Kerr, Staunton and Trap’ all lost their jobs for less
AS Martin O’Neill’s players slipped away from Aviva Stadium following a 1-0 defeat by Wales on Tuesday night, they carried with them a curious edict – work on your keepieuppies! As a kid, O’Neill simply revered Ferenc Puskas, so much so that he copied a tennis ball drill practised by the most magnificent of the Magyars.
The ‘Little General’ of Honved, Hungary, Real Madrid and Spain was able to juggle a tennis ball in the air 200 times with his feet, to the wonderment of O’Neill.
‘I used to think if I could keep a tennis ball up 200 times without dropping it, I would be as good as Ferenc Puskas,’ he revealed on Tuesday night.
‘I tell [the players] – it sounds crazy – about the use of a tennis ball. I can’t teach them techniques every single day. That is something they have to do at club level,’ he explained.
Crazy? Perhaps. But then it’s been a crazy fortnight or so for Irish football. In a bad, bizarre way.
It began when O’Neill was caught flat-footed at Lansdowne Road by a report on Sky Sports that Declan Rice was going to commit his future to England. He said Sky were wrong but given the way England drew with 2018 World Cup finalists Croatia and then beat 2010 winners Spain on their own patch, Rice appears to have less of a decision to make now.
Meanwhile, O’Neill, has all but failed in his efforts to keep Ireland in League B of the Nations League so he can wave goodbye to a second seeding at the Euro 2020 qualifying draw in Dublin on December 2.
The team he is paid €1.9m a year to manage is close to crisis, with one point from a double-header at home, and without a win in five competitive games.
He may not realise it, but Brian Kerr, Steve Staunton and Giovanni Trapattoni lost their jobs for less.
Yet, despite the decline, he insists he is ‘good’ at his job and will ‘win’ the battle to deliver Ireland to the Euro 2020 finals. He is, of course, entitled to defend himself. But, given his team is likely to finish third of three from nations ranked 13th to 24th in Europe, the chances of finishing in the top two of a Euro 2020 qualifying group which includes one of the current leading 12 are receding.
It was a strange boast and capped a rather odd international gathering.
Prior to the 10-day camp, he approved a couple of unusual media strategies. The first was to gag his assistant Roy Keane; the second was to cancel all planned media engagements on the Wednesday and Thursday before the Denmark game. According to the FAI, the manager and players wanted to focus. While his approach didn’t work, he insists he has been in tighter corners. ‘I think in my time at Leicester, I didn’t win for the first 10 games. So, I was in a real fight. I turned that round and eventually won some competitions for them,’ he said. Next up is a friendly against Northern Ireland in Dublin on November 15, followed by the Nations League finale against Denmark in Aarhus. By then, he should have Seamus Coleman, Robbie Brady and possibly James McCarthy available. They have been missed. Of the newcomers, Callum Robinson looks lively in attack, Matt Doherty’s consistency at club level has finally been rewarded, while Sean Maguire got half an hour against Wales. Collectively, though, they were unable to right a listing ship. He’s spoken of a rebilding process and he’s not wrong when bemoaning the lack of quality at his disposal and their technical deficiencies, which may not endear him to all in the dressing room. But there were few, if any, worldbeaters on Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest team of which he speaks so fondly. Yet, they won a Championship and two European Cups. Leicester City punched above their weight to win the Premier League in 2016. Burnley, Bournemouth and Huddersfield are similarly thriving thanks, in no small part, to good management. Given that Irish teams have traditionally done better than the sum of their parts, the challenge for O’Neill is to oversee a massive improvement.