TWITTER WAGS HAD fun this week with the Clare county board’s nomination of one Robert Frost as a candidate for the GAA presidency: would the association take the road less travelled by, many wondered?
Those famous lines about two roads diverging in a wood were fresh in the mind then, when it came to looking at this weekend’s international football fare.
It’s almost two years to the day since Scotland defeated Ireland 1-0 on a raucous night at Celtic Park, a result which seemed to suggest that it was they who were more likely to qualify for Euro 2016, rather than their Celtic cousins.
Writing here in advance of the return game in Dublin, I was in no doubt which team were on the right path.
“I can’t help but feel…that it is somehow simply their time. There was something in the air in Glasgow last November…it felt like we were watching a team going places. And sadly, it wasn’t Ireland, based on that night’s evidence”
Shows how much I know.
Two years later, Martin O’Neill’s team sit joint top of their World Cup group having parlayed the warm glow of the French summer into seven hard-won qualifying points.
Scotland’s campaign already looks doomed, and Strachan’s future is in doubt as they prepare to face England at Wembley. Their disastrous October fixtures – a home draw with Lithuania and a defeat in Slovakia – followed a grim summer spent watching all their closest neighbours frolic at the Euros.
“[Strachan] actually owes it to his country to step down from his job – as he has done elsewhere – such was the lame nature of Scotland’s showing in defeat to Slovakia,” went the verdict in the normally temperate pages of the Guardian.
“He set out a team against Lithuania which looked devoid of any plan,” wrote their Scottish football correspondent Ewan Murray, “Scotland were laboured to the point of instantly boring an expectant Hampden crowd.”
How different things were back in June 2015, when the Scots left Dublin with a point and a spring in their steps.
After that game the same Guardian writer wrote of an “unavoidable sense that O’Neill’s career is destined to peter out in an insipid fashion that seemed so unlikely for so long,” a view not uncommon that evening.
O’Neill would later recall the triumphant mood of Strachan and his staff, and how it jarred with his own feeling that further twists lay ahead.
He was right, of course, and that would be the night the teams’ fortunes truly diverged.
Scotland’s next result was the cataclysmic defeat in Georgia, the moment of self-destruction their fans had been bracing themselves for; Ireland, meanwhile, won their next three games and France beckoned.
There is a natural temptation to put the flipping of the two teams’ fortunes since the Euro 2016 qualifiers down to the respective managers. While Strachan’s initial organisation and attention to detail have given way to staleness, O’Neill’s team seem to personify their manager’s chippy defiance.
O’Neill’s well-publicised interest in the field of criminal law reflects a man who never leaves his case unargued, as his now regular post-match hectoring of RTÉ’s Tony O’Donoghue confirms.
It may be unseemly for an international manager to be so tetchy under questioning, making one long for Giovanni Trapattoni’s blissful disengagement, but O’Neill has been fighting his corner in football for a long time now.
This is a man who Brian Clough’s biographer, Duncan Hamilton, once described as the only player the legendary manager could not master.
The pair’s antagonistic relationship was based on Clough’s insecurity – “I’m wary of people who are more intelligent than I am – but I soon got you down to my level,” he once told the player – and O’Neill’s refusal to let anyone have the last word. With their late goals, ability to dig out results and general dogged spirit, you could say the same about his Irish team.
But as he faces another fork in the road this weekend – victory would be a mortal blow to major rival; defeat would resuscitate Austria and underline the competitiveness of Group D – O’Neill will know how easily he could have found himself in Strachan’s cul de sac.
Had Germany beaten Ireland, as expected, and Scotland made the Euro 2016 play-offs, it may indeed have been O’Neill’s career petering out, rather than Strachan’s.
And neither is the World Cup qualifying points total so far reflective of a pretty mixed bag of performances that could easily have yielded fewer.
Yet here we are.
The Road Not Taken is partly about the human tendency to look back on life decisions as having been the product of bold individualism, rather than the reality of random, uneducated chance.
Whatever the reason, the fortunes of O’Neill and Strachan with their similarly modest playing squads have diverged spectacularly since that night in Glasgow two years ago; and that, for both managers, has made all the difference.
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