During his lone full campaign, the former Republic of Ireland manager Brian Kerr on one occasion hired a private jet to get to a game involving one of Ireland’s rivals, and then on the last day of the qualifying stage dispatched a small army of scouts to distant corners of Europe to spy on potential playoff opponents. From Belarus to Albania to Finland the scouts, among them Lou Macari, were sent out in October 2005 but alas none of them had to write up a report, as Ireland themselves just fell short in the final game of making the playoffs.
On Friday, Martin O’Neill was asked had he adopted a similar no-stone-unturned approach with Ireland’s place in the playoffs guaranteed going into the last match and his answer was unequivocal.
“No. In this day and age, I don’t see that being a problem. We have access now to all games and having not seen somebody live doesn’t present a problem at all. Once the draw is made, we will have sufficient information on the side we’re drawn against.”
O’Neill will be at the Uefa headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland, for the draw this morning and no doubt will spring into action pretty quickly after learning which seeded country out of Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine and Sweden, is drawn against Ireland for next month’s playoffs.
Perhaps Denis O’Brien, the FAI’s billionaire benefactor, could put his private jet at the ready to fly O’Neill from Switzerland to Newcastle for this afternoon’s 4pm kick off against Norwich City. Ireland’s fourth-choice goalkeeper, Rob Elliot, is being drafted in to the Newcastle United side, with the club facing goalkeeping difficulties which are more acute than the ones facing O’Neill’s Ireland. Darren Randolph did reasonably well standing in for the injured Shay Given in Poland, but faces a return to the substitutes’ bench with West Ham while Elliot can get a prolonged spell of competitive action.
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Running an eye over Elliot would certainly merit cutting short any small talk with Michel Platini, the Uefa president, about how he managed to introduce seeding at the last minute in 2009 when it became clear that France were heading for the World Cup playoffs and we all know what happened after that.
Such a dramatic elevation for Elliot at international level would smack of desperation, but O’Neill will realise that the situation is far from healthy as things stand, even though Ireland finished Group D with the fewest number of goals conceded.
“He’s in as good a condition as can be without actually playing,” the Newcastle manager Steve McClaren reported on Elliot, without a huge degree of reassurance. “There was a possibility of Rob going away on loan, but I said, ‘No, we’ll keep him here’. We like him, he’s very good in training, and now he has to produce it in the games.”
Norwich City will hopefully line out with Robbie Brady in an advanced position, where he can provide further evidence to O’Neill that he is being wasted at left-back for Ireland, a position where he is also error-prone. O’Neill’s decision to change his midfield around against Poland last Sunday from the one which helped defeat Germany was clearly a mistake and his decision to return Brady to the back four in Warsaw was arguably the biggest gaffe of them all. Marc Wilson should have been restored to the Ireland line-up at left-back, leaving the feel and formation of the team pretty much the same. The two players returning from suspension, James McClean and Glenn Whelan, both had poor games, with Whelan not doing enough to stop the ranks of doubters swelling further.
Brady’s conversion to left-back for some of Norwich’s opening Premier League games has been deemed a success but that judgment is premature. “It’s a tough one,” the Norwich manager Alex Neil said. “He is a great tool for us because I can play him anywhere up and down that left-hand side.”
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Neil had just reported that Wes Hoolahan had taken a full part in training on the first day back in Norfolk for the club’s 11 international players, adding to the sense of disquiet about the little magician’s failure to make the starting line up in Warsaw, where his creativeness and ball-retention skills were so sadly missed from the start of the match. O’Neill’s post-match explanation for Hoolahan’s absence — that the player had complained of a sore heel and asked not to start the match — has drawn stinging criticism from the likes of John Giles who said that O’Neill “got caught between two stools and that was reflected in the team that he picked”.
The Norwich manager was oblivious to the fuss in Dublin, but declared some sympathy for O’Neill’s position. “I didn’t even know that he had asked Martin not to start the game,” Neil said. “Wes is somebody who knows his own body really well. Certainly here I pinpoint and pick games for him where I think he is going to have maximum effect. Wes is comfortable with that because he knows how important he is to the squad, but there are certain games which Wes is maybe not suited for. He is delighted to play his part.
“The one thing you have to do as a manager is to listen to players and if they are telling you they are not quite ready to play, why would you put them in?”
O’Neill refused to get drawn further into that debate on Friday when questions were put to him concerning Brady and Hoolahan. O’Neill did say that he had spoken to Shane Long, who sustained an ankle ligament injury against Poland that will keep him out for two to four weeks and the player had told him that he was “very optimistic” about the prospect of being fit for the first leg, which could be as early as November 12 depending on how the draw goes. “Despite the suspensions [John O’Shea and Jonathan Walters] and possibility of injuries, wherever we arrive within a couple of weeks’ time we’ll go for it,” O’Neill said. Fear of failure may make him redouble his efforts.
As Benjamin Franklin and Roy Keane once liked to say; “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.”