This is no longer urgent. Before Ireland beat Portugal in Lansdowne Road on Thursday night and turned the world upset down in Budapest yesterday, Heimir Hallgrímsson was pedalling towards the end of his contract with two flat tyres and the chain off.
There was no talk of the Icelander and FAI staying together, not even for the sake of the children. And now? There’s a twinkle in their eyes, like the second reconciliation of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Whatever happens in the heaven-sent playoff, Hallgrímsson will surely be offered another contract and he might even be minded to stay. But you wonder what Plan B had been? Or Plan C-Z?
They must have been thinking about it? Mustn’t they?
READ MORE
The shambolic process that eventually resulted in Hallgrimsson’s appointment officially took eight months from the end of Stephen Kenny’s reign. In reality, it took much longer. The FAI had known for months that Kenny had no future in the role and yet their shortlist/wish list/Santa letter was topped and tailed by Lee Carsley. When all the eggs fell out of that basket, the FAI were left traipsing the supermarket aisles of world football searching for lookalike brands at budget prices.
Nobody has ever accused the FAI of succession planning and in this instance, they are not alone. Succession planning is one of those concepts imported from the world of business that makes an organisation seem smart and serious. How often does a club or federation pull it off? Hardly ever.
Football, as a business, is too volatile and reactive. Somebody leaves or somebody is pushed and there’s a hole that must be filled. The outliers in this field are easy to identify. In English football, Brighton are the exemplars of savvy, data-led recruitment on the field, but they are also remarkably adept at identifying managerial talent and behind-the-curtain staff from off Broadway.
The success of their recruitment model is such that they are always preyed upon by wealthier clubs looking for off-the-peg solutions. When Chelsea changed ownership, for example, Brighton endured a 17-month period in which they lost 11 members of staff to Stamford Bridge, on the field and off it.
Brighton, though, are programmed to reboot. Many of those roles were filled by people who were already in the building and had been recruited cannily at another stage in their career.
For the FAI, the Brighton model is far beyond their bandwidth. For them, it is a case of who’s available, who might be interested and who is affordable. Within those parameters, it is hard to find the right words for a Google search.
Unlike footballers, managers are not cultivated in academies. They are developed in the wild. The football universe is full of Uefa Pro Licence holders who never made it as gaffers. The only proof is in the field.
Where do we look? In the top four tiers of the English game there are very few managers who were born on this island. Two of them – Noel Hunt at Reading and Alan Sheehan at Swansea – lost their jobs in recent weeks.
Elsewhere, Conor Hourihane has made a commendable start at Barnsley - they sit 11th in League One, precisely their position when he was appointed to the role on a permanent basis in April. Dean Brennan led Barnet out of the fifth tier of the English game last season and they have settled in mid-table in League Two. For a manager in those divisions, the key is to be noticed by other prospective employers before the tide turns. The tide always turns.
But if the FAI were looking for the next Ireland manager in the shallow pool of Irish managers across the water, who would be the credible candidates and who might do it? Brendan Rodgers is currently available, but he is the kind of manager who would view the Irish job as a backward step. Right now, he’s holding out for a return to the Premier League.
Kieran McKenna has steadied the ship at Ipswich after relegation and a stuttering start to the season, but it is not much more than a year since he was linked to the managerial vacancy at Old Trafford. McKenna is only 39 and whatever happens next for him at Ipswich, he has enough reputational capital in the bank to expect offers from ambitious clubs.
The interesting ones are Keith Andrews and Brian Barry-Murphy. In business, the Peter Principle holds that “employees rise to the level of their incompetence”. The consensus about Andrews’ promotion to head coach at Brentford was that he had reached that precipice.
That might end up being true, but after his first 11 Premier League games, Brentford have the same record as they did at this stage last year under Thomas Frank – despite not having the services of last season’s two top scorers, both of whom were sold in the summer.
Andrews has already had a taste of the international game as part of Stephen Kenny’s management team, but if his stock continues to rise at Brentford, at what point does he become an unrealistic target for the FAI? If they wanted him soon, he would surely baulk at it.
Barry-Murphy has made such a terrific start to his time as Cardiff manager that he was linked last week with the vacancies at Celtic and Middlesborough. The club were forced to deny that any approach had been made by either club.
Whether the Cork native appears on their shortlists or not, nobody in the game believed it was implausible. The Wales manager, Craig Bellamy, eulogised Barry-Murphy recently for the impact he had made on young Welsh players breaking through at the club. Cardiff play a smooth, expansive game, just as Rochdale did under Barry-Murphy. His stock is still rising.
If Hallgrímsson was to walk away this week, Stephen Bradley would have his advocates and so would Damien Duff. But would Duff work with the FAI again, having walked out once before? And would they chance a manager from the domestic league so soon after Kenny?
Between the departure of Brian Kerr and Kenny’s appointment as senior Ireland manager, there was a 15-year gap. Before Kerr, Eoin Hand was the last Ireland manager with League of Ireland credentials. It was 40 years last week since Hand’s last game.
And who knows, when the time comes, they might come up with someone we never heard of.
Anyway, there’s no hurry. Is there any chance they got it right last time?
