‘You can’t click in 10 days and become like Germany’
“We’ve changed the system, we put an emphasis more on the passing game,” the interim manager said on the morning after his team comfortably saw off Kazakhstan in Ireland’s final World Cup qualifying game.
But King also conceded the performance was not wholly convincing. “You have to accept flaws,” he said. “If you want to change something, you need to make sure that the skill set gets better. There were times, the players will tell you, we gave the ball away too easily.
“You cannot click in 10 days and become a team like Germany who are at it years and have invested fortunes in it. As a supporter base, if we’re going to play a passing game and we give the ball away and the crowd turn on us and turn on the team — that would be a negative. So you have to have an education of the system.
“Jack Charlton had a very clear way he wanted to play. People argued against it, people argued for it, but they understood it. Giovanni (Trapattoni) had a way of playing and this is what they did. People understood it, people didn’t like it sometimes. This would be the start of a more European-based game.”
Of course, King was quick to add that it will be entirely up to the new manager to decide if he wants to use the 4-2-3-1 approach as a template.
“That wasn’t even my purpose,” he said. “My purpose was to put my stamp on this. I picked the team, brought players in. I wouldn’t have done it without that. I was given that freedom by John Delaney and people who said, ‘Go ahead’ and I got full support. This is the way I’ve been playing and I didn’t want to change myself. I wanted to try and put a stamp that’s modern and modern football is very difficult to get an understanding of. A lot of clubs don’t understand it, a lot of players don’t understand it, and I don’t fully understand it but we’re always learning.”
Considering the limited amount of time in which had to work with the squad for two very contrasting games against Germany and Kazakhstan, King was full of praise for the way his players went about the task.
“I think what the players have done is an incredible achievement,” he said. “It was an incredible achievement to turn it around and put in a decent performance against Germany and a decent performance against Kazakhstan. Were there errors and flaws? Absolutely. But the players know that and they didn’t do it on purpose and I didn’t make my mistakes on purpose. That’s just the nature of the game, it happened.”
King also paid tribute to colleagues in Irish football and staff behind the scenes at the FAI for the help he was given over the last few weeks.
“I have spoken to Brian [Kerr] a couple of times since I got the job and I found him very helpful and that needs to be noted,” he said. “I have spoken to a lot of other people like Don Givens and scouts in England. I have been chasing the dream for two and a half weeks and there are a lot of people I have to be thankful to. Like the backroom team in the FAI for the way we were shepherded around and brought in and out of Germany like James Bond. It was terrific. It doesn’t get enough recognition and I really didn’t realise it myself, the level and quality that goes into making an international team.”
King was also delighted his team secured a victory on Tuesday night which, barring Romania winning both legs of their World Cup play-off, will ensure Ireland have second seed status going into the qualifying draw for Euro 2014.
“Second seed is incredible,” he said. “That could be worth a lot of money to the association and could be worth a lot of other football days for us. It could mean qualification for us as two teams go through. That could be massive.”
Yesterday, after a night of little sleep, King seemed a tired, happy but also relieved man to have reached the end of what he called “two and half terrific weeks of madness, bedlam, excitement, and football, football, football”.
In fact, it might not yet be the last we have seen of the Dubliner as interim manager.
Sources in Poland were yesterday reporting that Ireland will play a friendly in Poznan on November 19. There is also speculation that Hungary will visit Dublin four days earlier for a game at the Aviva Stadium on November 15.
Yesterday the FAI were not in a position to confirm either fixture but if there has been no new managerial appointment by then, King could again be called on to, firstly, name the squad and, then perhaps, to even take up his position in the dugout.
With that in mind, he will continue to attend games over the coming day and weeks, keeping one eye on his U21 duties but the other on the possibility that he could still have some work left to do as interim senior manager.
“I didn’t have that discussion [with the FAI] but I’ll be going to England to watch games anyway,” he said.
“In theory, it’s U21s — that’s long term planning. In the short term, if anything changes, I’ll be let know. If I book flights and I book the boat, I might just have to revert to London or something like that. I might have to go to Manchester United versus City.
“Tough gig,” he added with a laugh.
