Once more we find ourselves marvelling at the FAI ‘galacticos’

IT has been some time since I wrote that “the FAI is the dysfunctional sporting body that other dysfunctional sporting bodies call ‘the galacticos’.” And since then, there have been several times when it seemed appropriate to take that one down, and send it out there again — maybe there will never be a time, when it is not appropriate.

So it seems like a very FAI thing to do, to have its latest meltdown in these days when another major sporting body — which actually shares a stadium with it — is toasting itself and its most glorious victory, high on the improbability of it all.

Indeed the IRFU seems to be organising its financial arrangements for the same stadium with considerably more success than the FAI has had in that area. And perhaps that prudent management, and the peace of mind which it brings, contributes in some small way to the ability of the men of rugby to beat the All Blacks, while the football men are presenting us with a deeply disturbing moral defeat against Northern Ireland.

Yet there are other things too which contribute to that sense of well-being, things to which the FAI does not have access — it should be noted, for example, that the success of the Ireland rugby team is an extraordinarily accurate reflection of the success of the Irish ruling class in general, in so many of their endeavours.

One might have supposed that the Great Crash would have diminished them somewhat — but if anything, our “professional” people have come out of it even stronger than they were already, with a new confidence in their immunity from life’s vicissitudes.

So a guy who learned his rugby at one of our private schools will be able to look at the guy who is his English counterpart, or at any other guy he might ever have to face, and feel not the slightest twinge of inferiority of any kind — with Paddy there are always issues of self-esteem fluttering on the outskirts of his consciousness, but Paddy at the high end of Irish rugby has had it trained out of him. Bred out of him.

He will know with absolute certainty that he has lacked for nothing, that the culture which formed him is one of abundance, that the system works for him. The same cannot be said for the promising footballer from Tallaght, going through whatever system the FAI might have, or not have — and trying to make his way at one of the great clubs of England, where on his first day he might be introduced to one of the lads with whom he is competing for a place in the under-18s, a lad who is thought to be the best young player on the continent of Africa.

Without even trying, the IRFU has access to the structures built up over generations in Ireland’s rugby-playing schools — a resource that couldn’t possibly be recreated even by the most advanced thinkers in the game, because it doesn’t just make them better at rugby, it forges within them these unbreakable bonds of solidarity with their own kind. And it drives their ambitions in a way that was articulated recently by the IRFU chief executive Philip Browne, who intoned that “it goes back to the principle of ‘OK is not OK’”.

The promising lad from Tallaght doesn’t quite have these... shall we say, “intangibles” — and even if he did, it would all be under the aegis of the dysfunctional sporting body that other dysfunctional sporting bodies call “the galacticos”.

But he does have one thing that the rugby guy does not have — there is a passion for football in this country, all year round.

Every other sport will have its days of glory, but the football is always there for us. So that even when the international football is poor to the point of shame, it takes little to draw us back into it again.

We realise that to be there at all — given where they’re coming from, the systems that aren’t in place, or that are still under construction — to be playing for the Republic at all, many of these lads have already come an impossibly long way.

We don’t expect them to beat the proverbial All Blacks, to be the best in the world — but given where they are right now, we would like them to rise once more to become the best football team on this island at least.

It goes back to the principle of “OK is OK”.

‘Every other sport will have its days of glory, but football is always there for us...’