Qualifying for Euro 2016 doesn’t make Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane future-proof
It’s been four days since that memorable night at the Aviva, but the canonisation of Martin O’Neill and the last steps in the 13-year transformation of Roy Keane from national sinner to saint have already been ratified by a congregation of Irish football fans drunk on the giddy cocktail of qualification for Euro 2016 and a performance against Bosnia that was suggestive of even better days to come.
The clamour is rising: sign ’em up! Get those new contracts sorted.
It started on Tuesday when Keane gave a morning-after press conference at the team’s Castleknock Hotel and spoke about how he had turned down recent club offers and how he wanted to be a part of the Euros, but that he was still very much of a mind to return to club management.
O’Neill and FAI CEO John Delaney have both declared their desire to extend their current arrangement through to the end of the World Cup 2018 campaign, which isn’t the worst idea in the world given the management’s stock will have soared across the Irish Sea this week.
Yet new deals would be no guarantee of a happy ever after.
Giovanni Trapattoni got a new contract when he guided the Republic of Ireland to the continental competition this time four years ago and the usually more prudent bods in the IRFU have been just as quick off the mark in the modern era by having the likes of Eddie O’Sullivan, Declan Kidney and Joe Schmidt sign on the dotted line before World Cups.
How did they turn out?
Trapattoni lasted, what, another 15 months?
O’Sullivan and Kidney held on for even less while Schmidt, though already elevated to sainthood thanks to his work with Leinster and the two Six Nations titles he has secured with Ireland, hardly came home from the UK last month with reputation enhanced after that chastening quarter-final loss to Argentina.
Right now, O’Neill and Keane is the hottest management ticket in town, but it was an old University of Texas coach Darrell Royal who once put it that a coach isn’t as smart as people say he is when he wins, nor as stupid when he loses.
That’s a starting point worth using when we digest just what it is that MONKEANO have actually achieved thus far.
O’Neill has rebounded after an alarming slump in the team’s form midway through the qualifiers, but this is where the journey gets really interesting.
Logic dictates he needs to improve this team further and you would think he can if he is afforded the time, but what we need to see now is the team kicking on at a major tournament, which didn’t happen at Euro 2012.
There is no denying O’Neill has done a decent job with a squad everyone agrees isn’t a patch on those which Jack Charlton and Mick McCarthy had at their disposal, and one that is also shorn of the quality which Trapattoni enjoyed in the form of a younger Robbie Keane as well as Shay Given, Damien Duff and Richard Dunne.
It was Sam Mussabini, coach to Harold Abrahams, whose rivalry with Eric Liddell at the 1924 Olympic Games provided the script for the film ‘Chariots of Fire’, who said “you cannot put in what God left out” and yet O’Neill has made up for the lack of world-class talent by working assiduously on his team’s other qualities.
Time and again he has mentioned how perhaps the desire of players to wear the green jersey wasn’t always forthcoming prior to his arrival, but that he has seen no lack of it during his own era.
That is because he has simply laid down the law in that regard, while he has also bigged up his players in a manner Trapattoni couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Going to see them play for their clubs in England obviously helps, but O’Neill lauds them in public whereas the Italian constantly lamented Ireland didn’t have someone to match whatever star player or players were filling out the opposition’s ranks.
“Fantastic,” O’Neill calls his players, individually and as a squad.
He has walked the walk, too.
No-one can predict a Martin O’Neill line-up these days and players like Darren Randolph, Richard Keogh and Robbie Brady have emerged under his watch to assume leading roles.
Ireland are difficult to beat again and they are resilient, but they will need to do more, to be more ambitious and composed in attack, if they are to kick on from here.
Jonathan Walters spoke after Monday’s game about the need to atone for the crushing disappointment of the last European Championship and, with 16 of the 24 teams proceeding to the knockout stages, there is every chance Ireland could extend their stay in France beyond the group stages.
What is imperative is that the Irish psyche doesn’t lapse into ‘everything after this is a bonus’ mode.
If nothing else, the European finals need to serve as a launching pad for the World Cup qualifiers that begin next September when Ireland will vie with Wales, Austria, Serbia, Moldova and Georgia for a trip to Russia.
With just 13 qualifiers to emerge from nine European groups, a group that was met with a fair degree of contentment when first revealed is beginning to look just as punishing an ask as that just completed and there will be no prizes for finishing third this time.
So, hats off to O’Neill and Keane, but let’s not chuck them in the air just yet.
