Kelly gets on with life on sidelines

JUST two days to go before Ireland kick their heels and turn into the final bend of their European Championship campaign and yet vast swathes of the sports pages are being dominated by events 12,000 miles away.

Giovanni Trapattoni’s players have not been immune to it.

Stephen Hunt, for one, plans on watching the World Cup quarter-final against Wales unfold from Wellington on Saturday morning, this despite the fact that the national football team will return to Dublin from Andorra via Barcelona at an ungodly hour not long before kick-off.

Football may be the bigger sport but, in the battle of hearts and minds, the rugby brethren have stolen a march on the global game of late thanks to the success and the style of Declan Kidney’s side in New Zealand.

Add in the priceless publicity the GAA enjoyed with a Dublin-Kerry final and the third successive meeting of Kilkenny and Tipperary in the hurling equivalent last month and the beautiful game clearly has it’s work cut out to fight it’s ground.

Not that Stephen Kelly necessarily sees it in such combative terms.

“I don’t think so. I’m football all the time, but when I see the rugby lads play I can’t help but cheer them on. My wife was out watching the game at 9am with her friends in London. You support being Irish. When the country is doing well you get behind them no matter what sport it is. If we have just one person doing well in the Olympics, I’m sure the whole country will be supporting that person.

“That is the way Ireland is. It’s not a competition between us and the rugby lads. If they could win the World Cup it would be amazing and we know the lift it would give the country. We had Brian O’Driscoll in one day presenting caps to us so that shows the camaraderie.”

It isn’t just the attraction of rival codes that has pushed Kelly and his compatriots to the margins. Trapattoni’s rigid adherence to a functional and conservative 4-4-2 system and the resultant ‘style’ of play has left Joe Public largely unmoved. Half-empty stands, and sometimes worse, have been the norm at the Aviva Stadium as people have opted against the expense of such fare in these hard times. All the while, Trap sticks to his line about going to the opera if it is entertainment being sought.

Kelly goes along with that. Ireland “may not play like Brazil or Barcelona” but results in the last campaign took us to within a whisker of qualifying for a World Cup and have left the team in with a shout of automatic passage to the Euros next summer.

For that to happen, Slovakia will have to overcome Russia for a second time in this group while Ireland take care of business against Andorra, also on the Friday, and then again at home to Armenia next Tuesday.

As Trap would say, let’s just deal with the Andorrans first.

“Everyone says it’s a different game and, yes, it is but we’re not going to throw the playbook out the window, change our formation and go all gung-ho,” said Kelly. “We’re still going to stick to the basics — have a good solid structure and go from there.

“We’re capable of getting goals, we’ve proved that over the last number of games, especially in the Nations Cup. We have to go out there with a professional attitude. Everyone knows what’s at stake in these two games and the carrot at the end of the week if things go well. Tournament football is all about the results. That is the way the manager sees it but it counts for nothing if we don’t get two results from these games.”

No doubt Declan Kidney would agree.

Picture: INPHO