Seldom can the build-up to any Ireland game have been so dominated by talk about what happened in the previous game. Ireland play Portugal on Saturday night and the prospect of a match against one of the outstanding national teams in world football would usually be exciting enough to engage the attention. Instead the team are still haunted by the shambolic defeat in Yerevan that cost us any realistic chance of World Cup qualification.
There has been talk this week about our players’ struggle with the “heavy shirt”. Are we giving ourselves too much credit? Really, why should Ireland be a heavy shirt? A heavy shirt usually means teams like Brazil, Real Madrid, Manchester United – institutions with a tradition of greatness that can intimidate the self-doubting player.
Ireland, who have qualified for the finals of six out of 38 (soon to be 39) tournaments in their history, are clearly not in this category. The Irish fan base is easy to please – eager to celebrate, grateful for anything. A heavy shirt was what Fred was wearing in the 2014 World Cup semi-final against Germany. Brazil were losing 5-0 and their struggling centre forward was being viciously abused by his own fans. The closest thing to that Ireland have ever experienced in a tournament finals was being crushed 4-0 by Spain in Gdansk, and the supporters reacted by singing The Fields of Athenry for 15 minutes.
Maybe wallowing in how it all went wrong in Armenia is less self-flagellation than a kind of self-flattery. It’s subtly empowering to agonise about how we were the architects of our own downfall. We’re implying that we, and not Armenia, were the ones in control. If the defeat was a self-inflicted wound then at least we were the ones holding the knife.
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Maybe we find it more pleasant to ask ourselves “who can fathom the mysteries of this Irish team’s tortured soul?” than to admit “Armenia are better than us.” And maybe it’s easier to dwell on how we had it in our hands and threw it all away, than to think about what’s going to happen against Portugal, against whom we can control nothing.
Not that our mournful reflections on Yerevan have necessarily added to our understanding of what went wrong. Asked during the week what his thoughts were a month on from the debacle, John O’Shea said: “Ah, yeah, listen, it’s one of them ... you look back on the learnings from it, simple as that, and we know we have to do a lot better.”
“A lot better” is not setting the bar impossibly high, given that beating Armenia at home would make it a three-point window compared to the one point we managed last time.
Asked on Tuesday what Ireland might do better in future games, Finn Azaz suggested “stopping lapses of concentration in key moments and managing the games.” It reminded you of the famous Manchester United tweet: “David Moyes says #mufc must improve in a number of areas, including passing, creating chances and defending.” The ability to stay concentrated isn’t just a good habit in which Ireland have room for improvement, it’s arguably the single quality that most distinguishes top players from the rest.
More significantly, Azaz raised the possibility that “maybe there was a lack of understanding of the challenge we were coming up against away to Armenia, in terms of the occasion, the environment and in terms of them as players.” This sounded rather embarrassing for Heimir Hallgrímsson, whose job it is to prepare the team for these challenges, but when he was asked on Friday if he was surprised Azaz felt that way, Hallgrímsson simply said, “[He] shouldn’t have. Shouldn’t have.”
It played into the odd sense that Hallgrímsson currently feels like more of a sympathetic bystander than the actual leader of the team. A reporter wondered whether anything had been done or could be done to address the much-discussed problems of “the shirt being heavy and mental issues.”
“I’m always answering in the same way this question,” Hallgrímsson said. “This is not a quick fix. This is something that the FAI [Football Association of Ireland] needs to just think long-term to help young players cope with the pressure that comes with playing international games.”
Isn’t it the role of the coach to help players cope with that pressure? Good coaches, at least, understand how to cultivate the right mentality in their teams. Indeed, for most of the history of football management, this skill was known as man-management and was understood to be the most important part of the job.
For everyone else, the increasing hyper-specialisation of top-level football has created the option of outsourcing the job to a sports psychologist or “mental skills coach”. But this approach to staffing feels more viable at a rich Premier League club than an impoverished association like the FAI.
We do at least seem to have abandoned our abortive flirtation with “speak it, believe it, receive it” manifestation techniques, such as when Paddy McCarthy held the press room spellbound with his declaration that “I believe this young team is on the cusp of something special ... my expectation is we’re going to be in America,” or when Hallgrímsson gave most of the Championship players the summer window off because he needed them to be fresh for the World Cup next year.
The tone now is markedly more cautious. Rather than suggesting Ireland are about to astonish the world, Hallgrímsson says the players are eagerly anticipating a big opportunity to show how good they are against top-class opposition. Does this team still have the capacity to surprise us? “You’ll see tomorrow.”
