Pauw casts a long shadow
EVEN before her interview with Richie Sadlier emerged, Vera Pauw loomed large in an important week for the Irish women’s team. The profile now enjoyed by the national side is to a large extent down to her, to the improvements she wrought in the team, the World Cup qualification secured under her management, and the impression she made on a public who were mostly uninterested in the women’s game before she took the job. The importance of a Ireland side drawing a crowd in excess of 30,000 to the Aviva Stadium for a fixture is a credit to her impact, too.
And the way Ireland played against the European champions
Her departure was inevitable once she lost the players, or enough of them
on Tuesday night unmoored memories of Pauw’s Ireland, just as the endurance test in defeat to France four days previously had.
These were matches in which an unfancied team did what it had to do to remain competitive. Against France in particular, Ireland’s most effective way of getting up the pitch was through long throws from Megan Campbell.
It’s a rudimentary tactic but there should be no issue with the deployment of any lawful gameplan that helps address a glaring competitive imbalance.
In that spirit, Ireland played a system in both games that was less three than five at the back.
The biggest challenge for the underdog in both contests was creating viable scoring opportunities, and that’s a failing that again
runs right through the Pauw era, too.
Her departure was inevitable once she lost the players, or enough of them, and her interview with Sadlier confirmed this was a sundering that was causing suffering during the World Cup, as was widely suspected.
If one cause was frustration among the players with a long piece in The Athletic that exhumed the controversy around Pauw’s time coaching in America, it was also made brutally clear that senior figures believed Pauw’s gameplan was stifling them.
This view was delivered unsparingly by Diane Caldwell last September,
who maintained Ireland’s improved results ‘were in spite of Vera being coach’.
‘I think our preparations for games could have been better, physical preparation, opponent analysis, match tactics, in-game match tactics, changes, systems of play. I think a group of players that were destined for success came together at the right time,’ she reckoned.
That was one of the many points rebutted by Pauw in her enthralling conversation with Sadlier – an engagement, incidentally, that should bring more listeners to his excellent Episode series, but which also strengthens his status as the pre-eminent soccer pundit in the country.
Much of the interview is characteristic of the Pauw the country got to know, and greatly admire: she is blunt, confident, never in danger of under-estimating her contribution.
But she also reveals the devastation caused by a report from the National Women’s Soccer League that alleged she had weightshamed players.
This eventually led to her engagement with The Athletic that proved fateful for her Ireland career.
The original report issued only months after Pauw revealed she had been raped and sexually assaulted as a player.
Her recollection of the environment around the squad at the World Cup is of course partial, and describes an environment of evertightening tensions, of some players flouting regulations around what gear they should wear, and of her immense frustration with the FAI leadership.
Some of what she claims has already been denied; it would be no surprise if players have their say on aspects of it in the future.
It speaks to the power of the interview but also to Pauw’s standing in this country still, that it has attracted so much attention.
Pauw had limitations as Ireland manager, and no matter how important her service, once she lost the dressing room, she was done. It’s an irrefutable sporting reality, and one she seems to have understood long before the official parting.
Critics have suggested she should move on. On the evidence of Ireland’s doughtiness in defeat against France and England, they are also struggling to move on.
Her fundamental desire to make the team defensively resolute was the watermark on the plans for these clashes, too.
Pauw’s influence lingers – and so does the pragmatism critical to unfancied teams.