Ireland’s trawl: idol to idle
Even allowing for some things getting lost in translation — and, indeed, Ireland has been quick to claim he was misquoted, particularly in relation to his disparaging remarks about Cork and Birmingham — the unmistakable whinge of the self-styled misunderstood martyr comes through loud and clear. Trapattoni, Houllier and Mancini have all got it wrong, he says. Add in Brian Kerr when he was Ireland’s underage boss, and the only possible conclusion is that the lad has been serially unlucky with the managers he has encountered along the way.
Ireland refers to his international career as “ancient history” and, while it’s true that his name has long become a byword for controversy and what might have been, it’s easy to forget that barely four years have passed since he first broke into the senior team and, with his sublime natural talent, convinced many expert observers that the boy who, deliciously, bore his country’s name was set fair to become one of its greatest ever players.
Now we can see the name was appropriate in ways we couldn’t have imagined back then. Spookily, player and country have since gone on to match each other almost step for step: from the boom of 2007 when Ireland, the nation, was riding high on the hog and Ireland, the player, was scoring European Championship goals, to the bust of 2011 when the country is in hock to Europe and the footballer is hoping for a bailout from Newcastle.
Mind, the Cobh man’s decline was scarcely as precipitous, notwithstanding the fact that his Irish career did end on a sudden and exceedingly bizarre note as he followed up a final goal for his country in Bratislava with his exit from the national stage via the celebrated ‘Grannygate’ saga.
That Ireland was facing a personal crisis at the time only emerged later but, even allowing for the stress he and his partner appeared to be under, it still boggles the mind that he could publicly ‘kill off’ not one but two grandmothers and somehow think he could keep such a ludicrous fiction alive.
Yet persist with and even embellish it, he did. The FAI official who drove Ireland to Prague airport — where the association had a chartered plane on standby to hasten the return home of the bereaved grandson — would later tell me of how he’d had a long conversation in the car with the player about how best Ireland might handle the likely media attention at the funeral.
Yes, despite also testing the patience of his club manager, at that point his future still looked exceedingly bright at Manchester City, where he continued to go from strength to strength. Again, one needs to remind oneself that it’s only a year and half — back in May, 2009 to be precise — that I could write the following with conviction in this here space: “Stephen Ireland is by some distance the most outstanding Irish footballer on the planet. And, at his current rate of progress, he might be one of the best, period, by the time the World Cup finals hove into view next summer.”
And don’t just take my word for it; it was around this time too that Roy Keane famously remarked that Giovanni Trapattoni should be prepared to sleep outside Stephen Ireland’s house if it would help persuade him to re-enlist in the national cause.
In truth, that was always an unlikely outcome — and, by the sound of things, it’s an impossible one now. “I feel nothing for the national team,” he told the French magazine So Foot, adding, “I have more to do than go off for three days to play Andorra.”
Remarkably, this declaration of supreme self-centredness comes in the context of an interview in which he calls Trapattoni “arrogant” and insists that he wasn’t given a fair chance at Villa despite being “the best player in training — it was my team that won in every session”.
Er, pot calling kettle — come in, kettle.
We’ll have to take Stephen Ireland’s word for it that he remains the king of the training pitch after a period of what seems to the outsider to be a protracted decline. He hasn’t been helped, of course, by injury and the inevitable failure to see eye to eye with yet another gaffer, but the deeper concern is that what we are witnessing is the squandering of extravagant talent for no other discernible reason than this guy’s head repeatedly undermines his feet.
If he wanted to strike a note of wounded pride in his latest state of Ireland address, the effort could hardly have been more ill-judged, the actual effect more akin to that of an overgrown baby still chucking his toys from the pram in a bid to gain attention.
He can still turn things around on the pitch and he still has plenty of time to do justice to his prodigious gifts as a footballer — though whether a club as dysfunctional as Newcastle United is the best or worst place for him to hang his hat, remains to be seen.
He’s charged bald-headed, sort of, from wonderland to blunderland but, even if he insists on giving too many people too many reasons to rejoice in his apparent downfall, the knowledge of just how good he can be on a football pitch means you can’t help hoping — almost in spite of yourself — that, somehow, he finds his way back, if not to Ireland the country, then to Ireland the young footballer who once had the world at his feet.
