The Kieran Shannon Interview: Eoin was never handed anything

Eoin Hand’s was a journeyman’s career in football, but it was still the stuff of his boyhood dreams. Managing his country was beyond those wildest dreams and he was so close to success. But chaos and catastrophe confounded his best-laid plans.

“We had a decent team in those years and there’s been plenty of speculation that the problem was in the dressing room. That the senior players were too strong and the manager was too weak. I’ve never seen it that way. I always thought that Eoin had fair enough control over the players he had there. The lads seemed to like him and get on well with him. The problem basically was that we weren’t good enough.”

— Ronnie Whelan, Walk On: My Autobiography