Gavin Cooney

THE TENOR OF this Irish football week can be summed up by a senior figure at a once-prospective sponsor of the senior men’s team, who watched the 2-1 defeat to Armenia and phoned a colleague the following day to express a profound relief that their potential deal with the FAI did not happen. 

The thrust of the conversation: imagine if we now had to try and summon public enthusiasm for this team? 

In our many years following the Irish team through this wilderness, the atmosphere after the Armenia game was dispirited to an extent we have never witnessed before.

The players who were wheeled out to speak to the media appeared in a state of shock. Heimir Hallgrimsson spoke in a hushed and chastened tone, his voice broken. The 700-plus travelling fans made their displeasure known by affording the Armenian players a far warmer ovation than their Irish players. 

Travelling back from Yerevan with supporters, emotions strayed beyond mere disappointment to a kind of anger. Why did we buy into all the pre-game positivity? 

That positivity was real. One backroom team member, who has been around Irish squads for more than five years, told a colleague before the Hungary game that he had never experienced such a positive training camp. 

The coaching staff went out on a limb for it all. Paddy McCarthy, a highly-regarded coach double-jobbing with Crystal Palace, declared with utter conviction that the team was “on the cusp of something special”. 

Hallgrimsson spoke of the squad’s many club captains, and that the squad’s confidence issues had been remedied. “It looks like they are taller today than when I came a year ago,” he said on the eve of the Hungary game.

The FAI’s marketing and media departments also figured that they could rely on the positivity and thus marketed the whole qualifying campaign around the slogan, This is It. 

Hence Hallgrimsson appeared in a video announcing that the team’s development phase is over. (He generously insisted that the video feature footage of Stephen Kenny, as a nod to his predecessor’s work in preparing the squad for this moment of delivery, and that sense of maturation was furthered by the fact Kenny was in attendance for the Hungary game.) 

But then the team went to Armenia. 

That was it. 

Defeat means Ireland’s World Cup campaign is effectively over; a third-straight campaign to have blown up on the launch pad. Hallgrimsson says Ireland need a “miracle” to qualify, and CEO David Courell is already issuing votes of confidence, insisting Hallgrimsson will see out his contract to the end of the campaign. A different FAI CEO was saying the same thing about a different Ireland manager only two years ago. 

Hallgrimsson made errors in Armenia, most obviously blunting Ryan Manning’s attacking skills by playing him at left-back, while the second-half sub of Killian Phillips for Josh Cullen robbed Ireland of all positional discipline in midfield, and thus Armenia ran riot. 

Nathan Collins in the aftermath of defeat to Armenia. Ryan Byrne / INPHO Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO

But the criticism after this game has become much more focused on the players, who have now flopped away to Armenia under two different managers, all the while failing to back up their off-field talk. 

For in Armenia, the taller men whom Hallgrimsson had lauded only five days earlier had shrunk back to the international minnows they have become. He spoke after the game yet again about their confidence issues; that the pressure of playing for Ireland has become a “burden”, while urging the media to go easy on them. That was the public message, but the in-house inquest is expected to be unsparing. 

The FAI’s financial constraints mean Hallgrimsson has been unable to hire a sports psychologist, and though he said after the game that “it wouldn’t hurt”, he also knows it is not a panacea.

This is not a simple story of the cash-strapped FAI failing to provide the basic tools for the players to excel. 

Cryotherapy facilities were made available in Dublin and Yerevan to aid recovery, while a charter flight flew direct from Dublin to Yerevan. Unlike in 2022, the FAI ensured the squad could fly direct for five hours and not have to stop en route to refuel. CEO David Courell told the media yesterday that the FAI rank among the top 15-20% of Uefa nations regarding their investment into the senior international teams. 

And yet Caoimhín Kelleher and perhaps Evan Ferguson and Adam Idah aside, the players simply did not perform in the moment for which they were prepared.

“We didn’t turn up,” admitted Jason Knight after the game. “That was on us players. We have a standard we have to keep and it wasn’t there tonight.” 

Knight is always and admirably among the players willing to front up after defeat, but those words will ring hollow to the Irish fans who shelled about €1,000 each to turn up themselves. 

Glenn Whelan’s comments from a year ago have returned to sharp focus once again. Having worked on John O’Shea’s staff for the March and June windows, Whelan appeared on Virgin Media after the 2-0 loss to Greece and openly asked whether losing is hurting the Irish players enough. 

A year on, this remains a startling claim from a man who had scouted Greece for the Irish set-up earlier that week. 

The squad have become inured to defeat, but given the paucity of Ireland’s options, for many players, losing games does not equate to losing their place in the team. Hallgrimsson is minded to change this next month, to reset standards if nothing else. 

In hindsight, Hallgrimsson’s decision to omit Seamus Coleman from his 23-man squad was a terrible error. James McClean appeared on Off the Ball on Wednesday morning and called Coleman’s absence “mind-blowing”. 

Coleman’s leadership skills are outstanding, and have been valued by every coach and manager with whom he has worked. He sets standards and ensures they are followed. It would not be accurate to say Coleman inspires fear, but team-mates are more wary when he is around, as he is quick to let any player know when they are not doing their jobs. 

Coleman also knows his team-mates’ jobs. While obviously knowing what is expected of himself in each game regarding set-up in possession, out of possession, and on set-pieces, he also makes it his business to know where each of his team-mates are supposed to be, too. Hence he can hold them accountable if they are not doing as instructed. 

Take a look back at the goal with which Armenia won the game in Yerevan, and you’ll see a team doing each other’s jobs rather than insisting on them being done as intended.

Jason Knight leaps to press the opposition number six, but nobody follows. Dara O’Shea then follows an attacker into the midfield space Knight has vacated, while Nathan Collins steps too far to his left to cover for O’Shea. Josh Cullen then tries to clog up the space Collins has vacated, which in turns leaves a huge amount of room for Eduard Spertsyan to play a pass into the Armenian left-wing back, who in turn squares the ball across the box for Grant Ranos to tap-in. 
https://x.com/RTEsport/status/1965464302694867248

It was at this point that Collins’ comments prior to the Hungary game rang very differently. 

“People are stepping up to the plate, and driving things in training, driving things in matches”, he said, “Anything needs fixing, people are able to step up to that and know what we’re doing.” 

Collins has stepped up as captain in the sense he has become more vocal behind the scenes, but he is still just 24 and his performance in Armenia suggests he is struggling to balance his own responsibilities with those of the captaincy. Coleman has been a standard-bearer at the highest level of the game for 15 years. If he’s fit, he won’t be left out again. 

No sports team in the country injects as high an emotional dose as the senior men’s international team, for better and worse and, in Armenia, they continued to prescribe despair. 

And while sometimes the team can distract from the reality, this week they served to accentuate it. Hallgirmsson is said to have cut a uncharacterstically gloomy figure at FAI HQ in Abbotstown after returning from Armenia, and it matched the atmosphere around him. 

As one staffer told us, “I’d say morale was on the floor, but we are looking up from the basement now.” 

The FAI’s voluntary redundancy programme opened this week, with compulsory lay-offs likely to follow. Siptu workers at the FAI have been angered about the fact that they have not been told how many job cuts the FAI are seeking, as they say some staffers don’t know whether to stay or leave, given they don’t know what the future organisation will look like. 

David Courell and Heimir Hallgrimsson. Ryan Byrne / INPHO Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO

Courell says the FAI will reveal the number of redundancies they seek after the voluntary programme has closed. “Transparency”, he says, “is to come.”

In the meantime, the corridors are awash with rumours as to how many jobs will go. Employees we have spoken with have heard numbers ranging from 30 to 80, and everyone is currently working amid enormous uncertainty. 

There is also employee anger at a sentence in the FAI’s press release announcing the redundancies, in which it was stated that the Association does not have “the required framework and specific skillsets to implement vital strategies”. Siptu workers have asked for an apology, which is not forthcoming. 

“It was misinterpreted that we were referring to their skills being inadequate,” says Courell, saying that is not what the FAI inferred and that they must introduce new skills to the workforce to modernise.  

And with all of this happening, FAI employees had to listen to the country’s most famous footballer appear on the UK’s biggest football podcast and declare that the FAI couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. “Roy is entitled to his comments”, intoned Courell. 

There are many other controversies engulfing the FAI at the moment, including Eileen Gleeson’s discrimination case, which the FAI intend to “defend robustly”. This will generate many more headlines, and the current WNT incumbent, Carla Ward, is sure to be asked for her reaction to the details of the case published last week by the Sunday Independent. 

FAI president Paul Cooke watches on in Yerevan. Ryan Byrne / INPHO Ryan Byrne / INPHO / INPHO

And with that rumbling on, the FAI must steel themselves for another trip to the Oireachtas Committee on 24 September, this time to discuss their safeguarding procedures. Courell yesterday expressed a hope that the political questioning would remain within that brief, but that will be a forlorn ambition. Courell, HR director Aoife Rafferty, chairman Tony Keohane and president Paul Cooke are all on the invite list. 

This is a particularly poorly-timed trip to Government buildings, as it comes just a fortnight before Budget day, in which the FAI are targeting the inclusion of State funding for League of Ireland academies. They have proven the need for the investment with the completion of a recent audit, a piece of work that has been favourably received by officials within the Department of Sport. 

But while this audit has satisfied the economic case for the funding, the FAI must yet satisfy the political case for the money, which sources have told us they have not yet done.

There is now a growing fear among some figures at Abbotstown that all of these above controversies and distractions – along with the internal politicking evident in the delay to the implementation of the aligned calendar and the constant turnover of high-ranking staff – will give political reason not to grant the funding this year. 

Hence Courell stressed that the funding is for the League of Ireland, and not the FAI, when we asked him yesterday if he was confident the funding would be delivered this year. (This is an organisation, of course, that missed out on the funding last year as they applied for a Brexit relief scheme after the deadlines closed.) 

With every year that goes by without academy funding, Ireland’s life in the international wilderness will merely be prolonged. 

When we reported in depth on the Irish academy problem earlier this year, we found that there are approximately 60 Irish footballers aged between 16 and 18 currently training in full-time environments. This is a inevitable crisis of enormous proportions. 

Ireland’s defeat in Armenia was a failure of on-pitch leadership, while the FAI’s off-field leadership have the challenge of their lives ahead over the next month. If they deliver as poorly as the players did in Yerevan, then in the years to come we will lose once again to Armenia, but by then our international standing will be so lowly that we will no longer feel dismay or disgust. By then, it will be merely the logical outcome of how Irish football runs itself. Ireland’s academy fundamentals ran somewhere between 92nd and 96th in in the world. This translates to a Fifa ranking of 92 and 96 in a decade’s time. 

This is the most depressing fact of this week of despair.

All of this might be about to get a whole lot worse.