There's an interview with Ireland in the Athletic today. I'm not sure how much oxygen to give this guy. He states that he is working hard to get back to playing in the Premier League again, doing private fitness sessions, and he reckons he has the body of 27 or 28 year-old so could do 3 or 4 years.
Then, the piece goes as follows:
He will also say for the first time that, yes, he wants to play again for the Republic of Ireland. “The dream would be: get back with a club, smash it, go back to Ireland and undo all that scenario.”
Further bits on his Ireland career:
Ireland will probably never be allowed to forget the time he made up the story about his grandmother dying to get compassionate leave from international duty. The reality was his girlfriend had had a miscarriage. The lie was uncovered and, panicking, Ireland tried to make out it was his other grandmother.
Don’t overlook the fact, however, that the principal reason why he gave up playing for his country, aged 21, was because he wanted to be a good dad.
“It came down to prioritising. Can I leave my kids for two weeks to play for Ireland? As much as I’d loved to have done that, I couldn’t. I was away at matches, stressed out of my head because of my kids. I had no support. I had to pick option A or option B. But of course, I wish things could have been different.
“Why wouldn’t I want to play for my country 150 times? Why wouldn’t I want to be an Irish hero? Who would turn their nose up at that? Why would it ever be my agenda to be disliked in Ireland? I had death threats, I had all sorts. Christ, I didn’t want to leave the way I did. I didn’t want to be disliked in my own country but it came out of circumstances which were tough.”
Ireland will later say that one of the reasons why he thought he could get away with Granny-gate was because he did not comprehend what fame actually was. He had made his Irish debut at 19 and scored four times in six appearances but he didn’t understand what came with it. “I genuinely didn’t think it would get into the press,” he says. “I didn’t realise the onslaught because I didn’t know how big I was.”
The bigger regret, however, will always be the breakdown of his relationship with Mancini.
“He definitely had an issue with me, 100 per cent. Giovanni Trapattoni was the manager of Ireland at the time and they were best mates. Mancini kept saying to me, ‘Go back, go back. You need to go back to play’. I said to him, ‘Right now, I’m not even playing for Man City. That has to be my focus’ but he wouldn’t let up.
“I was always first to team meetings because I was so good with timekeeping. I’d walk into the room and sometimes, it was only me and him there. I’d think, ‘Oh ****!’ — I knew what was coming. We might have a really important game the next day but he wouldn’t stop talking about me going back to Ireland. In the end, I said, ‘Look, get Trapattoni over here, we’ll sit down, have a coffee and try to hammer it out together’. It never happened though.”
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Originally Posted by tetsujin1979
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