Go on Martin, give Daryl Horgan a call
So, there you are, bounding up the steps of the stand before kick-off, eager for the 90 minutes ahead. Who knows what’s coming: It’s the great unknowable that keeps us all coming back for more regardless of results, the weather or that new series on Netflix that you’ve heard so much about.
What must it be like, then, to be sitting there full of anticipation when someone like Martin O’Neill shuffles through the row of legs and parks himself in that last empty spot beside you? It’s a question this column often asks itself when the TV camera pans to the great and good in the crowd, as it did time and again on Tuesday in Oriel Park There O’Neill was, legs tucked up and squeezed in between two gentlemen whose eyes were fixed rigidly on the action in front of them. God love these people, but it must be like watching a racy movie with your parents.
Or sitting beside the archbishop in mass. What exactly do you say?
Maybe something like: “So, Martin, Daryl Horgan, eh?”
O’Neill had left before the Galway man was announced as both a “future Irish international” and man-of-the-match for a performance that delivered two very different but equally impressive goals.
The Ireland manager, having omitted Horgan from his last squad, must have been squirming in his seat in that first-half.
Or he might have had there been room.
But forget the cramped accommodation and that God-awful plastic pitch. For anyone remotely interested in the welfare — and potential — of the League of Ireland, Tuesday night was about as good as it gets with two excellent sides delivering a compelling and quality game of football before a national audience.
All too often, these live billboard games have been built up and destroyed by dreadful conditions or performances. Or a combination of both. After all the talk about Irish football’s ‘DNA’, here it was writ large before us with two teams whose European exploits have already made a mark on foreign fields this season.
For a league whose product has been dissed and dismissed by so many, and for so long, it’s two standout representatives have demonstrated time and again in recent months what Irish sides can do by allying traditional ‘British’ values to a playing style that leans both on possession and penetrative football.
Horgan is a pretty good representation of that.
To be fair to the Irish gaffer, he has dealt with questions regarding the winger’s candidacy for international honours pretty evenly, even if his reasoning about Dundalk’s heavy schedule at home and abroad was hard to swallow on the grounds that he would hardly excuse a British-based player in that scenario.
O’Neill’s reply to queries concerning his use of Wes Hoolahan and the team’s style of play have been much less measured. There are times in his post-match interviews when he has appeared about as approachable as a cornered badger and it makes you wonder what it might be like if they actually lost.
That’s the nub of his argument, of course. They haven’t.
The Republic of Ireland have seven points from nine after an admittedly tricky start to the World Cup qualifying campaign and yet the focus surrounding his team has been on the non-selection of creative players like Horgan and the team’s style of play.
It isn’t difficult to understand the opprobrium of O’Neill, and James McClean who said after the 3-1 win in Moldova that the Irish media needs to ‘get real’, but their simplistic focus on ‘points first, everything else a distant second’ fails to recognise just what it is many of us want from a national team.
Maybe it is the case that the bottom line is all that counts for the majority. We hear enough talk about football being a results business but sport is about identity and pride and ambition too and it shouldn’t be a crime to aspire for a national team that can do more than win ugly.
Which is exactly why Horgan and Hoolahan and the type of football that this Irish team plays have all become key talking points at the foothills at this early stage of a campaign that resumes in the middle of November when the Republic travel to Vienna to face a struggling Austria side desperate for a win.
We will risk repetition here for the purpose of pointing out that no-one in their right mind has ever suggested that Ireland are the sort of team that can dominate opponents. It is the disproportionate defensiveness on the part of the manager more than anything that has drawn up these needless battle lines.
We’ve seen before how the stock of some players has soared when ignored by the Irish management. Daryl Horgan, no more than Wes Hoolahan, is not the answer to all of Irish football’s prayers. He even suggested after the defeat of Cork that, his goals aside, it hadn’t actually been his best game.
Maybe so but it is impossible to see how he won’t be offered a place in O’Neill’s squad for the game in the Austrian capital which comes less than a week after the FAI Cup final between Dundalk and Cork. An exciting winger in the national squad would be cause enough for cheer, but one called up on merit from the League of Ireland?
What’s not to like?
