Worst small country in the world in which to do defeat
NO WONDER the country is sick. A nauseating cocktail of complacency and self-pity has been the dose prescribed for many in a week when World Cup ambitions in two codes were turned to dust. As the year slips deeper into the drab recesses of November, gloom lies thick across the land. The nation has turned a sickly shade of green.
That, at least, is the perception created since Wednesday, when Ireland’s unsurprising failure to be chosen as hosts of the 2023 Rugby World Cup was announced. That news came only a few hours after the soccer team were vaporised by Denmark in the second leg of their play-off for a place at the soccer World Cup, to be held in Russia next summer.
The two stories had more than misery in common. They share an old failing in how this country does its business – and how it deals with the reality of failure.
A ruthless philosophy grimly espoused by one of Ireland’s most famous sportsmen, a man closely involved with one of the week’s disasters, captures it best. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail: that was Roy Keane’s creed, espoused in the poisonous aftermath of his World Cup walk-out in Saipan 15 years ago.
It spoke to the enormous success he enjoyed as one of the great midfielders of modern times, but since then he has made his peace with the Football Association of Ireland to serve as assistant manager to Martin O’Neill.
The truth of Keane’s old wisdom remains vividly true, however, and its relevance was cast anew this week as he and O’Neill watched their players get squelched into the Lansdowne Road turf.
Their failure at least had the virtue of being a regular sporting setback; they lost because they were palpably not good enough.
However, the reaction to defeat has been astonishing, with many calling for O’Neill to be sacked, and Keane along with him.
Now a great many of these views have come shrieking out of the idiotic echo chambers of social media, but there has been deep unhappiness more generally discernible, too.
The unwillingness to accept Ireland’s inherent mediocrity has been astonishing, with fans eschewing this glaring fact in favour of outrage and demands for heads. This truly is the best little country in the world in which to do failure.
What on earth did people expect?
Ireland have been sliding, unchecked, from the heights reached in the Charlton years for two decades now. O’Neill can only fantasise about having a player of Keane’s calibre available to him, and the problem is only going to get worse.
This country does not produce soccer talent as it did in the past, and it seems inevitable that O’Neill will have to increasingly rely on the ‘granny rule’ as Charlton so unapologetically did.
This involves seeking out English players with an Irish parent or grandparent, who have little prospect of representing the country of their birth.
The age of the plastic Paddy will soon be upon us again, but who could blame O’Neill if this is a resource he seeks to access? What, after all, is his alternative?
There are attempts being made to increase the flow of underage talent in Irish soccer, but the days of floods of Irish hopefuls getting their chance at big English clubs are gone.
Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool and the rest now suck in players from all around the world, and a skinny wannabe
from Mayfield – like Keane was a quarter of a century ago at Nottingham Forest – must compete against talents from across Africa, South America and all of Europe.
The Football Association of Ireland has not identified a convincing alternative for Irish players pursuing a professional career, while the domestic league remains unloved by the vast majority of soccer fans in the country.
Those outraged, then, in the aftermath of Ireland’s collapse are deluded, and should make their peace with a brutal truth: struggle will be Ireland’s fate for generations to come.
Soccer fans might find thin consolation in the fact that their troubles were confined to the field of play. The embarrassment suffered by the Irish Rugby Football Union was more extensive and, worse, avoidable.
IT WAS clear from the voting at Wednesday’s World Rugby meeting in London that Ireland never had a credible chance of winning the right to host the 2023 tournament. Twenty votes were needed to triumph: Ireland dropped out on the first count with eight.
The global story has been the surprise victory of France, shocking South Africa which had been recommended as the preferred candidate by a World Rugby evaluation report published two weeks before this week’s vote.
Old-fashioned sporting politics saw the French overturn this
disadvantage; they did what rugby blazers do best and whispered in the right ears, won over the waverers through insistent lobbying, and consequently carried the day.
Ireland, meanwhile, were an afterthought. There has been outrage directed at the Welsh and Scottish unions for failing to vote for Ireland, as the English union did.
The anger has been mortifying to behold, as sulking officials and their media proxies fulminate over this alleged Celtic betrayal.
It is poppycock. The Scots had been open about their intention to vote for the bid that promised the largest amount of revenue for World Rugby, and the Welsh had been equally frank about voting according to the recommendation of the evaluation report, as a senior figure from their union was associated with it.
There was no mystery to their decisions, let alone betrayal. But that there have been accusations to the contrary exposes the brittleness of the Irish bid.
It had all been so different when Liam Neeson was providing the growling voiceover to a bid video that was dutifully green, windswept and mystical. ‘Ireland 2023 – Ready for the World,’ went the line.
There followed another one with Bob Geldof reciting The Lake Isle Of Innisfree, as the Irish presentation was enthusiastically framed around poetry, music and craic.
One English rugby writer, bemoaning the decision to give the 2023 tournament to France, appeared to fall into a reverie imagining what Ireland could have offered as hosts.
‘It is hardly sour grapes to suggest it would have thrown a RWC party so riotously entertaining it would have blown the doors off almost every other sporting event ever held.
‘Even the most teetotal of supporters ordering a lemonade in a remote Co. Kerry pub would have been instantly welcomed into the bosom of the rugby family,’ he wrote.
Is that really how Irish rugby wants to sell this country in the year 2017?
As it turned out, details like finished stadiums and functioning broadband were more relevant in organising a major sporting event than Riverdance and Geldof.
BACKERS of the Irish bid will argue with some vehemence that their vision was of a slick, modern tournament that would have captured the nation. If this was so, then packaging it in garish green stereotype was a woeful misjudgment.
Ireland faltered on more substantial grounds, and it is a real pity. Having experienced the excellent job New Zealand did as hosts of the 2011 edition, one could envisage an island of this size welcoming a global event.
But the facilities were not good enough, and this was exposed by the publication of the evaluation report two weeks ago. The shock this engendered was in itself shocking: it was as if the news that modern, smoothfunctioning stadiums were now demanded by supporters used to their comforts, took the Irish by surprise. France organised a tremendous Rugby World Cup back in 2007, and nine years later soccer’s European Championships were judged a huge success there. The French knew what they were doing, in the boardroom and in the backrooms, too, where the important deals were struck.
Ireland are left with their recriminations and their regrets, and nobody should be surprised by that.
But like sickened soccer supporters, scorned rugby fans should accept that the blame game starts at home.