New manager Colin Bell wants Ireland to put pedal to the metal

Colin Bell doesn’t quite go so far as to declare that the girls in green need to turn it up to 11 but, as a fan of Jurgen Klopp’s brand of ‘heavy metal football’, the new manager of the Irish women’s team certainly places a high value on intensity.

For the record, the Leicester-born 55-year-old also likes his music “loud and heavy”, name-checking Motörhead and Rammstein among his favourites.

The Klopp reference is no idle one: the pair worked closely together at Mainz when the Liverpool boss was making his first waves in management and Bell was in charge of the German club’s U23 side. “It was a fantastic time,” says Bell. “This was when Mainz developed this football philosophy that you can see in Liverpool, obviously now with more quality players. It was a thing that I also took to: to play high-intensity football, to kill the game of the opponents and bring your own game through.”