End of the affair: Vera Pauw will not be continuing as Ireland manager
TIME'S UP: Former Ireland manager Vera Pauw during a training session. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
Vera Pauw’s near four-year tenure as Ireland manager is over following a marathon six-hour meeting of the FAI board.
An FAI Board meeting decided Tuesday night that Pauw will not be offered a new contract after the expiry of her current one at the end of this month.
Appointed in September 2019, Vera led the team to their first-ever major tournament – the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 – and a FIFA Women’s World Ranking of 22.
FAI CEO Jonathan Hill commented: “On behalf of the Football Association of Ireland, we would like to thank Vera for her hard work and commitment over the past four years and wish her well for the future.
"In particular, I wish to acknowledge the role she played in leading Ireland to the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 where our women’s team made history and inspired a nation.
“The future is bright for women and girls’ football and our focus now is building upon the work done by Vera and the historic achievements of our women’s team, which we see as a platform to support the next phase of the journey for the team, and more broadly the development of women and girls’ football in this country.”
Directors began arriving at Abbotstown from 3.30pm for their summit but it wasn't until after 10pm that phonecalls were being made to Pauw informing her time was up.
Although the last Tuesday of the month constitutes the fixed date for directors to meet, this one carried extra significance for deciding the fate of a senior football manager.
It was way down the agenda of sequence but the item devoted to analysing the World Cup review presented by Marc Canham consumed the most time.
Player dissent was at the core of what is effectively a sacking, as preliminary talks of extending her deal which ends today began early in the year.
The FAI too were concerned at the potential of further historical details of Pauw’s spell in America - after they were stumped by an additional expose just as World Cup fever cracked up.
Eileen Gleeson and Tom Elmes are now expected to take caretaker charge for the Nations League opening double-header against Northern Ireland three weeks on Saturday three weeks in Aviva Stadium and away to Hungary three days later.
It was all the way back in November 2018 when a decision to axe a supremo was last made by the FAI; the version of the board under John Delaney’s watch accepting without debate the chief executive’s decree that the five-year era of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane had run its course.
Mick McCarthy’s name, but more prominently Robbie Keane’s, was presented as the future leadership and face of the Ireland team. Stephen Kenny’s name merely got a mention as an U21 candidate.
Delaney and his entire board were swept out of power within the next year as the extent of the financial and governance malaise unfolded.
A new broom was sworn in, led by the first independent Chairman Roy Barrett, and apart from fast-tracking the succession plan that brought Kenny due to the fore due to Covid-19, primarily it was off-field matters consuming their time.
This time last year, as Ireland went into the latter stage of the Women’s World Cup qualifiers favourites to seal a playoff, Vera Pauw’s position appeared watertight.
Popular with sponsors and the public alike, her branding of her team as the Tallaght Tigers fed into the renaissance of a squad that only five years earlier were forced to take strike action against the FAI to gain basic rights such as out of pocket expenses and a tracksuit that wasn’t passed down from the men’s youth teams.
All was going swimmingly for the Dutch native until an investigation into misconduct by coaches within the American soccer scene accused her of controlling behaviour and weight shaming during his year in charge of Houston Dash.
More damning was the claim that she had failed to cooperate with the interview process; an allegation she later explained as a refusal to continue based on not being allowed record the discussion.
At that stage in January, support from her employers was unequivocal.
Barrett dismissed the report, undertaken by two global law firms on behalf of the league and the players’ union, as a ‘sham’.
Barrett and Hill were comfortable enough with the situation to feel the matter was closed but within six months The Athletic published an article, wider in scope, that featured some unnamed players and former staff level detailed complaints against the Irish boss.
Silence ensued from those FAI powerbrokers so previously vocal in their backing and the noise instead clouded the build-up to Ireland’s farewell friendly against France at Tallaght Stadium on July 6.
This wasn’t the send-off from her native Tallaght that captain Katie McCabe dreamt about.
Whether by design or otherwise, the skipper has been enmeshed in this story since relationships began to sour around the time the final squad for the World Cup was confirmed.
If the Arsenal playmaker’s public argument with the manager as the final group game against Nigeria was evenly poised in the second half encapsulated the friction 61 days into camp, Pauw’s revelation spoke of her doggedness.
By identifying Sinead Farrelly as the player McCabe apparently wanted to be substituted, it was certain to generate a divide. Two can play that game.
Chief executive Jonathan Hill was part of the delegation Down Under and dealt with the captain in her capacity as head of a leadership group of senior players.
That they all declined to endorse her contract extension when interviewed was telling. Ten majority have got their way, a curious precedent in the context of seeking a successor.
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