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The Boys-in-Green are more of a light shade of grey  Sportswriters
like things to be black and white. The truth is it makes our jobs a lot
easier. Writing about a 5-0 victory or a 5-0 defeat is child’s play.
The story is all laid out for us and we just have to put the words in
the right order, keep an eye on the grammar and ask Microsoft Word nicely
to do a spell check at the end. And that’s that. Another day done,
another grand in the bank. Child’s play.
The problem is that not every issue is black or white. In fact, most of
them inhabit that nasty, little, grey area in between — a place
where nothing is obvious and everything is open to interpretation or indeed
misinterpretation.
And that’s exactly the area I find myself scratching around in having
watched Ireland’s friendly against Brazil. Ireland were not rubbish,
as anybody who caught last week’s game can attest to. They were
well-organised, showed flashes of class on the ball at times and the majority
of them worked their collective backsides off for the full 90 minutes.
In saying that, however, nobody with all their faculties about them could
reasonably say that this Ireland team were brilliant.
They were, after all, playing against a Brazil side containing perhaps
20 per cent of their key personnel. And while they did alright they rarely
looked like scoring while holding onto the ball for anything more than
five or six passes was a task that appeared to be beyond them.
Which leaves this Ireland side in some kind of football purgatory —
neither good enough to be talked about in reverential tones nor poor enough
to be pilloried and laughed at by the media snipers.
Bearing all this in mind then I cannot help but wonder if we have any
realistic hope of qualifying for either of the next two major tournaments
— the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 and the 2012 European Championships
in Poland and the Ukraine.
I’ve always believed that a decent barometer of how good we really
are and how likely we are to qualify for the next major tournament lies
in a comparison with England and, specifically, how many of our first
11 would get in their first 11.
If you take the 1988 European Championships you would have made a fair
case of Kevin Moran, Paul McGrath, Ronnie Whelan, Chris Hughton, Tony
Galvin and John Aldridge. Throw in Peter Shilton, Trevor Steven, Glenn
Hoddle, Terry Butcher and Gary Lineker and you’ve a decent team.
Jump forward to 1994 when we qualified for the World Cup and they didn’t
and you come up with a similarly Irish top-heavy 11. Packie Bonner in
goal. Gary Kelly, Paul McGrath and Phil Babb in defence. Roy Keane, Andy
Townsend and Jason McAteer in midfield. And a handful of Englishmen just
so they don’t feel left out.
I chose both 1988 and 1994 deliberately because they were both eras where
Ireland were at least as good as England, if not better, but in taking
a realistic look at both countries today I’m struggling to select
the Irish men to usurp their English counterparts.
Shay Given would be a certainty in goal in any joint team. In defence
Richard Dunne might hover around the fringes but England do have considerable
quality at centre-half which probably counts him out. Damien Duff, on
form and fully fit, would definitely make it on the left wing and on current
form Robbie Keane would be leading the front-line. Even ahead of Wayne
Rooney.
But that’s our lot no matter how patriotic you might be. Three players
and bar Dunne, not one other that comes anywhere close. And let’s
be completely honest it’s not an exceptional England team by any
stretch of the imagination. The under-21 international between the two
sides would suggest that it’s unlikely to get any better for Ireland
in the next three to five years.
A 3-0 defeat exaggerates the difference between the two sides on the night
but there was no doubt England were the better team. Nine of their starting
11 are Premier League regulars for their clubs while Anthony Stokes was
the only Boy-in-Green who’s played in the Premier League this season.
Ireland do have a couple of neat ball players in John Joe O’Toole
of Watford and Owen Garvan of Ipswich but in all honesty it would be unjust
to pick any of them ahead of any of the England under-21 team.
All of which leaves me to conclude that our qualification hopes for the
next two tournaments are pretty dim. If England, who possess a fair degree
more talent in their ranks, couldn’t qualify for Euro 2008 this
summer then we didn’t have a hope in hell of qualifying even if
Steve Staunton had never been inflicted upon us.
It’s a similar story going forward if we extend that particular
logic. I pray to God I’m wrong. But right now our prospects don’t
look particularly clever no matter who is appointed manager for those
qualifying campaigns.
ciarancronin3@eircom.net |
