RETURNING
Brady back for Wales match is the Long view
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND ACE ON COMEBACK TRAIL
And the Burnley star is being tipped to come back as good as ever as he continues to recover from major knee sugery.
Brady was ruled out for the season after shipping the crippling injury playing for the Clarets in a Premier League game against Leicester in early December.
And while Burnley refused to rule out a quicker than expected return just before the end of the season, that now won’t happen.
But Brady’s club-mate and international colleague Kevin Long has revealed the versatile midfielder is making great strides in his recovery.
Long said: “Robbie is doing well. He’s recovering well and he’s on track.
“He met up with the surgeon recently and everything is fine.
“I know he’s aiming to be back for pre-season and I’m sure that Robbie is going to come back even better.”
Meanwhile, Long admits that Ireland could do with taking a leaf out of Burnley’s book by starting to develop a winning habit. Sean Dyche’s (inest) men made an impressive start to the season and lost just twice in their opening 14 games – half of which were wins. Then they hit the skids with five defeats in eight matches only to bounce back in recent weeks by winning their last two games to cement their seventh-placed standing. After losing to Turkey on Friday, Ireland are now three games without a win, having been beaten out the gate in the World Cup play-off by Den- mark. And facing into summer friendlies against France and USA, Long has echoed skipper Seamus Coleman’s belief that a return to winning ways is a priority.
Long said: “As a nation we want to be winning games and competing with the best, we need to start winning.
“A few boys at our club will be going to the World Cup and that’s going to be difficult to watch in the summer but the World Cup is in the past for us.
“We need to look forward because we have new talent coming through and hopefully we can click.
“But it’s simple, we need to start winning games. We need to fight for every inch on the field and win games. Once you start winning games that breeds confidence and you fight more and more for each other on the pitch – that’s how you create that winning mentality.”
Long is fast becoming a go-to-guy for Martin O’neill and played well in Antalya in a three-man defence alongside Shane Duffy and the impressive debutant Declan Rice.
Having already tasted qualifying action in the last campaign, he’s pushing Ciaran Clark for his position, the latter having lost his place at Newcastle following injury.
Long, 27, said: “International football is a learning process but at the same time you need to learn quickly. You need to learn from your mistakes. We had a lot of new players for the Turkey game – players making their debuts – but this is international football and we need to learn quickly or else we’ll get punished every single time.
“We’ll take the positives out of the game, learn from it and hopefully it will click together quicker.”
And the Cork man continued: “We’ve players to come back into the squad, players who are out injured, and it’ll take time for these new players to bed in.
“But hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later. We want to create a winning mentality and we need to do that. It might take a bit of time but hopefully we can.”