http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/spo...6SPS1KERR.html
SOCCER: Tom Humphries talks to Brian Kerr about World Cup elimination, relations with the media, and what the future holds.
He took calls from those who mattered to him. He avoided the papers. He met with Fintan Drury and talked and talked.
He felt raw and disappointed and he thought again and again about it all. Played entire games in slow motion in his head. He did the Late Late rather than vanish entirely. He escaped the house and bolted for a bit of solitude.
When he sits down in short sleeves and jeans with a tape machine whirring in front of him, he looks drawn and tired but the tightness which has lined his face for the past fortnight is receding. Life goes on.
It's the middle of Sunday morning. The sun is shining. Normally he'd have the papers devoured along with his breakfast. Not today. Still raw.
Tough week, you say.
"It's funny, but in the run-in to a game, being in that cocoon or bubble we live in, you know everything is going on out there but the reality is that you don't know that much about it. You spend no time looking at it. I didn't see the television at all from the time we came in on the Tuesday before Cyprus until I got home late on Thursday morning. It's just stuff that's out there in the atmosphere.
"It was a tough week because we didn't win the match at the end. It's frustrating and annoying. I deal with it by knowing I gave it absolutely everything. Since the draw was made I've thought of nothing but about how to achieve getting to Germany. That's what we've done, we've given it everything. It's been difficult to deal with that. It's been a tough week in that sense. I knew the consequences if we won, if we lost or drew. You have to prepare though just for the match itself.
"I knew we had Roy (Keane) suspended but then he got the broken bone in his foot. You say what a blow that is but you get on with it. Then Duffer (Damien Duff) went. Another blow. When Shay (Given) got hurt (on Monday) there was a time in that evening when I wrote off any chance of him playing. I spoke to Packie (Bonner) about Paddy Kenny playing, that was it.
"There was a cloud around but it didn't affect the professionalism of the staff. We felt good going into the match. The Cyprus thing was awful in many ways, the performance wasn't up to scratch at all. I was able to rationalise it compared to the Swiss match. We got the result and got the win. If we'd beaten Switzerland, Cyprus was just another statistic. It was tough, but tough for everyone."
Do you carry regrets about the way you've done things, both with the team and the media?
"No. The knowledge I would have about the team and the selections and who was right to play in a match and what their current form is, in many ways would be almost unique to me. Nobody else sees the players play as often.
"It's an unusual situation in Ireland that some of the loudest voices never see the players playing other than what they see on television, which is not a great way to judge players. I would never be satisfied with that. You only see them when the ball is near them. I'm the one who goes and sees them, looks at them closely, talks to the clubs and coaches, watches them in training. Nobody here takes the interest in the opposition that we take. We're dismissive if we don't recognise players' names from the Champions League. That's why you have the job. You do the work. You'll do that, spend the time doing it. Maybe there's changes that didn't go as well as you would have hoped and you say afterwards perhaps the other option might have worked, but no regrets.
"Two years ago we lost in Switzerland in the last game of the group. The big one back then was why didn't I play Liam Miller. Everybody suddenly knew that Liam Miller was going to save the world. Most people wouldn't have known Liam Miller if he had come up and given them a kick in the head. They still wouldn't because he is a lovely quiet lad. Everyone had this opinion but I haven't seen anyone since asking why he didn't play the other night.
"Or Stephen Elliot in the Israel match. I didn't bring him on after Robbie (Keane) hurt his shoulder. He had so little experience. They hadn't seen him play. How many people go to the see the under-21 matches away from home? I've seen Stephen since he was 14 or 15. I took him a year early into the under-17s. He was injured nearly all that year with his back.
"Anyway I'd go and see him at (Manchester) City where he was in the 19s with a gang of Irish lads. He was the young fella among them. In the week prior to the Israel match, two weeks before it, he wasn't in the Sunderland team. I spoke extensively with people at Sunderland who said he was struggling, he'd picked up a virus in the summer and hadn't come out of it strong.
"In training, when he came with us we were waiting for him to show us something. Robbie hadn't been playing much. We needed him but there was nothing there. It wasn't Stephen. So on the day we put Graham (Kavanagh) on and Duffer up front. They got a hold and you know the rest.
"In the Faroes we had a couple of sessions and something clicked with Stephen and we had virtually no choice though but to play him. It's fine-line stuff."
What about the media though? You're general handling of it?
"The media? I handled it in a way which they haven't accepted. They have failed to understand what it is like to do the job in the way that I do it. When Jack (Charlton) or Mick (McCarthy) was doing the job how many times a year were they around? How many times a day was there access? How long were they at press conferences or that sort of stuff? With the youths or Pat's there were very few people interested. I used to hustle to get a few lines. Now ever since Mick or Jack had the national job the number of media people has just exploded. Websites, local radio, more interest from England. I get asked to do anything going. Independent producers. Reality shows. Panel shows. Everything. For what? Will it help me make a decision about picking the team? I'll either look foolish or it will improve my profile? I don't need that. I don't think journalism respects that. I do the job, informed on top of it, planned, decided about where we are going and who we'll see.
"The FAI have had various people in the role of media officer. It's tough. I don't see Sven (Goran Eriksson) on the telly every day of the week. I don't see daily press conferences. I don't see people getting upset that he doesn't do sideline interviews before matches. In the week of Cyprus and Switzerland I spent five hours doing media. I logged it. Then there's the calls, ferrying messages from the physio to the PR man, having to make sure with the precise phraseology about injuries, et cetera.
"At one stage Pat (Costello, the FAI's PR guy) needed an update on Shay. I said, 'Pat it happened three hours ago. We've done a lot of things since. I can't tell you if he'll be better.' Add that into an hour to announce the squad. That is a half day for me on the week before the team come in. Get ready, make sure that every player knows his position in advance, get ready, get washed, get out to the venue. It never works out, there's an extension of it somewhere.
"It's all just putting quotes from me out there. Surely that job is to analyse and to look at things and to work out the permutations. It appears to me to be lazy. We'll fill stuff with quotes from me.
"What am I going to say about why I left a player out? I'm going through the motions of doing it. I try to give them a little bit every day to get a story. Tell them an incident that made a difference in my thinking.
