A few minutes after full-time at the Dinamo Arena, Mick McCarthy walked into the Ireland dressing room to find it quieter than he was expecting. McCarthy felt the 0-0 draw was a point gained, rather than two points lost, but the downbeat mood suggested the players did not share his enthusiasm.
McCarthy told them he was proud of their graft, insisted that four points against Georgia was a good return, and reminded everyone that winning the home games and drawing the away ones is a tried and tested formula for qualification.
This is true, though the pep talk might have been more reassuring if Ireland had won their home game against Switzerland last month, rather than drawing it. And McCarthy was delivering this message before a Kasper Schmeichel wondershow inspired Denmark to a win against Switzerland that put them back in control of the group. Ireland must now beat either Denmark or Switzerland to qualify. In 10 competitive matches against Denmark and Switzerland this century, Ireland have zero wins.
The reality was that a draw was a bad result for Ireland’s hopes of qualifying, but a good result considering what had happened in the match. They had been outplayed again and had survived with a clean sheet because Georgia had again been hopeless in front of goal. Seldom can there have been such a contrast between the quality of a side’s approach work and the utter incompetence of their finishing.
The match would quickly be wiped from the memory banks of everyone who witnessed it, except for the detail that it saw the senior international debut of Aaron Connolly, the Brighton forward who has already attained near-mythic status among Irish fans after scoring two excellent goals against Tottenham on his first Premier League start.
Managers should remember that just because there is a clamour to use a particular player doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do
Connolly’s introduction in place of James Collins on 78 minutes drew the loudest cheer of the night from the 800 Irish supporters. He soon forced the first save of the match from the Georgian goalkeeper, and in injury time he broke through from halfway to shoot just wide with his left foot. It wasn’t just the Irish fans who left the stadium wondering why the best player on either side had only been allowed 12 minutes on the pitch.
McCarthy’s attitude towards the 19-year old is becoming an intriguing subplot of these qualifiers. You might expect that any manager would be thrilled at the emergence of a fast and exciting attacker to freshen up his team, particularly when all recent Ireland managers have moaned about the lack of just such a player. Yet McCarthy’s tone when he talks about Connolly is notably cautious and ambivalent.
He would not be the first manager to be irritated by the formation of a bandwagon around a crowd favourite. Remember how annoyed Giovanni Trapattoni got with people telling him to pick Wes Hoolahan. Managers hate this because it feels like a threat to their authority. Deciding who plays is their prerogative, and they guard it jealously. They don’t like feeling they’re being told what to do. If they pick the golden boy, maybe it looks like they’re caving to public pressure or playing to the gallery. And if they don’t pick him, everyone gets angry.
A common response is to accuse the media of whipping up hype, as when Trapattoni used to accuse journalists of being ‘friends’ with Hoolahan. Real football men have always thought journalists are clueless – on Saturday, McCarthy responded to one question about why Georgia seemed to play with more freedom than Ireland by asking whether the journalist had “ever played at senior professional level.”
But Ireland fans don’t believe that Connolly is currently Ireland’s most dangerous forward because they’ve been brainwashed by propaganda from the dishonest know-nothing media. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes in their head, whether or not they’ve ever played at senior professional level.
Managers should remember that just because there is a clamour to use a particular player doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do. Trapattoni was dead wrong about Hoolahan. And McCarthy was wrong to leave Connolly out of his initial squad, and wrong to leave him on the bench for most of the match. That was clear within a few minutes of his introduction. He was playing the game at a different speed from everyone else.
McCarthy doggedly defended his wrong decision. RTÉ were the first to ask him whether, on reflection, he should have used Connolly earlier. “Possibly,” he said, before praising James Collins’ ability to scrap with the centre-backs and generate second balls. “Could Aaron have done what James did?” he wondered. It’s hard to say. All we can say for sure is that James couldn’t do what Aaron did, in terms of frightening the Georgian defence and threatening their goal.
By the time McCarthy got to the post-match press conference, his answer to the same question had become “Not really, no.” Now he remembered that in addition to scrapping with the centre-backs, Collins had also been an important presence at defensive set-pieces. Yes, Connolly had looked good at the end, but “when you’re at the last 10 or 12 minutes, somebody who comes on like that can run in behind. If he’d started, he might not have been the same. But we’ve seen what he can do and we might have to have a bit of help with him. He certainly won’t be a lone runner.”
Anyone who has watched the matches, even if they've never played at senior professional level, knows that Ireland have been getting away with it
Clearly McCarthy was not going to be pouring any more petrol on the flames of Connolly-mania, but he did at least concede the player is in contention to start against Switzerland. The changes should not stop there.
McCarthy insisted in Tbilisi that Ireland have played good football in this tournament and it would be unfair to criticise them too harshly for the one game in which they didn’t use the ball very well. You can only hope this line is for public consumption and he doesn’t really believe it himself.
This team has scored six goals in nine hours of football. Of those six goals, two came from set-pieces, one was an own goal, another was created by a wildly deflected cross, and the only two clean open-play goals were scored against Gibraltar.
Anyone who has watched the matches, even if they’ve never played at senior professional level, knows that Ireland have been getting away with it, and the results have been better than the performances. You could say the luck ran out against Georgia, except Ireland were lucky not to lose.
How many times does McCarthy need to see the midfield three of Conor Hourihane, Glenn Whelan and Jeff Hendrick outplayed before he decides something has to change? He doesn’t even have to do something relatively radical like tapping the under-21s for Jayson Molumby, whose performances at that level have been just as promising as Connolly’s. He has Josh Cullen and Jack Byrne sitting next to him on the bench. Both played well in the friendly against Bulgaria, and it doesn’t seem to have counted for much.
It’s been argued that McCarthy, with his short-term remit, has little incentive to risk introducing new players this late in the game. But at this point, the biggest risk would be to leave things as they are.
