Gavin Cooney

AND SO RETURN the Irish football team to mope across the land. 

Nobody has been looking forward to the Portugal game this week, with the mood among the squad instead chastened amid the slew of inquisitions as to what happened against Armenia last month.

Jayson Molumby was not selected for the squad last month, but not even plausible deniability for the Yerevan shitshow forestalled his plaintive speech. 

“It’s hard to justify myself starting for Ireland when I have started many games in the past for Ireland”, said Molumby, his voice sometimes dipping close to an abashed whisper. 

“We haven’t won a lot of games so I’m not here to be saying I should be starting for Ireland. It hasn’t been a successful time since I’ve been here and I haven’t really achieved much personally. I haven’t played at a big tournament, I haven’t won a big away fixture against a Portugal or France. It’s tough.”

Molumby has won just five of the 29 Irish games in which he has played, but he is merely one of a down-trodden generation of Irish players.

Caoimhín Kelleher has won 10 of his 25 appearances, a win percentage of which his peers should be be jealous. Nathan Collins has 11 wins in 32 games; Dara O’Shea’s record is 10 wins from 37. Jason Knight has 41 caps and only 13 victories, while Josh Cullen has an added three appearances but only one extra victory. Adam Idah has meanwhile won 8 of his 34 games for Ireland, while Troy Parrott has a more respectable 14 victories across 29 appearances. 

Hence the team’s doleful notes shouldn’t come as news. More notable is the spasm of positivity into which the whole set-up talked themselves ahead of the Armenia debacle, which now seems to have been founded on everyone’s basic need to hear it. 

Our pointing out that this Irish squad has a confidence problem is hardly revelatory, given Heimir Hallgrimsson has been delivering this prognosis on a near-monthly basis.

But in spite of all of this, we learned this week that the Irish players somehow managed to go to Armenia with too much confidence. 

“Maybe there was a lack of understanding of the challenge that we were coming up against away to Armenia, in terms of the occasion, in terms of the environment and in terms of them as players”, said Finn Azaz on Tuesday. 

How, you might ask, did one of the most beaten-down Irish teams in history return to a stadium at which they lost on their previous visit and become undone by their own cockiness? 

Perhaps the answer lies in the extremes of emotion that belong to the cosmically oppressed. 

This team have been suffering in an Irish jersey for so long that they sometimes give the impression of believing that their epic penance must surely now be coming to an end, and so they grasp hard at any hint of positivity, using it as evidence that deliverance is finally at hand.

Hence the players’ temptation to meet whatever might be good with an extreme but flimsy exuberance; reacting as if they had finally found the proof that they had hit rock bottom and so now the future will be better, sanctified as it has been by earnest years of toil and torture. 

But sadly the 2-2 draw at home to Hungary proved to be Shawshank without the redemption. While Ireland’s first-half performance was woeful – a resounding failure even under the meagre metrics of their own limited ambitions – the second-half comeback was rousing, stoking as it did a fabulous, ear-thrumming atmosphere. 

Then came Armenia, after which the players trooped off with familiarly ashen faces, once again dispirited by the realisation that their progress is not linear.

These terrible whiplashes of mood are nothing new. This squad lost in encouraging heartbreak to Portugal four years ago and returned home to snooze their way to a home draw with Azerbaijan, while the admirably narrow home loss to France in 2023 then gave way to the chasing against Greece in Athens for which they had spent two weeks training to avoid. 

It was interesting to see that none of the players posted the usual banalities on Instagram after the loss in Yerevan, as we had heard that some were taken aback by the criticism with which they were met after the Hungary draw, with many picking more fault in what was done badly before half-time rather than done well afterwards. 

This speaks to players less interested in the rational analysis that underpins steady improvement than it does a group desperate to cling on to good feeling.

And after all these years of misery, how can you blame them? 

It’s forgotten now, but the Irish players actually started well in Yerevan, only to fall apart at the first sign of trouble. Ireland dominated the first half-hour or so, right up until Armenia had their first attack, in which they hit the bar. That moment was enough to return the pallid look to the Irish faces, and from there, their performance was hijacked by the anxiety that this would be another public humiliation. The same happened at Wembley last year, as Ireland fell apart following Liam Scales’ red card. 

These are the collapses of a squad too conditioned by the past, and thus caught in a vicious cycle from which they cannot escape. It is this fact that makes it all the more unforgivable that they continue to work without a sports psychologist or mental skills coach, whose role it is to make the players realise that the two most useless tools in professional sport are the past and the future. 

This is a belief of Gary Keegan, who has transformed the Irish rugby team by drilling them of the need to be “next-moment focused.” 

Watch the rugby players after any score and you’ll see them gather round for some collective breathing, which is done to centre them in the moment and mentally bin whatever had just gone before.

And amid the slagheap blaze of his presidential campaign, Jim Gavin found the time to reveal a similar strength of his Dublin reign to the Sunday Independent. 

“If my head got flustered, if I got too outcome-focused and distracted from what I had to do for the team, if I didn’t want my brain to get hijacked by cortisol, I would breathe… very simply… in for four, out for four”, said Gavin when asked about his blank features during frenetic All-Ireland finals. 

Unlike the aforementioned, the Irish football team continue to live anywhere but in the present moment. Instead they veer maniacally between prospects and retrospects, forecasting the next moment rather than acting thoughtlessly within it. 

Thus the only way these Irish players can escape their deadening past miseries is by convincing themselves that they don’t matter.