Tough road ahead for King, says Stapleton

Frank Stapleton returned to his native Dublin yesterday and spent a considerable portion of the trip being led on a ramble back down Memory Lane and more, again being asked to look deep into a crystal ball.

Noel King was the common denominator.

Stapleton had donned his boots again to help promote a string of upcoming live Manchester United games on Setanta and he did it in Ringsend, just a few kicks of a ball away from his old haunt on Lansdowne Road.

Stapleton is a northside boy, however, and talk of the new caretaker Republic of Ireland manager took him back to the game’s traditional home of Dalymount Park where he and King first wore a green jersey at schoolboy level.

“We played West Germany in 1972,” he recalled. “I played in that game. Do you know who the referee was? Charlie O’Leary. We had an Irish referee! I saw him a few weeks ago. He’s a great guy.”

Stapleton and King have crossed paths many times since, due to the former’s role as an FAI scout in England’s north-west and the latter’s long-term employment with the association, as women’s and then U21 manager.

The United legend isn’t surprised the FAI have opted for change, only that the alteration has come two games before the end of the World Cup qualifying campaign and he clearly feels his own teammate has been handed a dubious honour.

The hope is that the departure of Giovanni Trapattoni will allow the likes of Darron Gibson and Stephen Ireland to return to the fold but, with a trip to Cologne first in the diary, Stapleton has expressed a need for consolidation rather than revolution.

“We’re playing Germany in the next game,” he laughed. “That’s a difficult one. I think Noel probably will just go very much with what was there, I don’t think there will be too many changes. There wouldn’t be a point in it.

“They could bring in players who were maybe on the outside and then it might not work out. Then, the two games will be futile, there would be nothing in them. The first game is going to be very, very difficult.”

That said, he goes along with the idea that the new man — whoever he is — should bring with him a clean slate and Stapleton knows better than most the need to maximise every man qualified to play for Ireland.

Every week, he scans playing squads and fixtures before deciding which game he should take in for the FAI and the reality of the situation for Irish players right now means that he starts that search in the Championship rather than in the Premier League.

That’s partly why he believes that the association — while correct to launch an appointment process with Ruud Dokter and Ray Houghton — should refrain from appointing another manager from continental Europe or further beyond.

“It’s a difficult one because the new manager has to have some recognition of the players that are available.

“I wouldn’t go for another high-profile foreign manager because it is just the way we are, as players.”

Stapleton also echoed what has become a frequent refrain, in stressing the need to build from the ground up, to mirror the path taken by Belgium and Germany in recent times by re-addressing the grassroots.

He can understand the momentum behind appointing Martin O’Neill, a man who would seem to match his criteria for a new manager, but his former Manchester United teammate Viv Anderson believes all the pieces of that jigsaw may not fit.

“If you say to me ‘what is Martin O’Neill?’ I would say he is a day-to-day manager as opposed to an international manager who gets them eight times a year,” said Anderson, who played alongside O‘Neill for Brian Clough’s iconic Nottingham Forest team in the 1970s and 80s.

“He likes getting players to work with them every day. I always think international football is for an older manager. He’s 61? I think it’s an older man’s job who has done the day-to-day stuff and wants to come out and do eight times a year. It’s a personal thing, what Martin wants at this stage of his career.”