No offence at all to our visitors, about whom most of us would feel entirely neutral. But a late March friendly at home to Switzerland, on the most miserable of chilly, drizzly nights, with not a single thing at stake, our next game of any meaning not taking place until September, isn’t, on the whole, an occasion that would have you tingling.
But – and it’s a big one – suddenly this game was being framed by those who know things as John O’Shea’s final dress rehearsal for the Republic of Ireland job on a permanent basis, after we had been reliably informed by the FAI that he would be an interim gaffer for this international window, and this international window only, at the end of which they would thank him for his service and bid him adieu.
And then they would appoint either Jürgen Klopp, Rafa Benitez, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Neil Warnock, Roy Hodgson, Harry Redknapp, Sam Allardyce, Phil Neville, Anthony Hudson, Damien Duff, Gus Poyet, Robbie Keane, Willy Sagnol, Vera Pauw, Anthony Barry, Slaven Bilic, Paul Clement, Chris Hughton, Roy Keane, Michael O’Neill, Steve Bruce, Hervé Renard, Leo Varadkar or Janne Andersson. Or Lee Carsley if he changes his mind. Seamless, then.
But. “The second and final game for this regime ... well, we think anyway,” said Tommy Martin when he welcomed us to Virgin Media’s coverage of the game, himself none the wiser either about where this manager-seeking rigmarole will take us.
Some would say that’s unforgivable, but not half as much as Tommy saying “the Swiss roll into town”, that this double-header against themselves and Belgium has been “chocolate-themed”, and that Mick McCarthy and Damien Delaney were our “two tasty treats in the studio”. Mick and Damien didn’t know where to look.
Then Tommy took us over to the Euro qualifying penalty shoot-out between Georgia and Greece, telling us that the losing manager – Sagnol or Poyet – might end up being a hot-ish favourite for the Irish job because they’d probably be unemployed come the end of the evening. Mick and Damien looked a little sad about this, like we’re consigned to getting other nations’ cast-offs. Which, well, we kind of are.
Georgia won. “It’s reminiscent of an Ulster final in Clones,” said Tommy as we watched the celebrations in Tbilisi, Greece’s Poyet now most likely heading for the jobcentre. But? “Roberto Di Matteo has been spotted with FAI CEO Jonathan Hill,” Tommy told us, with viewers by now in need of a lie down.
“Would John O’Shea be so bad?” he asked. “People say we could do worse and I take exception to that,” said Mick, who was well up for Sheasie being given the job for two years. Damien concurred. “He looks ready to be a manager, I wouldn’t be averse to him getting the job.” But how would the final dress rehearsal go?
Well, it was okay-ish until Xherdan Shaqiri planted a free-kick into the corner of Gavin Bazunu’s net. The ghosts of Brian Kerr’s past had come back to haunt him. Remember?
“Hasn’t he the funniest shape of any player in the Premier League? He’s like a bloke that you might see standing outside the pub on a Sunday morning with his boots in his bag, saying ‘I wonder where we’re playing today?’ And a white van comes along and picks him up. He’s a little chunky fellah, about 5ft3in, he’s wide at the hips – that’s probably being generous to him – and the jersey looks like it’s bed in to him. If he lived in Dublin, he’d be called a ‘Barreller’.”
Half-time: Ireland 0, Barreller 1.
Mick and Damien were feeling gloomy. “We’ve done very, very well to get in at 0-1,” said Damien, reckoning Sheasie had to show his managerial mettle to make the tactical changes required to stop the Swiss from rolling all over us in the second half. Otherwise he’d be pinning his colours to Di Matteo’s mast. He didn’t actually say that, but this manager-seeking-quest has been so, eh, fluid, not a whole lot would surprise you any more.
Second half. Sheasie’s lads huffed and puffed, but they failed to come close to blowing the Swiss house down, the euphoria that followed Saturday’s 0-0 win over Belgium lost in time.
But at least come full-time the list of candidates for the job had been narrowed to Sheasie, Klopp, Benitez, Solskjaer, Warnock, Hodgson, Redknapp, Allardyce, Neville, Hudson, Duff, Poyet, Robbie, Pauw, Barry, Bilic, Clement, Hughton, Roy, O’Neill, Bruce, Renard, Varadkar and Andersson. Or Carsley if he changes his mind.
Sagnol? Probably out of the running. He has bigger fish to fry. Us? Still struggling, still fish out of these international waters.
