Bringing it all back home

IN football, as in life, as in the songs of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the big wheel keeps on turning. On a cold, rainy morning in November 2004, I sat with Brian Kerr in the Red Cow Hotel on the outskirts of Dublin and the talk was of a World Cup qualifying campaign involving, amongst others, Ireland, France and the Faroe Islands. Now it’s five years almost to the day, and I’m back in the same venue sitting across from the same man and, once again, the talk is of World Cup qualifying and of Ireland, France and the Faroe Islands.

The big difference is that, back then, Kerr was the manager of Ireland. Now, he’s in charge of the Faroes, while a veteran Italian has the task of masterminding World Cup success for the Irish against the French. So, all changed, changed utterly, you might think. But as Kerr looks back and looks forward, there are times in his company when you really can’t help thinking that it’s not such a very long way from there to here.

IRELAND had made an encouraging start to their qualifying campaign for the 2006 World Cup, beating Cyprus 3-0 at home and drawing 1-1 away to Switzerland before they faced up to the French in Paris in October, 2004.

Brian Kerr knew that this was the big one, on paper the toughest test of the campaign, and in the week leading up to the game he’d put a lot of thought into tactical work and meticulously preparing his squad’s training sessions.

But there was still some time for fun and games. At the end of one training session in Dublin, he decided to organise a mini-match between ‘The Dubs’ and ‘The Culchies’.

“The Dubs had fellas like Robbie Keane, Damien Duff, Stephen Carr and Andy Reid,” he recalls.

“To balance things out we also had Clinton Morrison playing with the Dubs. Clinton was a banger. The others would have had the likes of Roy Keane, Gary Doherty, Andy O’ Brien, Kevin Kilbane. It was only a little, tight match in the penalty box but the Dubs were fantastic, zipped the ball about, won handily. And of course they gave the other boys a bit of stick. Next day, we’re having training in France and, at the end of the session, I had the bibs in my hand, and Roy comes over to me and says (imitates mock-casual Cork accent): ‘Same teams as yesterday?’ And I just looked at him and said, ‘Not a bleedin’ chance’.”

And so it was an entirely unified and, more to the point, healthy Irish 11 which took the field in the Stade de France the following night with Kerr touched by the sight of nearly 30,000 Irish fans bouncing up and down as they hummed along to the French national anthem.

“Going out and seeing the crowd, it was brilliant,” he says. “I’d been to a lot of away games in my own time as a supporter. I’d been in America for the 1994 World Cup and I thought that night in the Stade de France was a little bit like the match against Italy in Giants Stadium. People got to Paris from everywhere. There was a whole romance about it. We were going well and people wanted to be there. It was great.”

And the huge Green Army got a performance to match the occasion as Ireland came away with a thoroughly deserved point. And it might have been an even better night had a John O’Shea effort not gone inches to the left rather than the right of the French post.

“Yeah,” says Kerr with a little smile. “I refer to it as the night we won 0-0 in Paris.”

If that was the match in which Ireland appeared to gain an advantage in the group, the return game at Lansdowne Road 11 months later was when France decisively wrestled it back. By then, Kerr’s side had twice seen off the humble Faroe Islands but had otherwise squandered too many winning positions in the qualifying campaign, in Basle, in Tel Aviv and, unforgettably, at home to Israel where, in controversial and even freakish circumstances, they managed to surrender a two-goal lead.

But with all the leading contenders taking points off each other in what was an exceptionally tight group, the match against the French in Dublin was set up to be a pivotal tie. And it had the marquee names to fit the bill, with the greatest French footballer of them all having come out of retirement to answer his nation’s distress call.

“Zidane was fading a bit at that stage but he was still a very influential player,” Kerr observes. “He didn’t involve himself too much in the chasing and harrying but once they received the ball, he was the out. And we had to be aware of that. As for Thierry Henry, they were actually on the verge of taking him off because he had been ineffectual – and then he came up with that goal out of nothing. He put it just an inch over Shay. There were few chances in the match but that was the genius that Henry had.”

If the Frenchman’s bolt from le bleu won the headlines – and the match – the game was also destined to enter the history books as the last Roy Keane would play for his country. Injury ruled the Corkman out of the remaining matches against Cyprus and Switzerland and, with Ireland now forced to play catch-up in the group, the luckiest of wins in Nicosia and yet another draw, this time against the Swiss in Dublin, were not enough to secure a passage to the finals in Germany.

With FAI boss John Delaney infamously declaring that visiting teams to Lansdowne Road no longer showed “fear in their eyes”, Kerr was unceremoniously ushered out the exit door, before Ireland’s football power brokers unveiled their preferred solution: Stephen Staunton and Bobby Robson.

Nothing other than a charitable disposition towards all concerned dictates that we draw a discreet veil over what happened next.

IT’S August 12, 2009, and once again Brian Kerr has World Cup business with the French. But this time, he’s in the dug-out in the tiny national stadium in Torshavn and notions of victory, or even of a draw are, frankly, the furthest things from his mind.

This is supposed to be all about damage-limitation – hell, just simple survival – as the part-timers of the Faroe Islands come face to face with the World Cup finalists.

“(Andre-Pierre) Gignac, the big fellow, got a good goal in the 42nd minute but in every match we have to have an awful of luck for the opposition not to score,” says Kerr. “It’s amazing the number of balls that whiz across the goal and don’t go in. The goalkeeper, Jakup Miikkelsen, makes unbelievable saves in every match. But they’re used to that. They’re quite calm about the ball hitting the bar or hitting someone’s head and going out for a corner. In an Irish match you’d be saying you were blessed to get away with it.

“And we had those moments against France – Nicolas Anelka missed one against us and I don’t know how. The ball came across the goal, he was two yards out, and it looked like all he had to do was stick out his chest to put it in. But when I saw the replay, one of our fellows had gotten the slightest nick on the ball coming in and so it just went by Anelka.”

Losing 1-0 at the half-time Kerr rallied his troops at the break, gave them lots of encouraging words. Luck and sheer hard work had gotten them this far, he knew. Keep it like this, he told them, and you’re bound to get a chance.

“And, sure enough,” he smiles, “we hung in and, with a few minutes left, we had a little bit of a go.”

Kerr reckons his side had about four half-chances in the whole game, the last of them coming in the 92nd minute – a big throw-in, a flick-on at the near post and then a header wide. In the end, that’s how close they came to drawing with France.

“It would have been mad stuff altogether but we were still in it,” is how he sums it up.

Inevitably, it was a very different story in the away game in September. Kerr had done his best to prepare his boys, even finding a unique way to help get the warrior juices flowing: he showed them a clip from the All-Ireland hurling final, the video tape paused and ready to roll at the very moment where Tipperary’s Benny Dunne gave Kilkenny’s Tommy Walsh a belt of the hurl (and got a red card for his endeavours).

“I told the players that I wanted them to give it a lash too,” Brian laughs. The Faroese, he reports, were suitably gobsmacked by this glimpse of Ireland’s ancient sporting art.

But it turned out that their aristocratic opponents were up to something novel too.

“France did a very clever thing by playing the match in Guingamp in Brittany where they’d never played before,” says Kerr, who adds that his own team’s base for the game was the nearby town of Treguier which, he was tickled to discover, is twinned with Mallow. “The stadium in Guingamp holds about 17,000 people and it was packed. There were Mexican waves from an hour before kick off, major stuff that the team was there. There was none of the scepticism of the Paris public. So, from the off, France were at it.”

It was an evening the minnows experienced the full power of the galactico strike force.

“Henry, Gignac and Anelka were the front three,” Kerr remembers. “And then when we were doing okay in the second half –3-0 down with 20 minutes to go – they bring Karim Benzema and Florent Malouda on.”

The game ended with France winning by five. So, a straightforward case of the little guys being crushed by the giants – or does he think that the French really improved as their qualifying campaign progressed?

“No doubt, they’ve improved,” says Kerr. “They started by losing 3-1 to Austria and it was real doom and gloom – and they were all set-piece goals. It probably didn’t reflect the play anyway because they had lots of it in Austria. They went to Romania and went two goals down early – one a header from a corner. That’s where they are vulnerable. But they came back and got the draw against Romania and I thought that was a great sign of resilience.

“But the game that impressed me most was the draw away to Serbia near the end. (The French conceded) a penalty, a red card and a goal after just eight minutes. But they dominated the game completely, playing with 10 men. They equalised in the first half and then in the second half they just murdered Serbia. And there was nothing wrong with their spirit. It was all high fives between fellows going on and off. I’ve read all about the trouble in the camp but I didn’t see any signs of the internal stuff, I have to say.”

AND so to Le Crunch, parts one and two. Kerr knows Irish football better than most and he’s had recent experience of the French up close and personal – so how does he see the balance of power tilting over the two legs of the play-off?

“I think France are favourites because they have better players, irrespective of whether they lose one or two more. Franck Ribery didn’t play a whole lot for them. Domenech could still bring Malouda in. Don’t forget, he’s not even picking David Trezeguet or Louis Saha.”

So that’s the bad news for Ireland. The good news? “I think the grounds for optimism are that, overall in the group, the French haven’t been convincing in that they did finish second. They won games against the Faroes and Lithuania 1-0 and even though they had a huge percentage of possession, they didn’t score more goals in those games. Also, in every game, there’s been some defensive misunderstandings and blunders.

“So, the encouragement would be that they’ve conceded goals from set-pieces and that there’s always a little bit of madness or a potential for a bit of wildness from William Gallas or a bit of unpredictability from Eric Abidal. And I’m not convinced by the goalkeepers, either. Also the fact that it is a very attacking team – you’re not going to get an awful lot from Henry or Anelka on the defending side.

“For me, the big question is who deals with Yoann Gourcoff, who is like Andrea Pirlo for Italy. Is it the centre-backs who come out and mark him or is it Glenn Whelan or Keith Andrews that pick him up? That’s the problem. This fellow Gourcoff moves well, gets good space and that’s a problem when, like Ireland, you play a strict 4-4-2.”

And the view that a 0-0 tonight would be a satisfactory result for Trapattoni’s team?

“I agree. The French only conceded three goals at home but I think Ireland, on the basis of the group, are capable of getting a goal in Paris – whether it’s a set-piece, which seems the most likely, or through Kevin Doyle, Keane or Duffer. They’re all capable of making something happen. But I think our best chance is in getting two draws and winning on away goals or penalty kicks. Although, I think if it does go to penalties it’s a disadvantage to be playing away in the second leg with the crowd booing you behind the goal. But that’s a long way down the road.”

THE high point, so far, of Kerr’s reign as coach of the Faroe Islands came in September when his side beat Lithuania 2-1 to not only claim a biggish scalp but also register their first competitive victory in eight years.

“There was real joy around the place,” says Brian. “Everybody was chuffed about it. I was confident that at some stage we’d get a result, that even with the limited resources we had, we’d catch someone on the hop one day. And it meant a lot to them and me.”

Just how much it meant to a proud and close-knit community is illustrated by a story Kerr relates about one of his players, striker Christian Hogni Jacobsen.

In the week leading up to the game, Christian’s father, Hogni, was tragically killed in an accidental explosion on the docks, the awful event actually witnessed by his wife. Hogni senior had been chairman of the NSI club, for whom his son and a number of other members of the Faroese squad played and, compounding the deep sadness for all concerned, his funeral happened to coincide with kick-off in the game against Lithuania in Toftir, a town close to where the Jacobsen family lived. (Rather less solemnly, some locals couldn’t help expressing concern about the likely impact on the gate).

While Kerr and the squad had already marked Hogni Jacobsen’s passing with their own private ceremony, it was only recently – at an end of campaign party for the squad, in fact – that his son revealed to Kerr how, in the funeral cortege en route to the graveyard, the family had listened to live radio coverage of the match.

And when the Faroes scored their second goal, he said, two statues on his father’s coffin fell off. “Christian thinks his da woke up,’’ says Kerr.

That party at which he heard that story was another memorable Faroese night for Kerr, the players linking arms and singing sea-shanties, the Irishman responding with a blast of something he was sure the natives would appreciate – ‘Weela Weela Wailla’.

It turns out that the Dubliners played Torshavn back in the day. “Oh, they’re big time up there,” reports Kerr.

A local journalist chipped in with a couple of jokes in English – for the manager’s benefit – followed by a few lengthy yarns in his native tongue, a language which has survived and thrived despite attempts by the Danes in years gone to ban it.

This was the same friendly journalist who, on Kerr’s first day in the job, had presented him with a crate of beer along with the words: “Of course, we might want to throw these bottles at you another time.”

No sign of that yet, what with the Faroes having moved up 41 places in the FIFA rankings over the course of Kerr’s first campaign at the helm. Anyway, the local sports journalists have recently been preoccupied with other matters – in particular, the allegation that the official Faroese ticket allocation for the Euro 2008 finals somehow ended up in the hands of a travel agent in the Ukraine.

Pause to rewind and reflect. Ancient penal laws. The Dubliners. Journalists bearing gifts one day and, perhaps, brickbats the next. And now Torshavngate. Maybe it’s not such a long way from there to here after all.

Yet, the biggest change for Kerr is also the one most critical to his job. While Ireland dreams of the World Cup, his thoughts are already on the next European Championship campaign and beyond. Managing the senior team is just the most visible part of the job. He is also concerned with putting in place the right pathways to facilitate longer-term growth, anxious to plug gaps in the underage structure which might help bridge the yawning gap between the local stage and the international arena. He searches for a way to best describe the prodigious leap involved and settles on this: “It’d be like the Hotpress lads who play in the AUL being asked to play in the senior international team against France.”

But of course on the day that’s in it, somehow you just knew it would have to come back to Les Bleus.

The big wheel keeps on turning.

- ‘Away With The Faroes’, a new fly on the wall documentary about Brian Kerr, will be broadcast on RTÉ Two, Tuesday at 9.40pm.