We were all hoping that qualifying for the World Cup was the start of something big for this Ireland team, that they would build on it and leave a legacy that would see the women’s game in Ireland thrive. Now? It just feels like it was a flash in the pan.
I haven’t felt as despondent about it all as I did on Tuesday night. I thought we had developed into a team that could handle an occasion like that. That we would take confidence from being the favourites rather than being burdened by the tag. That we’d outgrown the need to be the underdog. But it seems like we haven’t.
Wales are not a better team than us, but they managed the occasion a whole lot better. You want emotion in the game, but you need controlled emotion, and we just didn’t have that.
We had players stirring up the crowd at times when what was needed was a bit more calm. Just. Go. And. Play. The. Game. Even the management was getting in to a scrap with the Welsh bench. We needed cooler heads on and off the pitch. We didn’t get them.
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And Katie McCabe getting booked so early, and nearly getting sent off, hardly helped either. She faded thereafter, her typical game having to be put on ice. She’s had a tough time of late, she hasn’t been churning out the same kind of star performances for Ireland, so her having another difficult night wasn’t altogether surprising.
We had our chances, but we weren’t clinical enough. Wales were clinical with theirs. We just didn’t have that little bit of quality in the final third to get us a goal when we were on top, and we didn’t have the attacking players on the bench who could make an impact when they came on.
I had no problem with our starting line-up, but five at the back at home to Wales? It just didn’t feel necessary. Yes, McCabe and Heather Payne pushed up whenever they could, but they were still always going to get caught up in defensive duels and have their energy zapped.
We’ve stuck to this formation for so long, there has to be a more ambitious way. A 4-5-1, say, and Denise O’Sullivan would have found those pockets she’s so good at exploiting and would have been able to link up with the players around her much more easily.
But look, we can analyse it to death, but when you strip it back, we just weren’t good enough in those key moments and then we reacted too late. We should be beating a team like Wales but we didn’t have the composure to do it.
And to be honest, I just don’t see much improvement, not just over the last four years, but even from when I was in the squad. It’s telling that our best two players in the games against Wales were a girl who cannot train – Ruesha Littlejohn, 34 – and another who was out of the squad for four years, Julie-Ann Russell, 33.
What now? It feels like it would make sense to part ways with Eileen Gleeson. Her contract’s up, we didn’t achieve our goal. The players are part of that. The staff is part of that. The FAI is a massive part of that. But it’s the manager who pays. Eileen has given her whole life to Irish women’s football, and she deserves enormous credit for that. But ultimately, this was a failure.
The question is, though, are the funds there to replace her?
The pool of coaches in the women’s game in Ireland isn’t huge, so that would probably mean having to look further afield again. Even aside from the cost of that to a severely cash-strapped FAI, that comes with its own risks. We had Colin Bell who was out the gap the minute there was a sniff of a job in the men’s game. We had Vera Pauw and while she’ll always deserve credit for our World Cup qualification, her appointment brought its own difficulties.
And the squad?
There was an end-of-an-era feel to it on Tuesday. I would have loved if there was a swansong for the likes of Littlejohn, Russell and Niamh Fahey, all brilliant servants to our game, but I don’t think they’re going to have it now. Brazil 2027 seems a lifetime away. There’ll probably be a bunch of retirements and a rebuild.
Everyone bigs up our younger players who will become the mainstays of the team in the coming years. They have talent but they also have a lot to learn. And this self-awareness is key if they are to fulfil their potential.
They could learn a lot from the elder stock of the squad when it comes to attitude and application. Fahey, Russell and O’Sullivan play for the team, the cause, it’s a collective effort. The time spent kicking a ball against a gable end dreaming of playing in an Irish jersey will stand to you more in your career than curating the perfect Instagram profile.
The old cliche ‘play for the name on the front of the jersey, not on the back’ comes to mind. The pinnacle isn’t being a professional footballer. The pinnacle is playing for your country.
But whatever shape the team now takes, I don’t think our focus should be on the next World Cup. We should be prepared to go through some pain in the next two years so that in four years’ time we’re ready for the Euros. You have to be brave to do that, you’re going to get plenty of stick from the public – Stephen Kenny tried it and look how it worked out for him.
But we have to reimagine the style of football we want to play. We can’t just keep hoping that the same old one will work for us. The game moves on, we need to move with it. So, rip up the coaching book, start afresh with young players, have a cohesive approach that’s more holistic and based on skills. Otherwise, nothing will change.
And we need to stop depending on English and American players, we need to take a look inward. The success of the national team in getting to the World Cup just papered over cracks, we have to tend to the roots of the game at home and develop players who can turn us in to the footballing nation that we aspire to be.
Next summer will be pretty vacant for us. Wales, deservedly, will have one to remember. It will take drastic action if the summer of 2023 doesn’t prove to be a flash in the pan.
