’Best ever’ Dunne will be a big miss
“I’m younger than Shay, aren’t I?,” the 37-year-old chuckled. “So that will be alright.”
Quite apart from the superior longevity of goalkeepers, a legacy of back problems from his own long and illustrious career means we definitely won’t be seeing ‘Killa’ in the green shirt again, but he’s pleased his old team-mate Given — one year his senior — is giving it another crack “I told him not to retire two years ago so I’m happy he’s back,” said Kilbane, on a flying visit to Dublin. “I know there’ll be one or two question marks over it simply because of his lack of football over the last couple of years. That’s the only downside. I still think he’s more than capable of being in the squad. He’s as good if not better than the two we have. So I think it’s a bit of a no-brainer for Martin to call him up.”
Kilbane also believes Given’s return will help fill the perceived leadership deficit in the squad.
“I think it does,” he said. “Even if he isn’t playing games I think he can bring a lot to the squad with his experience. We’ve still got Robbie there and Shay there now. We can’t overestimate the loss of Richard and what that’s going to mean to us long-term. Shay’s going to fill some sort of gap that Richie’s left, definitely.”
Off the pitch, Kevin suggested, Given’s mere presence can be inspirational for the squad’s younger players, while on the pitch, well, let’s just say the Donegal man was never a shrinking violet.
“Shay is annoying at times the way he screams but that’s him, isn’t it?,” Kevin grinned. “He’s very vocal and keeps people on their toes. Some people it comes instinctively to, like Richard. Others it doesn’t.”
Much has been made of the familiarity of Martin O’Neill’s squad on the eve of the start of a new qualifying campaign – a familiarity only deepened by the late addition of the veteran Given who reached the 126 cap total against Oman on Wednesday night – but Kilbane is less concerned about the absence of new faces than he is about the departure of an old one.
“Seamus (Coleman) is the best at what he does, but he’s not a central defender,” Kilbane observed. “John O’Shea, for all the experience he’s got, he’s not Richard Dunne. Richard is one of our best ever, the best over the last 15 years, and he’s going to be a big miss. That can’t be overstated. We all know what Richard is like, he’s fairly quiet, he’s not loud, he’s not a screamer, but lads are coming off the pitch going, ‘how good was he?’.”
And Kilbane is worried the big man’s absence might be especially keenly felt in Tbilisi tomorrow evening.
“For all the big performances that Richard put in against the Russians and so on, it was against the Georgians he never gave them a kick, he was the one that kept them quiet.
“If there was a major incident, if it wasn’t Shay making a save, it would be Richard that was blocking it. And for all that I want someone to step up to the mark, there’s no one in that role.
“John (O’Shea) has enough experience and he has taken that mantle a little bit. We’ve had Sean (St Ledger), Darren O’Dea, Alex Pearce, Richard Keogh. (Damien) Delaney had a good season.
“And that is the worry, there is no stand-out candidate. There is no one you will put your hat on and say, ‘he is my centre-half, he will start’. There is no one that is that player, that is the big player.”
As it happens, Dunne also missed out on the last time Kilbane played in Tbilisi when, in what was Brian Kerr’s first competitive game as manager in 2003, Ireland won 1-2 in what, for once, fully merited the cliché of a hostile atmosphere. Gary Doherty had a vodka bottle thrown at him. Gary Breen was hit by ball-bearings, a couple more were targets for plastic bottles and, Kilbane himself had the closest shave of all. Something hit me on the shoulder and arm and then I looked down and it was an open pen knife sort of thing,” he recalls.
“It was sort of a flick knife or maybe a Stanley knife, with that sort of butt on it, and it just hit me. It cut into my arm and I needed stitches afterwards. There wasn’t too much made of it — I needed a big song and dance made out of it!
“I think that’s probably as intimidating as it gets, when you’re getting hit by bottles and knives. It was all in a day’s work for the Irish then, wasn’t it?”
All concerned can certainly do without a repeat of that sort of thing in Tbilisi tomorrow night. But whether the visitors can afford to do without Richard Dunne is the much more pressing concern for Kevin Kilbane.
