1. The League of Ireland needs more backing
ANYONE UNSURE OF the importance of the League of Ireland only needs to look at the background of players in the Irish national team.
Of the individuals who featured in the famous 1-0 victory over Italy last week, seven (including substitutes) began their footballing careers in the League of Ireland.
Wes Hoolahan, man-of-the-match against Sweden and key for the side throughout the tournament, spent four years at Shelbourne as a youngster.
Yet despite all the success the league has brought the national side, the domestic game continues to struggle at times, with attendances disconcertingly low across various clubs this season.
A combination of factors (some of which have been covered at length here) are to blame for the current situation, and whether the many problems with the League of Ireland will be solved anytime soon remains highly doubtful.
The Irish fans have been routinely lauded as the ‘best in the world’ in recent weeks, and their exemplary behaviour and sheer joie de vivre in France certainly warrants praise, especially given that it contrasts so starkly with the conduct of others.
However, moments to savour such as Euro 2016 may be thin on the ground in future, if domestic football continues to be neglected by the vast majority.
Bums on seats are needed more than ever, so every Irish football lover should be encouraged to embrace the game at both a national and international level, as despite some assumptions to the contrary, the two very much go hand in hand when it comes to creating success stories.
So, as The42‘s columnist John O’Sullivan put it rather eloquently recently: ‘We shouldn’t let our kids grow up believing that football is a TV show’.
2. Martin O’Neill deserves his new contract
If you were to look at Ireland’s Euro 2016 performance in a pessimistic manner, you could argue that the team were well beaten twice, drew with a poor Swedish side and beat an Italian team that didn’t really care too much about the result.
Yet such an assessment would be grossly unfair to Martin O’Neill and the players, given the extraordinary effort they have put in of late.
And regardless of the circumstances, over the past 12 months, Ireland have beaten two of the best teams in the world — Germany and Italy.
Before then, since the famous World Cup qualifying victory over Holland in 2001, they had only won two games against teams above them in the Fifa rankings: Slovakia in 2007 and France in 2009 (at least over the course of 90 minutes).
The current team didn’t exactly set the world alight this summer and were ultimately beaten by a far superior French side, but O’Neill now has the team playing with a level of pride and a much greater degree of adventurousness compared with the monotony of the Trap era.
The fact that they were 45 minutes away from knocking out the tournament hosts and outright favourites to win Euro 2016 is an achievement in itself, and O’Neill has surely got the most out of a hugely cohesive if technically limited group of players.
Judging on what has been said, the 64-year-old coach signing a new contract is a formality at this stage, and few would argue that it’s undeserved, given the evolution of the side under his watch.
With the 2018 World Cup on the horizon, a more youthful-looking Irish side will go into those games full of optimism, and O’Neill seems the perfect man to guide them through this challenging process.
3. Self-belief and mentality key for Ireland
Much has been made of Italy fielding a supposedly second-string side against Ireland last Wednesday, yet the Azzurri still had a level of talent that this Ireland team should have been no match for on paper.
Dortmund, Juventus, Roma, PSG and Milan were among the clubs represented on the field for the Italians that night, as opposed to Blackburn, Derby, Norwich, Ipswich and Burnley for the Irish.
Even if Italy weren’t quite at full tilt, winning 1-0 will still go down as one of the greatest results in Irish footballing history, given the obvious gap in quality between the two teams.
Richard Dunne has suggested that the likes of Jeff Hendrick and Robbie Brady should be playing club football at a higher level, and based on the Italian display at least, it’s hard to argue with this assertion.
It was telling that of Ireland’s three group games, it was only the match that they truly needed to win where they came up with a consummate performance.
As well as the Italians, they have shown a capacity to dominate decent teams of the calibre of Poland, Scotland and Sweden, yet as the latter game showed, the side are prone to hesitancy at times, and sometimes seemingly lack the confidence to see games through and be utterly ruthless in finishing them off.
Perhaps their often psychologically problematic approach to games, as evidenced particularly in the 3-0 loss to Belgium, is down to a simple lack of confidence against supposedly ‘better’ teams.
It is also shown in their inconsistent possession stats — against Italy, they had 48% of the ball, whereas against France, they had 33%.
The Boys in Green are widely regarded as a team that struggles to hold onto the ball, and while this may be true in certain cases, they actually had superior possession to their opponents in exactly half of their qualification matches.
However, should players such as Brady and Hendrick move to better teams, then you would hope the experience and self-assurance such moves will prompt will leave Ireland looking less uncomfortable and better able to cope with certain difficult situations on the international stage in future.
4. O’Neill’s men looking light up front
One of the biggest challenges facing Irish football and indeed, European football in general in the years to come is the much-needed cultivation of top-quality international forwards.
Now that the dust has settled and Ireland’s Euros campaign is over, Robbie Keane — surely Ireland’s greatest striker ever with 67 goals in 145 appearances — will announce his retirement from international football in the coming days.
Jonathan Walters and Daryl Murphy, at 32 and 33 respectively, could well follow Keane out the international exit door, while another 32-year-old attacker Kevin Doyle may not be overly keen on making regular trips between Colorado and Dublin from hereon in.
Should those players opt to depart the scene, Ireland could be in real trouble, as there is a worrying lack of top-quality strikers coming through.
As talented a player as Shane Long is, he alone cannot be relied upon for goals.
Meanwhile, one player being proposed as a potential solution to the problem — Aberdeen’s Adam Rooney — is already 28 years old.
What’s also a concern is that of the others seen as possible future Ireland stars, the likes of Scott Hogan, Joe Mason, Aiden O’Brien and Reece Grego-Cox were all not produced on these shores.
Against France, Ireland’s immense effort could not be faulted. However, at 1-0 up, they missed a few decent chances to get the all-important second, as too often, they lacked the stamina and composure in the final third to double their advantage.
Perhaps the most damning statistic from Sunday’s game was that, after being given the enormous confidence boost of the second-minute goal, they failed to register a single shot on target thereafter. They thus bowed out of the tournament with only three goals from four matches and, aside from games against Gibraltar, they have averaged exactly one-goal-per-game during O’Neill’s reign.
And this problem, it seems, is going to get worse before it gets better.
5. Tardelli was harsh but he wasn’t entirely wrong
Suggesting Ireland lack football intellect was a harsh assessment from Marco Tardelli, the team’s ex-assistant coach under Giovanni Trapattoni between 2008 and 2013.
However, in remarks quoted by a number of media outlets, the World Cup winner claims the meaning of his words didn’t come across properly and that there has been an exaggerated response to them.
In the original La Gazzetta dello Sport interview, Tardelli was quoted as saying: “They have trouble handling the game tactically. They don’t get that football is also an intellectual matter, and not just about attacking and going forward.”
And whether or not the coach meant what he said, the comments seem hard to argue with at face value.
The game against Belgium exposed Ireland’s flaws most sharply, as the Boys in Green’s footballers refrained from committing the type of cynical challenges that the Italians and others have made an art-form out of.
Despite Roy Keane’s subsequent cries of “take him out,” both James McCarthy and Ciaran Clark made weak, ineffectual challenges in the lead up to Belgian goals.
Moreover, disastrous spells shortly after half-time against both Sweden and France cost O’Neill’s side dearly.
Therefore, while Tardelli perhaps wasn’t clear enough with his original criticism, the crux of what he said was right — Ireland need to improve their game management and sense the danger better when the team is under immense pressure, in order to avoid such catastrophic 10-15-minute spells in future in which they are simply overwhelmed by talented opponents.
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