A World Cup but then what for struggling Irish football?
ood humour fills the air as the Friday night lights are switched on at Maginn Park, Buncrana, for the final time in a traumatic season. Derry City’s supporters still recall their first game at their temporary home last March, when the floodlights failed midway through the first half. “Make sure you’ve put your euro in the meter,” someone shouts. The light comes on, flickers and endures. There is a lusty cheer.
Welcome to the League of Ireland. The away dressing room is a portable cabin and the press box, perched on scaffolding, is reached via a ladder. The home players stop to chat with friends and family on their way to the pitch for the warm-up. Everyone seems to know everyone and there is a warmth, an intimacy, that is seldom found even at League Two level in England these days. Derry have been without a home all season while their Brandywell Stadium has been renovated, but there is a homely feel to Maginn Park, across the border in Co Donegal. A family atmosphere has been needed more than ever since fans, players and staff alike were stunned by the sudden death of their captain Ryan McBride in March.
For Derry’s fans, the final game of the season is all about paying tribute to McBride. For the visitors from St Patrick’s Athletic, in danger of being relegated for the first time in their 88-year history, it is a nerve-fraught evening. The match ends 1-1 and St Pats survive, with Galway United relegated instead. As the St Pat’s players and supporters salute each other in a post-match love-in, someone lets off a flare. Not for the first time that evening, the brooding figure of Roy Keane comes to mind. It is not hard to imagine what Keane, now the assistant manager of the Republic of Ireland, would make of fireworks to celebrate avoiding relegation or indeed of the friendliness that pervades the atmosphere throughout. Still, no corporate hospitality, so it is swings and roundabouts, really.
Tomorrow Northern Ireland face Switzerland at Windsor Park in the first leg of a World Cup qualification play-off. Forty-eight hours later, the Republic take on Denmark in Copenhagen. Both Irish nations surpassed expectations by qualifying for Euro 2016, going on to reach the knockout stage, and are now 180 minutes from a place at next summer’s World Cup finals in Russia. Against a backdrop of handwringing both north and south of the border — worries about poor facilities at club and grassroots level, a lack of qualified coaches and a declining number of players finding their way to the promised land of the Premier League — that seems as extraordinary as it does uplifting.
The Republic fell to 70th in the Fifa world rankings in 2013 but have risen to 26th under Martin O’Neill. Northern Ireland’s transformation under Michael O’Neill, from 119th in April 2013 to 23rd in the latest rankings, is even more striking. It looks like a glorious period for Irish football, on both sides of the border, but there is concern about what lies ahead, about where the next generation of players is coming from.
Of the 27 players in the Republic’s squad for their play-off games, 12 are aged 30 or over and, of the remainder, only five (Ciaran Clark, James McClean, David Meyler, Robbie Brady and Jeff Hendrick) have 20 or more caps. A spate of international retirements is expected once this World Cup campaign is over — whether that is in Dublin after the second leg next Tuesday or in Russia next summer.
The situation is similarly stark in the Northern Ireland squad; of 27 players, 12 are over the age of 30 and there is a lack of top-level pedigree among many of the remainder. Their only four Premier League players are Gareth McAuley, 37, Chris Brunt, 32, Steven Davis, also 32, and Jonny Evans, 29. Their progress under Michael O’Neill has defied all odds and expectations, a triumph of spirit and organisation, but the job is only going to get harder. “Is there a conveyor belt of players coming through?”
Kenny Shiels, the Derry manager, asks with regard to both Northern Ireland and the Republic. “Probably not, so both countries will probably find themselves looking again to players with English accents. That doesn’t sit well with me. We have to try to develop better players. That’s not easy.”
The Premier League is not the be-all and end-all, but player development in Northern Ireland and the Republic is typically judged on how many players make it “across the water”. While the number of English players appearing in the Premier League has fallen steadily over the past two and a half decades, figures from the Republic initially held up well as Shay Given, John O’Shea, Richard Dunne, Damien Duff, Robbie Keane and others established themselves at leading English clubs.
Players from the Republic (including those who have switched allegiance on the basis of dual nationality) made 663 Premier League appearances in the 1992-93 season, which climbed to 759 in 2003-04 and to a high of 768 in 2011-12. That figure has dropped sharply in each of the past five seasons — from 768 to 575 to 501 to 480 to 424 to 400 last term. The projected figure for this season is 321, led by Brady, Shane Duffy, Stephen Ward, Shane Long, McClean and Hendrick as well as three English-born players in Rob Elliot, Clark and Harry Arter.
The equivalent figures for Northern Ireland are no less troubling. From a peak of 333 in the 1994-95 campaign, the number of Premier League appearances made by Northern Irish players fell to 154 last season. This season’s projected figure is 100. These figures are not cited to downplay the importance of any other league — the League of Ireland, the NIFL Premiership or indeed the Sky Bet Championship or Scottish Premiership — but to reflect the reality. The best players from Northern Ireland and the Republic are always urged to pursue careers in England or at the biggest Scottish clubs, whether joining an academy at 16 or trying, like Ward with Bohemians, Seamus Coleman with Sligo Rovers or McClean with Derry, to make the jump a little further down the line.
Unlike in the 1990s, there is no longer the expectation of an Irish contingent in the dressing room of every Premier League academy. “The world has changed,” one figure in the Republic says. “Our best lads don’t have the Liverpools and the Manchester Uniteds fighting over them like they did in the past. Those clubs are trawling the world for the best young talent. Also, the development structures here are in desperate need of modernisation.
“You could have two brilliant eight-year-olds — one in Manchester, one in Dublin. One goes to Manchester City’s academy from the age of eight, gets the best possible coaching, signs for them at 16. The other goes to one of the local clubs in Dublin, like Home Farm, Belvedere, Cherry Orchard or St Kevin’s. Those clubs do a brilliant job, but they can’t match what the English clubs are laying on, training-wise, facilities-wise, education-wise, from a young age. So how does the boy from Dublin fulfil his potential? Even if he goes to City at 16, he’s trying to make up for lost time.”
This realisation has increased pressure on both the FA of Ireland (FAI) and Northern Irish FA (IFA) to make significant investments in youth development. Unlike in England, the clubs cannot meet the cost. The FAI set up “emerging talent centres” across the Republic as well as 11 “centres of excellence” at regional level for the best young players. The IFA has launched its own initiatives aimed both at doubling participation in football by 2025 and identifying the best prospects.
The FAI invested “more than €20 million” (£17.6 million) in grassroots football last year. According to the many critics of the FAI’s chief executive, John Delaney, that is not enough. There is more money in football than in hurling or Gaelic football, but those sports, which draw far bigger crowds, are not in competition with other European nations.
The feeling among many League of Ireland clubs is that their competition has become an afterthought, with money steered towards the national team. The argument, increasingly, is that without investment at club level, the national team cannot hope to sustain their resurgence. Clubs ask where the next generation of international players are coming from. Increasingly, apart from the old fallback option of exploiting the ancestry rules, the answer is the League of Ireland and the NIFL Premiership.
“Those who play over here for a few years and go over to England a little later have a better chance of making it, in my view, than those who leave at 16,” Shiels says. “A lot go away at 16, come back at 19 and don’t even play football after that.
“You look at what James McClean has done. He was here at Derry. So was Shane Duffy. So was Niall McGinn [the Northern Ireland forward], who went to Celtic. But there needs to be investment in the league.”
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