Comment: What happens if FAI’s Stephen Kenny succession plan doesn’t work?

We should probably be grateful that there was a plan at all. John Delaney, a man who lurches between self-promotion and self-preservation, is hardly the obvious choice to plot a path to redemption for Ireland. With some organisations, silence persuades you there is some grand scheming going on behind closed doors. With the FAI, the suspicion is sometimes the opposite.

Having one eye on the present and the other on the future should be the right thing to do. Whether Mick McCarthy is the right man to lead Ireland in 2018 having been the right man 22 years ago is open to debate, but — in the lack of any standout, ready-made candidate — the FAI consider him a safe pair of hands.