Connolly’s quantum leap to upset Ireland’s time travel plans?

Students of time travel will know this is precarious. In John Delaney’s grandiose vision, Ireland’s future has been mapped out and somehow it’s looking bright. Meanwhile, Mick McCarthy was summoned from the past to look after the present.

Now, in a dangerous quantum leap, Aaron Connolly is a saviour sent back from the future. Which puts us into tricky ‘grandfather paradox’ territory. Is he likely to change anything while he’s here that will prevent the future taking its natural course?

As messy as it looked when Ireland’s ‘succession plan’ was unveiled, this was actually cleaner when today and tomorrow were kept at arm’s length.

Hope belonged to Stephen Kenny. And a picture is emerging of a very different Ireland. An exotic world populated by creatures like Parrott and Kelleher and Molumby and Connolly, where fans enjoy watching international football, players keep the ball, and Ireland have — whisper it — a philosophy.

There was another sneak preview in Tallaght on Thursday night, full of novel scenarios such as Italy wasting time to hang on for a point against Ireland. Familiar words were organised into unfamiliar sentences, among them: Italy held Ireland to a draw.

And afterwards young men like Conor Coventry were saying weird things, such as the draw felt like a loss, when all we have ever known is draws that feel like a win.

Last month in Sweden, there was another bizarre episode involving these young men. Having secured what is regarded, in Irish football, as the Holy Grail — a 1-1 draw against a half-decent side — these players took an unfathomable course of action and kept attacking, eventually coming away with a 3-1 win.

So we could see, there and then, that everything would be up for grabs, sometime in the future. That there might be a new normal, as they say. And we were happy with that. Because, as the greatest philosopher, Brendan Rodgers, put it: you cannot live for a second without hope.

So with the future boxed off, under Stephen Kenny’s faraway tree, the pressure was lifted off the present. The here and now had a free hit.

A realist and a pragmatist, rather than a philosopher, Mick McCarthy had space and a little time to be as realistic and pragmatic as he wanted. The players, too, could travel light, because here in the present it’s still accepted that we just don’t have the players.

So we won’t necessarily be passing up any Holy Grails, on the rest of Mick’s short journey. And whatever about today, on Tuesday a draw will feel like a win.

It helps that Mick is essentially operating in a post-punditry vacuum, The Panel a thing of the past. Sure, some punditry is still going on, but no longer is every aimless ball into the channels linked to fundamental obstacles such as third-level education and personal stereos and the manager’s unsuitability for driving the train to Cork.

The national mood is no longer set in a studio in Montrose. It’s being set in the future.

There might, at the outset, have been some pressure on Mick to actually qualify for the Euros, for the sake of the few shekels it would bring. But since it has emerged that the FAI will need more than a few shekels to get that house in order, there’s no great panic on that front either. In for a cent, in for a euro, while we’ve got our caps out to Uefa.

So we are in a happy place, where we can sing ‘Que Sera Sera’ and actually mean it. Where Glenn Whelan is now a fondly regarded servant, rather than mocked as a totem of everything that’s wrong.

And then, at lunchtime last Saturday, the boy Connolly’s DeLorean screeched down Tottenham’s right and parked in Ireland’s present. This is where it could get messy. We’ve already seen evidence this week that neither the past nor the future are present-proof.

Manchester United’s horror show at Newcastle appears to have been the final straw that dispatched a coach trip of fans and journalists back to the past to recalibrate Jose Mourinho’s spell in charge at Old Trafford as a magnificent triumph of husbandry.

In contrast, the exciting, notional future for the League of Ireland we’ve been hearing about for some time was best kept right there, in the future.

Because this week we heard that this silver bullet solution may be the same as all the other silver bullet solutions: change the number of teams and the number of times they play each other. And there is not much excitement about that future anymore.

What’s the worst that could happen with Connolly?

Well, we’ve recently seen, with the likes of Callum Robinson and Sean Maguire, the damage playing in actual serious games can do to excitement levels. Do we really need reality biting Aaron?

And what if the boy does good and fires us to the Euros? Where does that leave the future? Is it postponed? This week Robinson was wondering if the FAI “might look at the plan”.

And since, if it does go ahead, the future might well involve certain teething problems as Ireland adjusts to a new normal, it could probably do with a reciprocal digout from the present, in terms of easing the pressure.

By that token, a pragmatic, realistic play-off defeat might just be a sensible investment in our future.

For now, in his pragmatic and realistic way, Mick thought he was reassuring us when he confirmed that Connolly “did not look out of place” here in the present. Considering he was talking about an exotic saviour from the future, Mick was actually describing our worst fears.

Organising a World Cup seems too tough

A mixed week, you could say, for rugby. There was a blow to the pipeline as The Irish Times ran a feature pointing out it might not be all that prudent spending all your spare cash sending your kids to private schools, even if it does build you a ‘serious network’.

Rightly or wrongly, one assumes you’d need to lean on that kind of serious network to get anywhere close to the top of World Rugby. Yet rugby’s elite administrators don’t seem to be a great advert for the best organisational skills money can buy.

And yet, there are those of us who have never felt greater empathy with rugby chiefs than during this rough week for the game.

When we look back now on those “robust contingency programmes” they boasted about, who among us can’t see parallels with our own lives when our best-laid plans amounted to keeping the head down and hoping the worst never happens?

Who among us can’t identify with a group of people who looked at New Zealand v Italy, a fixture with everything notionally at stake, and conceded, ‘what’s the point?’