to us to be very, very careful and very sharp in what we do and what we don’t do.”
But flights from North Carolina for Denise O’Sullivan and Connecticut for Roma McLaughlin will always be long and injuries are guaranteed. “Yeah, that is what we’re facing.”
As are Finland.
None of this should impact Stephanie Roche’s international renaissance, after a three-year hiatus, as the veteran Peamount United striker is set to feature.
Ireland (possible): Brosnan; Fahey, Quinn, Caldwell; Payne, Littlejohn, Connolly, McCabe; Ziu, O’Sullivan; Roche.
