Time to spin the wheel

What Ireland need to do now and why Martin O’Neill is the man to do it.

The more they change the Irish managers, the more things stay the same. For those who think the departure of Giovanni Trapattoni might herald a sea-change in the way the national team plays its football, a little bit of recent history offers some wise and sobering counsel.

When Robbie Keane said this week that, in his time as an international, Ireland only ever had a Plan A, never a Plan B — and robustly added that any suggestion to the contrary was “crap” — he was only using exaggeration to underline a basic truth. From the watershed success of Jack Charlton onwards, successive Ireland managers have, of course, sought to put their own imprint on the job, but none has dared to try and reinvent the wheel.