No sign of fear loosening grip
Michael Lyster chuckled his derision, while Cyril Farrell doubled on the pass: “The lads Friday night are getting paid, you see; they don’t want to score.”
Cheap shots, really. And a shame, on a glorious Sunday, that hurling needed to look sideways and betray any signs of insecurity. But a reasonable barometer of sentiment, all the same.
We’re back there, again. Our footballers fair game. When our international manager has spent years advising us not to expect much, given the modesty of our standards; little wonder that onlookers should flood the tent too.
As we say goodbye to Giovanni Trapattoni; we can appreciate many of the things he gave us.
He was the boss, the gaffer, that Stan threatened to be. He invested in banks of four and returned enough so that indignation alone fed us through the winter of 2009. He gave us the guarded giddiness of early June, last year; more sense of occasion than optimism, but still a treat.
And he enabled tens of thousands of supporters to book flights and trains to many places, secure enough in the knowledge that whatever they saw when they landed, it probably wouldn’t be a beating.
Maybe he was right, too, not to mollycoddle players with phone calls and reasons; a call-up remains more honour than entitlement. But it all came at what cost to our self-esteem? “You remember we are Ireland. We think we are German or English. We are Ireland.”
The familiar grip he used to subdue us. For whose benefit did he plaster the ceiling on our dreams? Of course it was nothing we haven’t done to ourselves. Even when we’ve had a team to be feared, it tended to play with dread. Courage surfaced, at times, briefly under Mick McCarthy; perhaps partly down to Roy Keane’s insistence that the game wouldn’t take place above his head.
But our sights have been lowered for so long, there is acceptance that we have much to be afraid of. But we have had other ways, though we shouldn’t forget John Giles’s Irish teams were eventually whistled because they didn’t get the ball forward quickly enough.
Like success, fear has many fathers — perhaps the Dalyer boo boys are due a paternity test.
The good news for Trap’s successor, whoever it is: our ranking has fallen so far, the prospect of finally beating someone regarded as better than us must have swelled.
But equally, as Lao Tzu — a 4-2-3-1 man, I’d imagine — put it; if you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Greg Dyke reckoned arresting England’s slide down the rankings will be like turning a tanker. So they have decided to wait until 2022 to win the World Cup.
Are we set to bide our time too and hope for a bottom-up cultural revolution? Or would Martin O’Neill really be the man to wrestle the wheel and kick off top-down change? In many ways, O’Neill is the ideal candidate to dress some of the wounds Trap left open. A man who talked about Ashley Young in the same breath as Diego Maradona and Cristiano Ronaldo would certainly lift the heads of some of the wounded players.
O’Neill will trust players, but will he trust them to play? Talking on BBC radio this week about international management, his rhetoric wasn’t encouraging. “I assume you’re not going to be able to do an awful lot with the players. But what you can do is get organisation in. You can work on set-pieces, which is a big part of the game.”
Whatever about the tanker, your heart sank.
And in the wake of the Sweden defeat and the damage Zlatan Ibrahimovic inflicted; it was impossible not to recall another occasion when derision tittered around a TV studio after a match.
The studio was the BBC’s and the World Cup was Germany’s. The scorn was O’Neill’s and the target Zlatan; “the most overrated player in world football”.
You worry.
