FAI empowerment of players may turn off top candidates
HERE is what’s expected of the next manager of the women’s national team and, by extension, what the FAI leadership will want from Stephen Kenny’s successor, too. ‘They should be a collaborative and inclusive leader. It’s imperative they understand the Irish culture and all of the uniqueness in Ireland. They need to be modern practitioner, both in terms of performance areas, but also from a coaching perspective, to be able to tactically and technically adapt, be able to set teams up to play different opposition.’
Ladies and gentlemen, form an orderly queue. No pushing! You’ll get your turn.
There are aspects of what Marc Canham, the FAI director of football, said on Thursday that are sensible, and pointedly contrary to the approach of Vera Pauw.
Her commitment to periodisation, a contentious training method whose effectiveness has been questioned and which has left some players prepared under its disciples feeling unfit, was obviously an issue.
The mention of being able to adapt tactically also has a pungent relevance in the context of her departure, and if expecting a manger to be reactive is logical, it also underlines the strangeness of the FAI deciding a history-making manager is, months later, no longer what the women’s team requires.
The mention of the ‘uniqueness’ of Ireland’s culture sounds awfully like a sop to a sporting nation that loves hearing there’s no one like us. But the most important detail in Canham’s job spec was the expectation that the new manager of the women’s team – and, logic suggests, the next person to manage the men’s side – must be ‘a collaborative and inclusive leader’.
Now given that player unhappiness was arguably the decisive factor in Pauw’s downfall, expecting her successor to be ‘collaborative and inclusive’ will sound deafening alarm bells in the head of any ambitious manager. With whom should they collaborate? Who is that must be made feel included?
The players, is the obvious implication. Player power is a phrase loaded with meaning, all of it negative. It implies spoiled pups who don’t know their places, when in fact players are the most important element of any functioning team.
Managers are vital and valued and storied, but if their players start to lose belief, then they are goners. There is no way back.
That is not to be regretted, but rather acknowledged as a reality of modern sporting life. Yet the best managers can appreciate the importance of their players but also, crucially, make them realise that without the manager’s leadership, the most talented group will go unfulfilled.
The manager has to make the plan and see it implemented. Collaboration, for good ones, does not go beyond creating an environment conducive to improvement.
Players can have an input, but any manager worth the bother will feel uneasy about his charges being collaborators. A cynic might wonder if, after seeing Pauw’s squad play such a role in her downfall, the FAI executive is trying to retrospectively justify it with this dream of collaboration and inclusion.
And this could have repercussions in the search for Kenny’s replacement, too. Deciding to let him see out the remainder of this year’s fixtures is an arrangement with which Kenny is apparently comfortable, and it is not an outrageous situation.
But the groundwork in identifying and contacting potential successors should already be underway. And perhaps it is, but any prospective candidate, or their advisors, will clear their throats and ask about this business of inclusivity, and wonder what exactly it means.
Who sets the limits of the players’ input? Does an unhappy squad have recourse to a sympathetic executive tier? Even the suggestion of such a structure would send decent candidates fleeing.
Whatever about succeeding Pauw, the job of managing the men’s team is not one with obvious allure.
The spread of talent is extremely patchy, with midfield an area of chronic quality shortages. The atmosphere around the job has been, if not poisoned, then heavily polluted by some of the exchanges between partisans on opposing sides. The wages are, by the standards of the European game, modest.
There will still be talented coaches interested. Lee Carsley is said to be the preferred candidate, but given his standing in the FA hierarchy, and the possibility of him building a long-term candidacy for England manager, his availability must be questioned.
But if he does want it, convincing him to take on a role with the expectations attached as listed by Canham will be an impossible job.
And that’s the most fitting description of the gig.
THIS is no act of betrayal. There are many words we can hang on Evan Ferguson’s broad shoulders, and traitor isn’t one of them. Players withdraw from internationals for precautionary reasons all of the time. Seeing Ferguson continue to thrive for Brighton is one of the few good news stories in Irish soccer.