Little in the way of southern comfort beyond Euro 2016
Tuesday’s performance and result at Turner’s Cross aside, it has been a pleasant enough run-in to the European Championships, with the blue skies and sunshine that has framed training at the National Sports Campus in Dublin and Cork’s Fota Island doing its bit in keeping the mood upbeat and optimistic.
It isn’t just the Republic of Ireland who have benefited.
Northern Ireland’s visit to Carton House late last month coincided with the long stretch of hazy bliss, and it lent a peaceful and cheerful air to a relaxed media day when 21 of Michael O’Neill’s players wandered in and around the building and surrounding gardens, where they chatted away to their hearts’ content.
The entire affair lasted two hours and it was only halfway done when the thought struck that the overwhelming majority of those interviewed bore distinctly recognisable Northern accents. A pretty obvious assertion, you might think, but the contrast having spent so long covering their Republic of Ireland counterparts was marked in that regard.
Just to be clear: this is not to decry the presence of any player born in Derry, Glasgow, Manchester in Martin O’Neill’s squad, but the presence of so many with accents hewn from jurisdictions other than that of the 26 counties is still an issue which probably doesn’t get as much air time as it should merit.
Martin O’Neill’s 23-man squad for Euro 2016 includes nine players whose birth certs were processed outside of the Republic.
In fairness, the proportion of second and third generation Irish in previous squads used to be even greater. The number was 11 in 1988 and 2002 and 13 in the 1990 and 1994 World Cups. Or, 56% of both those squads, in other words.
It fell to just eight for Euro 2012 and, while the Republic will have a greater amount of players with domestic league experience in their latest squad, the North have chosen only five men who qualified through parentage or the granny rule. And this despite a population which is roughly one-third that of southern neighbours who haven’t always been, well, neighbourly.
The procurement of players born, bred and made in the North by the FAI has been stemmed since Michael O’Neill took charge in Belfast, but there will be those watching as the tournament unfolds in France for whom the sight of Shane Duffy and James McClean wearing a different shade of green will not sit well.
Among them will be Felix Healy. Born in Derry, Healy played and managed in the League of Ireland and the Irish League and he also lined out for Northern Ireland at the 1982 World Cup.
The Troubles were embedded in the fabric of daily life in the North at the time. The Good Friday Agreement and the merest hint of someone representing the Republic was another generation down the road.
“When I was playing, you were Northern Ireland,” Healy explained, in a conversation with this column recently. “John O’Neill and I were from Derry and it was Northern Ireland. In Derry, now it is a different scenario. My eldest young fella is going to all the Republic of Ireland matches. He goes everywhere and he is going to France.
“The way Derry is (with players representing two different countries), it can be in many ways divisive. My thoughts are that you shouldn’t be allowed to play 15, 16, 17, and 18 and then just jump ship and play for somebody else, but that’s the nature of the beast. I hope both teams do well, but I think it will be incredibly difficult for both.”
Whether sourced in Northern Ireland or elsewhere, the sheer volume of players whose football education was gleaned from systems outside the Republic is alarming — their presence at this elevated level had little or nothing to do with the FAI, beyond some underage squads and in the case of those from the North, not even that.
The FAI and its high performance director Ruud Dokter will argue that they have put ever-improving systems, structures, and expertise in place at grassroots levels in recent years and yet the lack of talent progressing through those pathways to the senior international side has been all but non-existent under O’Neill’s watch.
It emerged on Wednesday that Ireland will have the oldest squad by average age at Euro 2016, as was the case in 2012. The average age will be just 68 days short of 30, which is an exceptionally high figure for any major field sport, and only nine debuts have been handed out by O’Neill since his first game in charge, against Latvia, in November of 2013.
Just two of those were players who played their underage club football in the Republic before making it as professional footballers in the UK, and neither Jonny Hayes or Alan Judge are what we would call spring chickens. It’s a damning rap sheet and a real cause for concern once the Euros end and attention turns to a much stiffer World Cup qualifying campaign.
: brendan. obrien@examiner.ie
: @Rackob
