It says something about where we are as a footballing nation that there could have been quite such a hullaballoo over whether or not a 20-year-old attacking midfielder with barely more than a handful of first-team top-flight games under his belt would declare for Ireland or not. But there were times over the past year or so when the tone of the debate about Jack Grealish just said a bit about us as a nation, plain and simple.

On the football front, his decision to play for England is, of course, a bit of a blow. Grealish is a prospect, a serious one; though no more than that. He is, for instance, a player who has yet to have a season anything like Stephen Ireland’s breakthrough one at Manchester City, but few concern themselves much with the 29-year-old from Cork these days.

And yet he had the potential to bring fresh energy and a spark of creativity to an Irish team overly reliant for both on Wes Hoolahan, a 33-year-old who was for the most part ignored by a succession of international managers through the first decade or so of his senior club career.

Martin O’Neill’s attempt to name Grealish in his squad at the start of the summer, his assertion that the midfielder might go straight into the team if he accepted a call-up for any of the games since, and his willingness to leave the door open despite the growing sense that this saga was only going to end one way, certainly makes his estimation of the player’s likely significance clear.

Failure to land

The manager, in any case, emerges from it all well enough with little scope – unless something new emerges – for criticism over his failure to land the player. It was, as the northerner repeatedly said, a choice to be made by Grealish himself.

That his father, Kevin, would seem to have had a big say in things is a matter for Jack, too, although it would be a real pity if the views of Jonathan Barnett, the agent who once told Gareth Bale that declaring for Wales rather than England would cost him “millions and millions”, or anyone at Aston Villa had made a material difference to the decision.

With most Ireland supporters having appeared to accept quite some time ago which way the wind was blowing, the reaction to the actual announcement was philosophical enough, but earlier suggestions by a minority that Grealish was in some way “a traitor” or turning his back on “ his country” were obviously fairly absurd.

Grealish qualified for Ireland through grandparents on both sides of his family and there was clear evidence of a sense of Irish identity long before he accepted an invitation to play for a succession of Irish international youth teams, most publicly in the Gaelic football he played for his local club, John Mitchels, in the area of Birmingham where he grew up.

But he was born in Solihull to parents both born in England, and Ireland’s claim to him was based, it seems reasonably safe to assume, on the birthplace of people forced to leave the island because its economy did not offer adequate opportunities for them to support themselves or their families.

If England did that and in the years since allowed the family to get to the stage where one of its sons is about to become a multi-millionaire, then he must surely be entitled to feel some sense of gratitude or belonging.

Of course, there is a colonial or post-colonial aspect to it all, but while there have been a few in English media who have worn their wilful ignorance of such issues on their sleeves and indulged in obvious hypocrisy in relation to foreign-born players who have declared for England (Raheem Sterling, Wilfred Zaha, Victor Moses, and Saido Berhaino to name just a promising few of the current crop), that really isn’t for Grealish to worry about.

In recent years players such as Kevin Kilbane, Lee Carsley (on Monday appointed as manager of Brentford) and Steven Reid have all spoken or written impressively about how they felt Irish, are Irish, despite the location of their births, and supporters of the Irish team are rightly grateful for the manner in which they represented the nation. But it was their choice too, and Grealish is every bit as entitled to take a different path.

Challenges

For our part, there are different challenges ahead. Sure, there will be more Jack Grealishes, plenty of them.

But there is also a generation of players now who were born or brought up in Ireland whose own families’ origins lie abroad. Players like Noe Baba, Avis Ganiyu and Jean Yves Poame, all of whom have represented Ireland at underage level but have had to move to England in order to fulfil their professional ambitions.

It will be a measure of how far we have come as a football nation if players like them, having come through the system here, end up playing for the Irish senior team and someday, maybe, we will have progressed to the point where players won’t feel they have to leave to have any chance of winning full caps.

More importantly, though, we’ll have reached somewhere really important as a people if we can celebrate the fact that members of the new Irish communities want to play for the country they now call home; if we can be inclusive enough to ensure that nobody in their situation feels he cannot, but still accept with good grace when some feel, for whatever (good) reason, like the Kilbanes, Carsleys and Reids, that their heart simply lies elsewhere.

In the meantime, Grealish should go his own way with our best wishes.

He has a lot to live up now and the hope should be that he does not end up regretting his decision.