CARSLEY TAKING THE IRELAND JOB WOULD BE HEART RULING HEAD
AS A player, Lee Carsley was described in martial terms. He was a warrior. Never out-battled. Wouldn’t take a backward step. The language of war provides some of the most deadening clichés in the book of sport, and it was emptied of lazy terms to describe a player whose earthier virtues were on show in a time when Roy Keane was setting the standards.
This urge to pin players into fixed categories is common in all sports, and so throughout his fractured, flickering Irish career, Lee Carsley was a clogger.
It failed to describe his talents fully, but it saved pundits and others the bother of paying too much attention. Carsley couldn’t drive a team forward like Keane, or pick a pass like Mark Kinsella. Nor was he especially interested in burnishing his reputation through the media.
So clogger it was – until resources started to run thin, until Keane retired, and players a level below him like Kinsella did, and then Carsley’s abilities became more prized.
There was a time in the ill-starred Stephen Staunton years when his absence from squads became a matter of ongoing rancour. He was, like Liam Brady before him and Wes Hoolahan after him, an outsider whose exclusion became a rallying point for those demanding more.
Even that list of exiled heroes traces Ireland’s straitening circumstances; the talents shrank, but the expectations took longer to deflate.
And that remains a problem today, as the demands made of the national manager plainly don’t reflect where the team is at.
It’s unclear what has caused the rupture in an appointment process that was expected to proceed steadily towards Carsley’s announcement as successor to Stephen Kenny. But if he is wary of taking charge of an ordinary bunch who are nonetheless the biggest draw in Irish sport, with all the attendant pressures, then it would be difficult to blame him.
Some sources have insisted he is not stepping back because of an ambition to take over from Gareth Southgate, but the England job is one of the most prestigious in the sport. It would be odd if he wasn’t intrigued by it, at least.
The pressure is great and the scrutiny is relentless, but the players are vastly better than Ireland’s and the prospects of tangible success are real.
Failing with England is a brutal process, as most of the previous incumbents of the job have learned.
But at least failure in that job is easily understood. If the team play poorly, don’t progress to the later stages of big tournaments, or suffer shock defeats, then the manager pays.
What is success or failure in the Irish job? It should be reasonably clear, too, relative to the team’s ranking and the dearth of quality players available.
The national team should beat teams obviously inferior to them, and be at least competitive against everyone else, even the elite sides in the world.
Yet one of the most absurd features of the Kenny years was the determination of some of his most ardent supporters to recast what we understood success to be.
In this nonsensical, inverted world, losing to Luxembourg was not in fact a mortifying failure, but rather the result of years of underinvestment in various parts of the game by the FAI.
What right did Ireland have to beat Luxembourg, demanded his advocates? The visitors were, on the dismal March night in 2021 that they humiliated Ireland at Aviva Stadium, ranked 98th in the world, while Ireland were 42nd.
If Ireland is the job he covets, it is testament to the power of passion
The game was greeted as a huge shock all over Europe. Seamus Coleman said it was ‘a horrible night, an embarrassing night’. Kenny conceded that ‘it’s not acceptable to lose in the manner that we did’.
He understood, as Coleman did, as anyone willing to recognise the enormity of the outcome did, that results matter.
No, countered his backers, success is fanciful given years of neglect. This defence, incidentally, was never made for Staunton, Giovanni Trapattoni or Martin O’Neill.
The national team is not a laboratory for experimentation, or an academy where tender talents can be patiently nursed.
It’s about trying to win in an environment where the spans of teams, and managers, is measured in qualifying tournaments.
If Lee Carsley wants to manage an international team, then this goal would be more attractively met with England.
Perhaps Ireland is really the job he covets, and if that is so, then it is testament to the ongoing power of passion, even love, all those intangible elements which are mostly eschewed in these cooler, scientific times.
Love could save Ireland, as logic screams otherwise.