THE GENERAL SPORTING mood in Czechia was this week punctured by the exit of their men’s ice hockey team from the Winter Olympics, narrowly beaten in an overtime thriller by Canada.
The concern for Heimir Hallgrimsson and Ireland is that this will be a fleeting disappointment because the Czechs are feeling better about their football team. When Ireland were first drawn away to Czechia in the World Cup play-off semi-final on 20 November last year, we were one of many Irish outlets to take a quick look under the Czechs’ bonnet and be frankly excited with what we found: we had drawn a national team without a manager, who had lost to the Faroe Islands, and who had stripped Tomas Soucek of the captaincy amid a public stand-off between players and fans.
But now the Czechs have found a new manager and suddenly everything is looking much more rosy. “Changing the manager has changed the mood,” says Štěpán Hájek, a sports journalist with CANAL+ Sport in Prague.
That new manager is aiming to be the second-oldest manager at the 2026 World Cup after Dick Advocaat with Curaçao. Seventy-four-year-old Miroslav Koubek was appointed to the job a week before Christmas, having shown some recent high achievement in a long and peripatetic coaching career around the Czech leagues, guiding Viktoria Plzen to the quarter-finals of the Conference League and then the last-16 of the Europa League. It was Koubek’s third stint in charge of Plzen, and this is his first crack at senior international management.
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Miroslav Koubek. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Koubek recently made headlines here by describing Ireland’s style as “island football”, a pithy spin on the classic international review of Ireland as committed and physical long-ball merchants. While we can’t say Mr Koubek is inaccurate in his assessment, it is no value judgement on his part, as he is likely to set the Czechs up in a similar manner.
The bellwether as to whether he does so, says Hájek, is if he selects one of his old Plzen players, Lukáš Červ, in central midfield, who is more brawn than brain.
One of Hallgrimsson’s difficulties is in knowing how Koubek will set up formation-wise, but his favoured system is a 3-4-1-2, which is kindling further optimism in Prague given it is the best means of stacking the team with their many in-form forwards.
The striker with whom you’re likely acquainted is Patrik Schick of Bayer Leverkusen, who scored twice in the Champions League play-off away to Olympiakos in midweek and has a respectable seven goals in 17 Bundesliga games so far this season. Koubek may partner him with the physical, chirpy figure of Tomáš Chorý, whose indiscretions include a six-match ban last year for punching an opposition goalkeeper in the crotch “deliberately and with great intensity”.
Chorý is in the best form of his career, however, with 12 goals in 15 games in the Czech league for Slavia Prague this season, having spent a season playing under Koubek at Plzen.
The other stand-out attacker is Pavel Šulc, a versatile attacker who has 10 goals in 20 Ligue Un games for high-flying Lyon, playing across a variety of positions including off the right but predominantly up front or in a more withdrawn, central attacking role. That Koubek’s previous playbook can easily accommodate all of Šulc, Chorý, and Schick is underpinning much of the Czech optimism.
Koubek has also apparently poured oil on the troubled waters regarding the captaincy, though it’s yet to be announced whether Soucek will retain the armband or whether it will be passed to the more vocal Ladislav Krejčí, the Wolves centre-back. It will be interesting to see how Koubek manages the situation, mind, given Soucek and Krejčí come from opposing sides of the Slavia/Sparta rivalry which so defines Czech football.
Hájek points to concerns about the quality of the centre-backs who will play alongside Krejčí, while he also says the team may lack creativity in deeper midfield.
Ireland have many more concerns today than they did on the day of the draw, most obviously the absence of Josh Cullen and the ongoing injury travails of several key players, including Evan Ferguson and Robbie Brady.
Also troubling for Ireland is that time has appeared to have greatly mended the mood in Prague.
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'Changing the manager has changed the mood' – Czechia in much better place ahead of Ireland play-off
THE GENERAL SPORTING mood in Czechia was this week punctured by the exit of their men’s ice hockey team from the Winter Olympics, narrowly beaten in an overtime thriller by Canada.
The concern for Heimir Hallgrimsson and Ireland is that this will be a fleeting disappointment because the Czechs are feeling better about their football team. When Ireland were first drawn away to Czechia in the World Cup play-off semi-final on 20 November last year, we were one of many Irish outlets to take a quick look under the Czechs’ bonnet and be frankly excited with what we found: we had drawn a national team without a manager, who had lost to the Faroe Islands, and who had stripped Tomas Soucek of the captaincy amid a public stand-off between players and fans.
But now the Czechs have found a new manager and suddenly everything is looking much more rosy. “Changing the manager has changed the mood,” says Štěpán Hájek, a sports journalist with CANAL+ Sport in Prague.
That new manager is aiming to be the second-oldest manager at the 2026 World Cup after Dick Advocaat with Curaçao. Seventy-four-year-old Miroslav Koubek was appointed to the job a week before Christmas, having shown some recent high achievement in a long and peripatetic coaching career around the Czech leagues, guiding Viktoria Plzen to the quarter-finals of the Conference League and then the last-16 of the Europa League. It was Koubek’s third stint in charge of Plzen, and this is his first crack at senior international management.
Koubek recently made headlines here by describing Ireland’s style as “island football”, a pithy spin on the classic international review of Ireland as committed and physical long-ball merchants. While we can’t say Mr Koubek is inaccurate in his assessment, it is no value judgement on his part, as he is likely to set the Czechs up in a similar manner.
The bellwether as to whether he does so, says Hájek, is if he selects one of his old Plzen players, Lukáš Červ, in central midfield, who is more brawn than brain.
One of Hallgrimsson’s difficulties is in knowing how Koubek will set up formation-wise, but his favoured system is a 3-4-1-2, which is kindling further optimism in Prague given it is the best means of stacking the team with their many in-form forwards.
The striker with whom you’re likely acquainted is Patrik Schick of Bayer Leverkusen, who scored twice in the Champions League play-off away to Olympiakos in midweek and has a respectable seven goals in 17 Bundesliga games so far this season. Koubek may partner him with the physical, chirpy figure of Tomáš Chorý, whose indiscretions include a six-match ban last year for punching an opposition goalkeeper in the crotch “deliberately and with great intensity”.
Chorý is in the best form of his career, however, with 12 goals in 15 games in the Czech league for Slavia Prague this season, having spent a season playing under Koubek at Plzen.
The other stand-out attacker is Pavel Šulc, a versatile attacker who has 10 goals in 20 Ligue Un games for high-flying Lyon, playing across a variety of positions including off the right but predominantly up front or in a more withdrawn, central attacking role. That Koubek’s previous playbook can easily accommodate all of Šulc, Chorý, and Schick is underpinning much of the Czech optimism.
Koubek has also apparently poured oil on the troubled waters regarding the captaincy, though it’s yet to be announced whether Soucek will retain the armband or whether it will be passed to the more vocal Ladislav Krejčí, the Wolves centre-back. It will be interesting to see how Koubek manages the situation, mind, given Soucek and Krejčí come from opposing sides of the Slavia/Sparta rivalry which so defines Czech football.
Hájek points to concerns about the quality of the centre-backs who will play alongside Krejčí, while he also says the team may lack creativity in deeper midfield.
Ireland have many more concerns today than they did on the day of the draw, most obviously the absence of Josh Cullen and the ongoing injury travails of several key players, including Evan Ferguson and Robbie Brady.
Also troubling for Ireland is that time has appeared to have greatly mended the mood in Prague.
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