How Far We've Come

[ramondo]

When Gary Mackay helped secure the totally unexpected Scotland win in Sofia that sent the Republic Of Ireland into the 1988 European Championships, little did we know then how our fortunes as Ireland supporters were about to change.

That amazing stroke of good luck helped undo some of the hurt and misfortune of previous campaigns (particularly the 1982 World Cup qualifiers) and was the beginning of about six years of never-dreamt-of success:

Euro '88: The glorious, lucky win against England; the superb performance against Russia (Whelan!). Sure, there was disappointment following Holland's late goal, but at least we were there! We were playing against the big boys and holding our own.

Italia '90: The relative ease of qualification - we knew we were going to get there even though it was our first time; the magnificent draws against England and Holland; the Egypt game mysteriously erased from our memories; the stomach-churning but ultimately joyous penalty shoot-out against Romania.

USA '94: Alan Mc Laughlin's equaliser at Windsor Park followed by the confusion of the last minutes of Spain v Denmark (what score do we want?); Ray Houghton's (again!) goal against Italy; the not so memorable Mexico, Norway and Holland games - but again we were there.

We then went through eight years of somehow conspiring not to qualify for anything before our sense of national pride soared again for the Japanese and Korean adventures of two years ago.

That's how it happened; we tasted a degree of success and liked it. Our boys in green performed heroics and filled us with pride. But now we want more, demand more and if we don't get to Germany '06 some of our supporters are going to be angry and critical: of the players, the manager, the FAI, anyone.

How did it come to this? For sure, the performance against Cyprus was shocking, but this has always been the way with Ireland. As a kid I remember listening to a World Cup qualifier game on the radio (RTE not bothering to televise it) and jumping around the living room when Frank Stapleton scrambled in the winner in injury time - against Malta!

That said, we've had too many poor games in this qualifying group. Any success we've had in qualifying groups in the past has usually included a significant win against a decent side, the likes of Holland, Spain, Portugal or whoever. We've struggled in a relatively easy group and even if we do manage to beat the Swiss, the play-offs would again, I fear, break our hearts. It's a poor state of affairs when we're hoping against hope for a home win against the likes of Switzerland.

We have to be realistic. For years I remember laughing at the half-time discussions on the BBC during yet another disappointing England performance, until one day someone came out and said it: "We're just not as good as we think we are". They were still living off the success of 1966 and couldn't move on. Yes, it was true and I fear past success is haunting this Ireland side too. We do have players who can turn in an occasional great performance, but such players are too few, their great performances too scarce.

The only hope I can see for us on Wednesday is a lucky win against the Swiss and the French somehow not beating the Cypriots. For this to happen may require calling on the Gods to pay back some of the bad luck we've had in qualifying competitions in the past, but they've listened before.

After all, no one ever expected to remember Gary Mackay.

:)

[robbie_B]

Spot on. I do think we need to get back to playing our style of football as Niall Quinn said we are Irish not Dutch!!!

[ramondo]

Dunno exactly what he meant by that. Maybe something like:

When Crystal Palace shared Selhurst Park with Wimbledon it was said you could tell which team was playing at home on any particular week from the outside. If you looked to the top of the stand and saw the ball being endlessly hoofed up the field so high it cleared the stand, you could be sure it was Wimbledon at home!

Well, Jack Charlton advocated it as well, but he was a lucky ******* too.

[Dotsy]

When Gary Mackay helped secure the totally unexpected Scotland win in Sofia that sent the Republic Of Ireland into the 1988 European Championships, little did we know then how our fortunes as Ireland supporters were about to change.

That amazing stroke of good luck helped undo some of the hurt and misfortune of previous campaigns (particularly the 1982 World Cup qualifiers) and was the beginning of about six years of never-dreamt-of success:

Euro '88: The glorious, lucky win against England; the superb performance against Russia (Whelan!). Sure, there was disappointment following Holland's late goal, but at least we were there! We were playing against the big boys and holding our own.

Italia '90: The relative ease of qualification - we knew we were going to get there even though it was our first time; the magnificent draws against England and Holland; the Egypt game mysteriously erased from our memories; the stomach-churning but ultimately joyous penalty shoot-out against Romania.

USA '94: Alan Mc Laughlin's equaliser at Windsor Park followed by the confusion of the last minutes of Spain v Denmark (what score do we want?); Ray Houghton's (again!) goal against Italy; the not so memorable Mexico, Norway and Holland games - but again we were there.

We then went through eight years of somehow conspiring not to qualify for anything before our sense of national pride soared again for the Japanese and Korean adventures of two years ago.

That's how it happened; we tasted a degree of success and liked it. Our boys in green performed heroics and filled us with pride. But now we want more, demand more and if we don't get to Germany '06 some of our supporters are going to be angry and critical: of the players, the manager, the FAI, anyone.

How did it come to this? For sure, the performance against Cyprus was shocking, but this has always been the way with Ireland. As a kid I remember listening to a World Cup qualifier game on the radio (RTE not bothering to televise it) and jumping around the living room when Frank Stapleton scrambled in the winner in injury time - against Malta!

That said, we've had too many poor games in this qualifying group. Any success we've had in qualifying groups in the past has usually included a significant win against a decent side, the likes of Holland, Spain, Portugal or whoever. We've struggled in a relatively easy group and even if we do manage to beat the Swiss, the play-offs would again, I fear, break our hearts. It's a poor state of affairs when we're hoping against hope for a home win against the likes of Switzerland.

We have to be realistic. For years I remember laughing at the half-time discussions on the BBC during yet another disappointing England performance, until one day someone came out and said it: "We're just not as good as we think we are". They were still living off the success of 1966 and couldn't move on. Yes, it was true and I fear past success is haunting this Ireland side too. We do have players who can turn in an occasional great performance, but such players are too few, their great performances too scarce.

The only hope I can see for us on Wednesday is a lucky win against the Swiss and the French somehow not beating the Cypriots. For this to happen may require calling on the Gods to pay back some of the bad luck we've had in qualifying competitions in the past, but they've listened before.

After all, no one ever expected to remember Gary Mackay.

:)


Jesus Ramondo you have brought back some memories. I remember listening to the Malta match on the radio as well. From what I remember we created chances in that match but failed to finish them off. We still hammered them 8:0 in LR (our biggest competetive win I think) in the same campaign. I agree that our expectations have risen since those days but I don't think that is a bad thing. You need to have confidence to achieve anything in this life but at least we are not arrogant. My gripe with the performance on Saturday is not that we played badly but that the players apperared to me to lack a sense of pride in playing for their country. They looked like they didn't give a ****e that we were been outplayed by the likes of Cyprus and should have got beaten if we are been honest. I can recall teams in the past playing badly but never playing with such a lack of pride. Setanta showed the 3:2 win in the 1982 qualifiers on Saturday afternoon. As a team we played badly that day but the players skill showed a desire to play and didn't give up until the final whistle.

[OwlsFan]

Well, Jack Charlton advocated it as well, but he was a lucky ******* too.

Lucky. This one really bugs me. We finished top of the group in 1987 with the most points. No luck there. We only lost one game in the campaign away to Bulgaria. If the Bulgarians had lost the first game at home to Scotland rather than the last there would be no talk of luck.

We weren't lucky under Charlton when the Dutch got an offside goal in 1988, when Packie knocked the ball out to Schilachi in 1990, when Aldo had a perfectly good goal ruled out in Spain, when Packie threw the ball into his net against the Dutch in 2004 and we had to play our high tempo game in the hottest place in the World Cup in the USA etc.

Let's keep the myth going that we were lucky and as for "no one" expected Scotland to win - I took the day off work to watch the game, RTE televised it live (for a change in those days) so there much have been some expectation in the nation.

Mick Mc was never blessed with much luck either until the Holland 1-0.

Looks live the weather will be foul tomorrow. An evening game in the rain under floodlights. I feel the stuff of legends in my bones tomorrow after all the negativity around.

[dutchie]

I wonder do we expect more or is it the media that expects more,we were always a nation who tried there best and are improving all the time,our underage structures are the best in the country,but with the english rags ie.mirror sun star,slating us when we do dadly,the same way they do to their english team,its no wonder people begin to question our team and our manager.
I think its time to get 100% behind our team and manager and start publishing supportive material and throw the rags in the bin.

[thejollyrodger]

Our underage structures are the best in the world ? hmmm.. we have work to do there.


Nurturing our home talent




Emmet Malone On Soccer: With tomorrow's game against the Swiss potentially marking the end of the international road for some of the senior team's best known and longest established players, there has been growing concern over the apparent lack of emerging Irish talent at a time when the manager's options are already thin on the ground.

The changing patterns of player development at British clubs and the growing number of youngsters brought in from continental Europe and beyond have led to a significant drop in the number of youngsters from this country ending up in the academies. The logical conclusion, it would appear, is that fewer players of international quality are going to come off the production line.

The situation isn't helped by the fact the club careers of three of Ireland's most promising young stars of the past few years, Liam Miller, Colin Healy and Aidan McGeady, have, for one reason or another, stalled. Others who were obliged to endure the "next big thing" tag for a spell in their teens have seen their prospects plummet dramatically.

For all the setbacks, the FAI's technical director, Packie Bonner, maintains things are not nearly as bad as they have been portrayed.

"For a start," he says, "we have a senior squad the nucleus of which is young but very experienced. Players like Damien Duff, Robbie Keane and Richard Dunne are going to be around for quite a few years yet. Of course, we could always do with plugging a few gaps here and there, but for the most part we have time on our side and there are some very good young Irish players coming through the system."

The Irish end of the system, however, is about to change dramatically with the launch soon of the FAI's Emerging Talent Programme, a long-awaited scheme to identify youngsters with potential and provide substantially greater resources to assist with their development.

The project will result in kids around the country being offered the chance to do additional training with specialist coaches at regional centres. Mindful of the problems there have been previously when schoolboy clubs felt their best players were being poached, no attempt will be made to take the players away from their existing teams, the aim will simply be to ensure they get the sort of coaching required to get the best out of them.

The intention is that there will be a "finishing school" here in Ireland, with players brought through to senior level, possibly with a good deal of input from Eircom League clubs who will be major beneficiaries from the entire project.

For the moment, though, it is conceded our best players will continue to be "finished" in Britain, although their prospects of cracking the first team at a really big club are almost minuscule.

"To end up in the first team at a club like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal an Irish lad really would have to be very talented, and it's because the bar has been raised by the number of foreign players coming in that it's probably not such a bad thing at all that the clubs are taking over fewer young lads from here," says Ireland under-21 manager Don Givens. "It's something of a relief that they're being more selective, because what was happening before was that they were hoovering up numbers just in case they missed the next Damien Duff."

One reason for this changing, points out the FAI's careers development officer, Eoin Hand, is that compensation must be paid to a player's previous clubs when he first turns professional. For the big boys the money is small beer, but in the lower leagues a manager is going to be careful about who gets offered deals when each one effectively costs £50,000 in payments to the schoolboy outfits that helped to develop his skills.

A priority of the new FAI programme, meanwhile, will be to improve technical ability. That many of our leading teenagers are lagging behind in this department is conceded, although there is still surprise at just how disparaging Manchester United's academy director Les Kershaw was recently when he told the Daily Telegraph that, while his club is working hard to develop gifted young English players: "Some clubs would rather take a rag-arsed Irish lad at 16, who is a hardened competitor because the Dublin and District Schools League is tough but he doesn't have great technique."

"The funny thing is," says Hand, "clubs like United have tended to be at the front of the queue for the best lads from the DDSL and they'd be the first ones to bend or break the rules if there was a lad they really wanted."

On that score the FAI is unlikely to make real progress.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/sport/2005/1011/2417759892SP1EMMETCOL.html


© The Irish Times

I think we have little luck with irish soccer. anything we got was through hard work and lots of effort. A lot of countries resent the irish sucess especially FIFA et al the burocrats.

Im really going to support Ireland tomorrow night and hopefully we can get a victory. I couldnt stomach a draw or worse to lose.

[ramondo]

Let's keep the myth going that we were lucky and as for "no one" expected Scotland to win - I took the day off work to watch the game, RTE televised it live (for a change in those days) so there much have been some expectation in the nation.

It was lucky in the sense that everyone thought, except you maybe, that it was all over before the game. As for taking the day off work, it was an evening kickoff - did you work nights?

Anyway, Bulgaria hadn't been beaten at home for years and Scotland weren't exactly on top form, having lost to us as at Hamden (a lucky goal!). If anything, most of us would have expected them to lose intentionally - though there was talk of the promise of Champagne from Charlton - I don't know how true that was.

Con Houlihan wrote a piece about it in the Press a few days later and talked about going to a city pub after work 'just to see what happened' and finding it deserted apart from one other guy at the bar.

He finished it by saying :


..he turned to me after the final whistle and said, "Jaysus, isn't it great."

It certainly was.

I'm sure the two of them rocked the town that night.:)