IT HAS BEEN quite a week for John Delaney and the FAI. The appointment of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane has been greeted with wild optimism by most people, though some are understandably cautious about O’Neill’s choice of assistant given Keane’s previous volatility and patchy managerial record.
With the press conference to formally unveil the new management team having just taken place, Delaney has found himself embarking on a whistle-stop tour of media outlets this week. It’s not something that seems to bother the Waterford native unduly. On the contrary in fact, Delaney seems very comfortable in front of the cameras, microphones and voice recorders — especially when there’s good news to be delivered.
Last night’s appearance on The Late Late Show trod the same familiar path as other interviews this week have done, to the point that the Delaney must have felt like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix in reacting to the questions. Ryan Tubridy, one of the highest-paid broadcasters in the country, chose to conduct the interview through the medium of YouTube clips. First came Keane’s reaction to a question about Delaney from 2009. If the clip was on VHS it would be worn out by now given the amount of times it has been played this week. Delaney’s response, as it has been all week, was good-humoured; “He was probably right.”
Next up was the grainy footage of Mick McCarthy’s bizarre Thursday press conference from, ironically, the same Ipswich chair as Keane’s outburst in 2009. Once again, the footage was met with a dead bat from Delaney. “Mick is a good man and a good manager.”
The frustration for the viewer was that, given the announcement about O’Neill and Keane had been made days earlier, RTE and Tubridy couldn’t do more than rake over old ground, which has been covered ad nausea all week. It is generally accepted that Tubridy isn’t Ireland’s foremost sports fan, but this was a discussion more about business than sport.At one point, early in the interview, the host asked Delaney about Denis O’Brien’s involvement in once again financing the package for the management team. The response from Delaney was; “We couldn’t employ either of those gentlemen (O’Neill or Keane) unless Denis O’Brien was giving us the support needed.” The answer was begging for a simple follow-up question – Why?
Why are the FAI’s finances in such a poor state that outside help is needed to fund the salaries of the senior side’s management ticket? The answer may have been perfectly reasonable, or Delaney may have kicked for touch, but the question ought to have been asked.
Later in the piece Delaney went on something of a canvassing exercise; “My day is spent working with clubs at a grass-roots level, we have 160 employees, I think we turned over €40m last year. I think I’ve visited 1,800 clubs now in 8 or 9 years…my whole day is built on developing the Irish game.” Again, there was an obvious question to be asked about the current state of the game in the country, given that Delaney is now in the job almost ten years. What is being done at this grass-roots level that Delaney seems so au-fait with to ensure Ireland starts producing better quality players?
With one of the best FAI Cup finals in living memory still fresh in everyone’s mind, surely a question about the strength or otherwise of the Airtricity League would not have been unreasonable — does Delaney see that as a priority?Tubridy, being at the end of a very long list of interviewees this week, surely should have attempted to go down a slightly less worn path with his questions, but he chose to play it extremely safe and extremely obvious. Delaney, for his part, has handled the attempts to get a rise out of him with cheap YouTube footage with great dignity and emerged with great credit in that particular department.
If there were any floating voters in the audience then Delaney’s parting gift of a ticket each for the Latvia game would surely have swung them. A predictable end to a predictable interview.