Martin O’Neill has always been clear that he believes Jack Grealish and Declan Rice made the right decision to play for England rather than Ireland.
“I don’t think that Jack or his family have regretted that decision,” he told Ladbrokes last year.
Yesterday, on TalkSport, he told Simon Jordan and Jim White: “Rice has chosen to play for England. What a terrible decision that’s been, he’s been to a couple of Euros finals, the Republic of Ireland haven’t won a game . . . [Rice’s] decision was always going to be, playing for England. And he’s really regretted that . . .” adding, after a pause, “. . . that is a joke.”
O’Neill is probably right. As the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemann used to say, “regret is rare”. More often people retrospectively justify their choices and actions, the way you see O’Neill doing whenever he discusses this subject.
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Still, you do wonder if in Grealish’s case there might have been a flicker of something like regret when he turned on the TV and saw himself starring in the Hellmann’s Mayonnaise Summer Euros BBQ campaign, despite not having been picked for the Euros.
This evening in Dublin, Grealish has a chance to play his way back into the England picture thanks to interim manager Lee Carsley, the man the FAI originally wanted to succeed Stephen Kenny.
If Carsley is to become the permanent successor to Gareth Southgate, good results in this Nations League group are the minimum requirement. What the FA really wants is for Carsley’s team to express England DNA.
England have described their DNA in a series of “philosophy statements”. For example: “POSSESSION PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT: ENGLAND TEAMS AIM TO INTELLIGENTLY DOMINATE POSSESSION SELECTING THE RIGHT MOMENTS TO PROGRESS THE PLAY AND PENETRATE THE OPPOSITION.”
“OUT OF POSSESSION PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT: ENGLAND TEAMS AIM TO INTELLIGENTLY REGAIN POSSESSION AS EARLY AND AS EFFICIENTLY AS POSSIBLE. TAKING INTO CONSIDERATION THE STATE OF THE GAME, THE ENVIRONMENT AND PRE-DETERMINED GAME PLAN.”
There are also TRANSITION and FORMATION philosophy statements but by now you probably get the picture.
Southgate’s teams were good at the basics of defending and scoring goals. What they lacked was the ability to INTELLIGENTLY control games against the best opponents, a failing exposed in their last four tournament-ending defeats to Croatia, Italy, France and Spain. England are now seeking to evolve into a tournament-winning final form.
Heimir Hallgrímsson’s Ireland are attempting something a bit more humble.
Hallgrímsson spent the first few minutes of yesterday’s prematch press conference politely refusing to answer questions about how Ireland were going to set up in tonight’s game. Then he answered a question about how Ireland planned to entertain and excite the sell-out home crowd by asking one of his own.
“What do you mean with ‘entertainment and excitement’? What excites you? What entertains you, what excites you?”
It was a good question – if we’re honest, what do we really get excited about? What are the most famous 21st-century images of the Irish football team in action? There’s the picture of Roy Keane tackling Marc Overmars from behind in the first minute of the Ireland-Holland game in 2001. An image laced with emotion, in this case aggression.
There’s the freeze-frame of Thierry Henry’s left hand controlling the ball as his marker Paul McShane squawks in horror. This time the emotion is betrayal. Or Robbie Brady’s winner against Italy in Lille. The image you remember is not even the goal, but the celebration, with the tear-streaked face of his brother in the crowd. The rarest Irish football emotion of all: joy.
These are the moments that excite us and imprint themselves on memory – not the patterns of play, not even really the results, but the moments of feeling.
In this, fans and players may be growing apart. While the crowd seeks to revel in high emotion, the players need to be more detached and composed than ever.
Hallgrímsson and John O’Shea have both spoken this week of how it’s more important to calm the Irish players down than to rev them up. The game they’re playing has evolved into an endless flowing sequence of number-puzzles that are better solved with a cool head than the battle-fever we used to think you needed for big matches.
There was a viral video during the week of a children’s team, supposedly in Florida, constructing a sensational passing move which started in their own box, progressed elaborately through the thirds and ended with their striker rounding the opposing keeper and scoring into an empty net. It was astonishing. The teamwork was so good there was something almost sinister about it.
When Johan Cruyff said football is a game you play with your brains, did he ever imagine a sight like this perfectly co-ordinated drone swarm of 10-year-olds?
This evolution in the game has coincided with Ireland’s decline as a force in international football. The battle-fever days suited us. The sudoku-logic-puzzle beating-the-press game, we’re still coming to grips with. Football kids in Ireland have not been coached in this style of play from the cradle like the better-resourced kids in Spain or England or even, apparently, Florida.
Stephen Kenny tried to drag us into football modernity. Last week, before St Pat’s played Basaksehir in Istanbul, he reflected: “It’s not easy in Ireland because you want to play a certain way but you’re constantly told ‘we’re incapable of it’. And if you don’t get the result, then it’s sort of like, ‘what did you expect’?”
Actually Kenny’s efforts were largely cheered on by fans and media made desperate by the bleakness of the late O’Neill and Mick McCarthy II eras. Far from saying Irish players couldn’t do it, most were optimistic that a change of emphasis and attitude could take us somewhere better.
Sadly the results said otherwise. In Kenny’s time we played 10 tournament qualifiers against the sides that were considered rivals for the top two qualifying spots – Serbia, Portugal, France, the Netherlands and Greece. We won none and lost eight of those matches. We scored six goals, four of which originated with corner kicks. The only goal that came from good passing in open play was the first: Alan Browne’s header in Serbia.
After two failed qualifying campaigns we had a choice: do we persevere, keeping faith that in the long run it will work out, or do we try something different, because in the long run we are all dead? By appointing Hallgrímsson, the FAI chose option B.
At his squad announcement last week, the Icelander was asked whether Ireland would stick with the back-three systems they have generally used over the past three years, or change to the back-four systems he favoured with Iceland. He said that he doesn’t think so much in terms of formations.
“It’s about what fits the players, first and foremost.”
Instead, he said, he prefers to think in terms of principles of play.
What about one of the key principles Kenny tried to instil – that Ireland should play out from the back, with the goalkeeper passing short to the defenders?
“In my opinion, having this short time with the team, I think that is something we will develop slowly. It’s not something you can force. This will develop slowly, and [eventually] on the ball you can have the relaxed player, playing maybe the risky passes, without losing it.
“But I think at the moment, other things are more important than spending a lot of time in [the] build-up. For me, it’s about scoring a goal. If the build-up helps you do that, then of course we will focus on that.”
You don’t have to read very far between the lines to figure that Hallgrímsson sees Ireland much as Trapattoni, O’Neill and McCarthy did.
Compared to most other teams we don’t have good players, so if we want to survive we have to be humble, keep it simple, play as a unit, defend for our lives, and make the set pieces count. No more empty rhetoric about ‘attractive’ or ‘progressive’ football, no more huffing copium about performances and potential. A new pragmatic Ireland will be judged on results. Let’s see how it goes.
