Thomas Delaney: We struggled to crack ‘primitive’ Ireland

By Brendan O’Brien

Martin O’Neill can’t have been all that happy with Age Hareide’s take on last year’s World Cup play-off second leg when the Danish coach sarcastically thanked the Irish manager for offering Christian Eriksen the freedom of Dublin.

It was an overdose of salt on an already raw wound.

Irish players and managers are more accustomed to being killed by kindness, even if it usually borders on the patronising. Difficult to play against. The British style. A physical side who like to get at you with long balls. That sort of thing.

Dane Thomas Delaney’s take on the first leg last November, a claustrophobic 0-0 draw in Copenhagen, was probably the ultimate back-slap in that regard. Playing Ireland that night, said Delaney at the time, was like trying to open a can of beans with your hands. It may have been praise bordering on damning, but it did speak for a defensive resilience and downright stubbornness that was, for all the absence of anything vaguely resembling an attacking offering, on evidence again two days ago.

“We lost it. We couldn’t find it,” said Delaney when asked what they had done with the tin opener that prised open the Irish defence five times last November. “It was the same frustrating feeling as the first game last year.

“This is not an insult, this is positive in what I mean, but Ireland’s play is primitive, but you can survive very long being primitive and they make it very difficult for us and, yet, they suddenly out of nowhere get a big chance. We were struggling a lot to find the room that we wanted.”

Delaney makes no bones of the fact he believes Denmark are the superior side, but there was no arrogance to his confirmation of the fact and he was philosophical enough to remark that football is the attraction it is, because the better sides don’t always come out on top.

The Borussia Dortmund midfielder, like a number of his colleagues, was far more exercised 24 minutes into the game at the weekend when he stopped playing with the ball at his feet and Jeff Hendrick almost scored as a result. Delaney claims to have learned from the incident. As kids the world over are told from day one, he will play to the whistle in the future and Hendrick’s glaring miss when one-on-one with Kasper Schmeichel allowed him to view the whole thing with a measure of detachment.

“There was a player in the midfield, Arter, lying and players shouting ‘kick the ball out’, and, yeah, I think I’ll do it, I turn backwards, I want to play it out and suddenly there is a fast Irish guy running towards me. I didn’t realise what happened.

“I think you look at the video, I just stand there. So, yeah, of course, you have to play until the referee whistles, but the reason why we maybe got a little bit mad was everybody heard it. Even our goalkeeper. Of course, he says he didn’t hear it, I believe him.”