Now every minute counts, warns O’Neill

Club managers measure the passage of time in days and weeks, international managers in months and years.

Martin O’Neill has freely admitted that, as a first-time national manager, he faced a challenge in adjusting to the long, drawn-out nature of the international calendar, something only compounded in his case by the exceedingly protracted nature of the build-up from the day of his appointment last November to tomorrow’s European Championship curtain-raiser here in Tbilisi.

But, after all the talk and all the friendly fire and all the scouring of stadia the length and breadth of England monitoring talent old and new, the moment of truth is close at hand, the point of definition when O’Neill’s club and country experiences will finally come together. Match day is almost upon us.

“This is it,” he asserts, “this is competitive football. Every game, every minute of these games is very important for us. We’ve got to compete the whole way through. The matches are not easy for us. You see yourself what sort of talent we have here. Our job is to get every single ounce out of the players.

“As for them, if they willing to do it — which I think they are — it’s just maybe to get that extra 10%, maybe 10% they don’t think they have themselves. That’s what this is about.”

A commonplace among players who’ve played under Martin O’Neill – and repeated again only this week by Niall Quinn who drew on his experience of watching him at close-quarters in Sunderland — is that he “comes alive” on match day, to use an Aiden McGeady description, as an inspirational man manager.

“I want to try and get it right,” he says, when that observation is put to him. “This is it. I said the other day, we have to be mentally and physically prepared for the game. The physical aspect, we saw the other night against Oman, some players wilted. The mental aspect has to be very strong.”

Factoring in all those considerations will be part of the process by which O’Neill arrives at his starting 11 for tomorrow’s game.

Does he give priority to David Forde’s superior match fitness over Shay Given’s vast experience? In filling that Richard Dunne-shaped hole at the heart of the defence, and having watched Richard Keogh and Alex Pearce try to stake a late claim against Oman, does he opt for a relatively new face to partner John O’Shea or slot Mark Wilson in beside the Sunderland man and retain Stephen Ward at left-back? And, with James McClean out of the picture, will it be Robbie Brady or Anthony Pilkington out wide?

Unless the manager springs a big surprise – or injury forces his hand at the 11th hour – it seems reasonably safe to assume that Seamus Coleman, James McCarthy, Glenn Whelan, John O’Shea, Marc Wilson, Wes Hoolahan and Robbie Keane will all be in the starting line-up for a game in which the opposition and the setting would seem to tick all the boxes for the proverbial “tricky away fixture” — from a team which posed significant problems at home for Spain and France in World Cup qualifying last time round to a venue which, on a super-heated night, is expected to be thronged to capacity by a crowd whose fabled hostility is not likely to be softened by the visit of the nation which, on the back of security concerns, successfully applied pressure to have their World Cup meeting with the Georgians moved out of Tbilisi – the game eventually took place in neutral Mainz — back in 2008.

So, no pressure then...

“This a difficult game for us,” O’Neill concedes. “Georgia, it’s a renaissance for them in that it’s the opening game, and they’ll be feeling confident, if we’re going to be brutal about it, of snatching second place, as Poland and Scotland will be and ourselves. It’ll be a dogfight all the way through. We’ve got three of the first four games away from home. It will be a long road. But this is where it starts. Georgia. This is match time.”