Martin O’Neill happy to bide time on team selection

Martin O’Neill might have been presiding over the launch of the FAI’s popular Summer Soccer Schools for 2015 at the Aviva Stadium yesterday but he left nobody in any doubt that, in his role at the very top of the Irish football tree, there’s no percentage in treating players like little kids.

With his tongue only partially in cheek, here is what he had to say about the psychological benefits of his much talked about habit of not telling players his Irish team until the final hours before kick off

“The benefits are for me, totally for me,” he dead-panned. “I couldn’t give a monkey’s about the players. They will know the team when I want to tell them, most of them — unless he is three years of age and he wants to know before he has a good night’s sleep with a rattler.”