Canham showing a certain type of integrity
THE poor guy was on a hiding to nothing, there really was no polishing this particular turd. Just get it out there, Pull the pin, toss the grenade and prepare for the inevitable incoming flak sure to come from the other direction. Even then in the stilted in-house interview released via social media on an unsuspecting public last week, he more resembled a deer caught in headlights than a confident, assured football executive.
The interviewer did his best to sound relatively up-beat, and FAI Director of Football Marc Canham did his best to match his energy. The eyes, though, we felt told a story. Canham knew there was no amount of lipstick that would cover this pig. The FAI, with him as the face of the process, have made a sow’s ear of their efforts to find a replacement for Stephen Kenny as Republic of Ireland manager. What’s more Canham was on record mere weeks before saying the process would be wrapping up this very week.
Had he faced the press – as some suggest he ought to have done – he would have been torn to shreds. Rightly so you could argue, this is a farrago bordering on a fiasco, no question about that. And, yes, the FAI as a publicly funded body should to be open to scrutiny. Nevertheless, you can’t blame the guy for wanting to avoid that sort of a grilling. Avoiding it, of course, hasn’t spared the English man from heavy criticism. It might even have made it even more pointed.
The opprobrium directed at Canham and the FAI has been fierce and almost unrelenting ever since. So much so that one is, almost, left to feel sorry for the Director of Football, left to carry the can as former CEO Jonathan Hill resigned his role a week before.
Unquestionably the process has been shambolic, but there’s a certain type of integrity in the way Canham is insisting on seeing it through, sticking to the principles he set out when it started.
The former non-league footballer isn’t stupid. He knew how this would play out – hence the soft-ball in-house interview – and he still held the course. We’ve got to give him credit for that much at least. If he was worried solely by the optics of the situation, John O’Shea would have been unveiled as Republic of Ireland boss at a press conference in Abbotstown or some flash Dublin hotel around the same time as Canham’s infamous interview was hitting our phones.
That the former Bath City footballer avoided the path of least resistance is admirable in its own way. It doesn’t excuse how poor the process has been – what were they doing for the six months when Kenny was dead man walking, what have they been doing in the almost eight months since? – but it’s something at least.
For what it’s worth, despite this, we think he probably should have just gone ahead and offered O’Shea the role by now. Those friendlies last month, and those to come before the Nations League, will be largely wasted without a permanent boss in place. The fear is that O’Shea could be another Steve Staunton – the neophyte manager with the old hand alongside him, Brian Kerr to Stan’s Bobby Robson – but there’s no guarantee of that either. Give it Sheasy and put us all out of our misery.