DAMIEN HOPES IRELAND PICK BETTER TEAMS
DAMIEN DELANEY feels it’s about time Ireland played stronger nations in friendlies, rather than “stat-packing” against weaker ones.
Interim boss John O’Shea will name his squad this Thursday for the March 23 and 26 friendlies against Belgium and Switzerland at the Aviva Stadium.
The FAI will appoint a permanent manager in early April and they will mark their debut with a home friendly against Hungary in June before another in Portugal a week later.
All four of those nations have qualified for the Euro finals in Germany this summer and Delaney believes they will be a stern test as a result.
According to the exIreland defender, players will only improve by facing better sides and he questioned some of the friendlies organised under Stephen Kenny.
Kenny’s Ireland played 11 friendlies during his three-year reign, winning five of them, drawing four and losing two.
Defeat
But only England (a
3-0 defeat in Wembley) and Belgium (a 2-2 draw in Dublin) could be considered as top-ranking opposition.
The other friendly opponents were Qatar twice, Andorra, Hungary, Lithuania, Norway, Malta, Latvia and New Zealand.
Delaney said: “Top opposition will magnify any weakness that you have. They will find it — the analyst before the game will find it and the players on the pitch will find it.
“And afterwards you’ll come in and think ‘Oh my god, we didn’t know that area was an issue for us but it is’. But that’s how you find it.
“Those friendlies we picked (under Kenny) were bloody bad. You’re looking at them and going, what are we learning from this, what are we gaining from this?
“There are a couple of reasons why you could argue we picked them. If you were cynical, you could argue we picked them to stat-pack possibly.
“But there was nothing in it for us. We should have been doing the best we could to get the highest calibre possible, especially in friendlies.”
Vera Pauw, the former Ireland women’s boss, made a habit of arranging friendlies against top-ranked nations as she felt it was how her players would improve.
And Delaney — the former Crystal Palace, Hull, Ipswich and QPR centre-back, capped nine times — believes Pauw’s logic was sound.
Benefit
“That’s how you get better, by playing against better teams,” he said.
“A lot of the friendlies we picked at the back end of Stephen, you’re looking at them and thinking ‘What benefit do we get playing against Malta?’
“We play enough teams that are ranked below us. We’re talking about getting better so we should be playing the likes of Switzerland and Belgium.”
While Kenny was wedded to a particular style of football, interim boss O’Shea says his Ireland team will be a ‘mix of everything’ for the Belgium and Switzerland games.
And that’s music to Delaney’s ears as he reckons Kenny’s Ireland were too stubborn to vary their approach.
Delaney added: “I always felt the argument was Giovanni Trapattoni or Stephen Kenny and there was no middle ground. But there should be middle ground.
“You have to open up and play football, because in modern football you can’t keep giving the ball to the opposition as they will get you eventually.”