FUTURE LOOKS FINE WITH AARON
Teen debutant’s cameo provided best moments of a turgid display
IN THE 77th minute, Ronnie Whelan made the announcement. ‘Connolly is getting his top off and it looks like he’ll be coming on very shortly.’
Aaron Connolly is 19 and a large number of the people willing him to energise Ireland wouldn’t have heard of the Galwayman before he scored twice for Brighton against Spurs a week ago.
Mick McCarthy had to do something, and a small country like Ireland is obliged to promote fresh talent at the first sign of it blooming at senior level.
This country hasn’t seen an elitestandard goalscorer emerge since Robbie Keane two decades ago, and the excitement around him is justified in that regard.
Yet, it was an act of desperation, too, to pitch him into the midst of a misshapen performance, free of exciting offensive play, and expect him to correct it.
Then, with eight seconds of the regulation 90 minutes remaining, he nearly did.
In a preciously rare moment of attacking coherence, Ireland worked the ball into the Georgian penalty area where, when a defender failed to control it properly, Connolly struck it firmly with his left foot. It was smothered by the goalkeeper.
Little more than 100 seconds later, he tore onto a clearance, sped free of the defence but lashed his leftfooted shot wide.
They constituted two of Ireland’s best chances in a dismal game. That says plenty about what had gone before, and Connolly’s more senior team-mates, but it also gave a glimpse of what this teenager can bring to an Irish side that remains chronically short of talent.
Enthusing about a coming star is still only meagre consolation. Broadcasters eagerly sell days like yesterday as feasts of sport.
The idea of hundreds of thousands of people anchored to their sofas by two Ireland teams in action is closer to fantasy for the TV stations and their advertisers.
Even the slickest marketing ponytail would have been challenged to package hours spent in the company of the national rugby and soccer sides as unmissable, however.
Before the return to form against Samoa, the rugby men had spent the last two matches looking in vain for their best form.
And life is invariably a struggle for their soccer brethren, whose days are spent mostly in toil, interspersed by the odd shock win here, or unmerciful hammering there.
Joe Schmidt’s team looked much closer to their best in doling out a heavy beating to Samoa, but that result would have buoyed few to the extent that they were expecting two studies in Irish dominance in a row.
The soccer team rarely dominate. Struggle is closer to their mode of existence, and it is apt that so many of their qualification campaigns take in trips deep into Europe’s east, hardscrabble places where little seems plentiful other than misery.
What frequently distinguishes
Irish soccer on big days is the analysis on RTÉ. Whereas too much of the contributions of Jamie Heaslip, in particular, but also Stephen Ferris on the Rugby World Cup seems compromised by the fact that many of the men they are scrutinising were team-mates and friends, there is more freedom in the rebooted soccer studio.
Since the departure of the old regime, where challenging the orthodoxy had succumbed to crankiness and headline-chasing long before its end, coverage of the national team has been less hysterical but still thorough.
This is largely down to Richie Sadlier, who was not on duty yesterday, but it didn’t need forensic investigators to pick through the mess of Ireland’s display. Kevin Doyle, Damien Duff and Dietmar Hamann had a straightforward job declaring this a painful afternoon: the game had been wretched and Ireland looked incapable of a creative idea, let alone a move.
The snap and enthusiasm of their effort against the Georgians and Switzerland in Dublin was gone. Midfield has been workaday for years, and Jeff Hendrick and Conor Hourihane, playing in front of Glenn Whelan, could not influence passages of play that troubled a painfully limited home side.
Hendrick has frequently been a frustration in Ireland colours. His talent is obvious – and a reminder of it came with a thundering goal for Burnley against Everton last weekend – but sporadic, and time after time he simply hoofed possession away in Tbilisi.
With a midfield better suited to functionality rather than stylish flourishes, a team might be set up so as to allow the full-backs to provide opportunities.
McCarthy is at least trying to accommodate two outstanding right-backs in the one side. Seamus Coleman, as team captain, is the incumbent and McCarthy was clear about that from his the start of his second tenure.
For the tepid match away to Gibraltar in March, he played Matt Doherty in front of Coleman but that didn’t work.
Here, he picked Doherty at leftback with Enda Stevens suspended and the deployment had an uneven feel to it.
The Georgians were not good enough to expose him in a position that he knows reasonably well from his club career anyway.
But like Coleman on the other side of the pitch, Doherty had a forbidding job trying to prise open scoring opportunities given the paucity of movement or imagination in front of him.
None of this is new, or to be sneering or condemnatory.
Ireland are extremely ordinary. What has changed since McCarthy succeeded Martin O’Neill is that the team have, up to this mess, played with a purpose and enthusiasm that had been absent for months.
This was a regression. Practically, it makes qualification much more difficult but Ireland’s job was never easy in that regard.
The scale of it was distorted by a schedule of games that included home and away fixtures against Gibraltar in the first four matches.
Connolly is a very promising talent, but no man could correct all of Ireland’s issues.