September 8th, 2005
10 Things I’d do if I was Brian Kerr
1. Find a new striker NOW. Clinton Morrison is not World class and was incompetent and useless last night. He never looked like scoring. He never looks like doing anything. One of his two ‘attempts’ on goal was actually a total miskick when shown in the replay.
2. Clone Roy Keane - it looked like there were four of him on the pitch last night, doing the work of some of the other donkeys (as usual).
3. Tell Robbie Keane to spend more time practising his goal-scoring than his cartwheels.
4. Make some serious changes to the team as a whole. We’ve been playing most of those 11 players for a while now and they’ve never looked as uninspiring as last night.
5. Realise that when you’re one-nil down, you don’t leave making substitutions until the 78th minute.
6. Get rid of Kevin ‘If you give the ball to me I’ll just give it away’ Kilbane.
7. Hit myself over the head for not even considering the option of a Premiership striker who hasn’t played for the Republic in two years (David Connolly). See suggestion 1 above.
8. Ask John O’Shea why he’s failed to live up to all the hype about him from a couple of years back.
9. Think about resigning if Ireland don’t qualify for the World Cup. (Don’t get me wrong, he hasn’t been a completely terrible manager and he seems like a nice man, but his decisions are far too safe and it feels as though he’s just coasting along rather than driving the team forward.)
10. Ring up Sven-Goran Eriksson and sympathise about our respective 1-0 losses. Then point out that at least Ireland weren’t beaten by a team ranked 112th in the FIFA World ratings.
September 8th, 2005 at 10:52 am
What about ‘get on to FIFA about a Ref who booked Irish players for virtually nothing and made a rake of bad decisions that kept interrupting the run of play’
September 8th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
I especially agree with your thoughts on O’Shea (I agree with everything in fact) he’s a donkey. It was a frustrating game and we have the ability to do so much better…
September 8th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
I’m not a big soccer fan. If I was, I certainly wouldn’t be an Irish soccer fan. It’s as drab and depressing as a limp episode of Eastenders.
Having said that, I do enjoy watching a good game. Thierry Henry, despite being our executioner last night, is a joy to watch. Va-va-voom and all that. Flair and grace in equal measure, the man spins a silken trail of elegance around bewildered opposition, and it’s beautiful to behold.
My neighbours inadvertently tell me when a match is worth watching. They’re big Chelsea/Dublin GAA/Irish soccer fans, and the appropriate flag flies outside their house on match days. I can hear through the thin wall we share if a match is a thriller, there’s shouts and groans and cursing to beat the band. Plates smash sometimes.
Last night?
Not a peep.
Nuff said.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
I think that’s harsh on Morrisson. He’s scored 3 goals in this group and is only 1 behind Robbie Keane. Henry scored only his second in the group last night.
I agree with pretty much everything else.
September 8th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
UI, I just find Clinton M so inconsistent, he’s way too patchy and I really felt he was awful last night. But isn’t it another indicator of the low standard of Irish international football (and our even lower expectations of the team) that we think 3 goals from a striker is great?!
Thierry’s goal was superb. I think my brother (who I watched it with) put the mockers on it by saying early in the game: “Ah sure Henry bashes them in for Arsenal and never plays well for France” and then the 67th minute came along…
September 9th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Yeah, how about David Connolly. Surely having him on the bench would be a million times better than Norwich bench-warmer and general donkey, Gary Doherty. Kevin ‘Zenadine’ Kilbane was painful and Kerr could surely have made that switch sooner. O’Shea isn’t fulfilling his potential but he was still involved in one of our best attacking moves and didn’t make a fool of himself in his defensive duties. Clinton was causing them all kinds of problems in the first half doing his favourite thing: acting as a target man, but Robbie Keane looked very poor. We know that we can defend (forget home game with Isreal) but we need to be much more creative in attack or we can forget about this World Cup. So, please Brian, no more Doherty - for crying out loud! We’ve got McGeady and Connolly - why not use them?
September 10th, 2005 at 11:50 am
I think you’re all being harsh. The first eleven we put out had to be the first choice. You could argue Finnan for Carr or Kavanagh for Kilbane but neither of those alternatives would have made a blind bit of difference. David Connolly should be in the squad but the French defence would have had him for breakfast, even if Boumsong was a little unsteady for a while. Connolly’s had plenty of chances before and not taken them.
Personally I would have started Harte and played O’Shea in the middle because our set-pieces are pure muck when he doesn’t play and France wouldn’t exploit his lack of pace, but Kerr would never do something like that in a game like the other night.
It’s very easy to shout for someone like McGeady, Flood or Elliot but, while each has talent, they have done nothing to deserve a starting place on any grounds other than “trying something different”. It reminds me of the ridiculous calls for Liam Miller to be brought to the World Cup instead of Lee Carsley.
I watch our U-21s, there is nothing coming through and I actually think that if we don’t qualify for this tournament we won’t qualify for any for a very long time. Do you realise we look like being seeded 4th for the next Euro qualifiers?
We have to remember that our players are limited, play in limited premiership teams and that our only remotely talented striker has had bugger all first team football so far this season. France may have struggled the last couple of years but they still have class all over the pitch and, ultimately, class comes through no matter how many heroic performances where a minnow catches a big team out you can think of.
People noticed that we didn’t get a sniff in the second half. It wasn’t because we disimproved it was because France fixed the mistakes they were making at half time. Boumsong stopped fouling Morrison and Sagnol and Dhorasoo snuffed out the Duff and that was it - we wouldn’t have scored if we were still playing. They won because they have a touch of class that we don’t.
The friendlies have really fooled people into believing we’re better than we are. We haven’t beaten a remotely half decent team away from home in a competitive match since Scotland in ‘87 or beaten one at home since Holland in 2001 - the biggest fluke of a game you’re ever likely to witness.
I don’t know if it’s from watching relative egg-chasing success, or the Saipan thing, that has people shiting on that we should be capable of beating anybody. That’s just guff. It’s like suggesting that by playing with more passion, getting stuck in and whatever other cliches-of-the-talentless you want to use, a team like Charlton could win the Premiership. They might beat an Arsenal once in a blue moon but it doesn’t disguise their limitations and people need to realise that about us too.
September 11th, 2005 at 12:38 am
dealga,
The Holland game wasn’t a fluke. We were simply the better team - even with 10 men.
“It’s like suggesting that by playing with more passion, getting stuck in and whatever other cliches-of-the-talentless you want to use, a team like Charlton could win the Premiership. They might beat an Arsenal once in a blue moon but it doesn’t disguise their limitations and people need to realise that about us too. ”
Bullshit. Greece won Euro 2004 and they didn’t do it by playing like superstars.
Hey Sinead, did you notice David Connolly grabbed a goal in the Premiership on Saturday? Should we try and lure him back for the Cyprus game?
September 11th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
I suggest you get a tape and watch it again. It was a great win but still it was a flukey game of football. Anyway that doesn’t change my point. Our history of qualifying campaigns shows that we draw against the big teams and beat the minnows - The baltic states, the part-timers and countries that have only existed since 1989. The problem is there are now fewer and fewer minnows and we have fewer players playing at the top levels of football than we had.
The worst thing about Greece winning Euro 2004 is that it has been the lifeline for this argument that relatively mediocre teams should be expected to compete with the big teams. Denmark in 1992 is another example of results conspiring to deliver the odd shock. But they are still odd shocks and it doesn’t automatically follow that we should expect to punch consistently at the level of France, Spain, England, Germany etc. Besides all those countries (including Greece and Israel) have far stronger domestic leagues than we do, which gives them a strength in depth that we will never have.
My point is about the expectation level people have. Neither the quality of our pool of players nor our history in competitive games justifies it. In all competitions since we started the Italia ‘90 qualifiers in 1989 we have beaten the following seeded teams:
Spain WCQ 89
Italy WCF 94
Portugal ECQ 95
Croatia ECQ 98
Yugoslavia ECQ 99
Holland WCQ 01
that’s 6 matches in 16 years and each of those qualifiers was at home.
September 11th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
dealga
“I suggest you get a tape and watch it again. It was a great win but still it was a flukey game of football”
It wasn’t flukey. Holland bottled it. When they went 1-0 down they panicked and had about four strikers on the pitch. It was a well deserved win thanks largely to Roy Keane’s display.
“The worst thing about Greece winning Euro 2004 is that it has been the lifeline for this argument that relatively mediocre teams should be expected to compete with the big teams. Denmark in 1992 is another example of results conspiring to deliver the odd shock. But they are still odd shocks and it doesn’t automatically follow that we should expect to punch consistently at the level of France, Spain, England, Germany etc”
LOL. That’s nonsense and you know it. You don’t win a major football tournament through ‘odd shocks’. Greece won because they played with heart and passion and they deserved to win. If Greece can do it, so can Ireland. In the 2002 World Cup, a very average German team made the final. If things had gone differently, Ireland could have been there.
“My point is about the expectation level people have. Neither the quality of our pool of players nor our history in competitive games justifies it.”
You leave out the major problem - when we had the best bunch of players in our history, we had a tactically inept manager who had no faith in the team and forced it to play defensive, route 1 football.
Going back through history is pointless unless your point is to show what a bad manager Jack Charlton was.
September 17th, 2005 at 9:15 am
i’m asking myself: how can it be that i’ve never ran through your site before? it’s a great one! naked truth: http://interactive.usc.edu/members/students/2005/09/carcassonne.php , there was once this guy