Hughton thrives in new role

CHRIS HUGHTON always played for Ireland with the enthusiasm of a star-struck schoolboy and his cheery good humour has not been dimmed by the responsibilities of management.

Assistant manager to Brian Kerr is clearly a task he is enjoying, just as he is relishing his coaching duties with Ireland’s current internationals. He literally skipped from one interview situation to the other after yesterday’s training sessions in Dublin, feeding his thoughts to the newspaper reporters, then the radio representatives and, finally, the TV crews with a sparkle in his eye.

“As a group (this squad) is very good,” he said. “There is a lot of experience, there is an awful lot of quality in the group.

“It is very stimulating to work with them for a number of reasons. You want to coach at the highest level you can and there isn’t a higher level than at international level. Of course, the difference in coaching at an international level is that you don’t get the players for the same period of time you do at club level.

“When you see a player progressing from week to week you are able to work on certain aspects of his game. You don’t have the opportunity to do that at international level but it is stimulating, yes, because obviously you are working with a different group of players and it is a new challenge. You come away from international weeks after seeing what you maybe did not see from a player at club level. There may be some aspects of his game where you say ‘yes, I knew he was a good player but he does that better than I thought he could’.”

He was asked to point to a comparison with the contemporaries he had in the Irish team over a playing career that ran from 1979 to 1991 and covered 53 games. He said: “If we look at the periods when I used play, I suppose there was a turnover from being a side that generally did well at home and found it difficult to get results away from home, but we’ve now got a group of lads who have had success for quite a long period of time and they’ve grown up together. As a squad, we are stronger for it. We have more players now capable of influencing a game rather than just one recognised centre-forward as we had in Frank Stapleton.”

It will be interesting to see whether the Irish squad that is basically built around the players who worked with Mick McCarthy for six years will produce even better results under the coaching guidance of Brian Kerr, Hughton and Noel O’Reilly.

Hughton has come back to Ireland’s international fold with a big reputation as coach and he spoke of the work the management team have done in studying next week’s opponents on video. That, of course, was something Mick McCarthy and Ian Evans also did on a regular basis, but will the current team interpret things a little differently and, perhaps, apply a different approach?

“The difficulty always when you play against a team like Georgia and Albania is player identification and also a system of play. So, looking at the videos will be for us to show the individual players who play for Georgia and to identify a system of play they use. Normally they play three at the back, four in midfield and one just behind the front two and that is the system they have been playing over the most recent period of time. But, of course, I think they are a flexible enough side with good enough players to be able to change that.

“We’ve look at three or four videos (of Georgia) and the difficulty as always with international sides in friendlies is that you know they are going to experiment and change the side and bring in new players.

“The pattern of play they are going to use seems to have been the same in most of the games but as regards personnel that is something we have yet to determine.”

This first important competitive test for the management team has its drawbacks, because Ireland lost their first two matches in the competition, but also has its benefits.

“Playing two matches back to back like this means we have a longer period together and, of course, there has to be a focus but with each game there comes a different angle.

“If I look at the Scotland game as a management group, the priority there was to get the lads in, to get to know the lads again and see their strengths and weaknesses and for them to know us and to get to know our methods.

“The players were very familiar with their opponents in Scotland because they play against them at club level on a regular basis. Now it is different because it is never easy to play against teams like Georgia and Albania, but we will go as far as we possibly can to anticipate what they will produce and to draw up a plan to produce the required results.”