I think that performance last night was to keep MO’N in a job & there is no shame in that. The plan was to stay compact. If we opened up last night and got tore apart again he’d have been under so much pressure his position would have been untenable.
We lack ball players. Persisting with the likes of Walters & McClean is only going to lead us to direct football.
I’m expecting another borefest Tuesday night but hopefully by time next set of fixtures come around Rice has agreed to come back.
Better what did you call them? Players.....was it? You actually called them players?Originally Posted by Cathalsmart
If a barman couldn't pull a pint would you call him a barman? If a mechanic couldn't fix your car would you call him a mechanic?
Forget Martin O'Neill and Roy Keane. It has nothing to do with them at this stage.
It is all about those imposters in green shirts who are making you part with your hard earned money under false pretenses.
MON and ROY organise the team and set the team up to play a certain way, you reap what you sow here.
I played football weekly for 20 years or so and followed every Irish match of the Irish team for three decades. I'm on a break since the 5-1 last year.
What annoys me is that we are not really trying to play football. We have become a even more rubbish version of England pre-Southgate in that our management and squad think that we can win with fight, passion, belief and manliness. That's mystical bla bla, I have to time for that. It's depressing to watch.
Why even bother taking part in football tournaments if we don't try to play football? It's like showing up at the Olympic Diving competition and doing cannonballs. You'll get nowhere. People say we don't have the players but how do we know if we don't even try to play football? These players are all professional footballers with experience at decent clubs.
So, after 10 years of Trap and O'Neill (make that 12 years if you include the shambles that was Pinger), there's only so much torture my eyeballs can take.
Respect to those of you who still put up with it. Youse would make good prisoners of war. Unbreakable to the end.
At the same time, I think the fans need it to be made known that we can't be taken for granted. The FAI can't rely on us to just show up, buy tickets and fill the coffers year after year.
Thank God Above! Finally somebody who calls a spade a spade.
At least that would be fun to watch.
We don’t have the players is a nonsense argument. You could point to many other countries who have the same type of talent pool to pick from and can produce decent and effective displays and results.
Our players can produce performances week in week out in the top 2 English leagues. Why can’t they do the same with us? Because our management team cannot find, coach, deploy a coherent system. And claim they don’t have enough time to. WT absolute F planning do they do between intl breaks apart from crisis management of their own doing.
Lazy as F and they need to get gone.
passing game??? what passing game?
Let's assume O'Neill and Keane are the worst managers that ever drew breath. How does it stop our players from actually playing football when they cross the white lines?
As an Irish player you suddenly develop amnesia about all the internationals of the last few years when you hoofed the ball long for 90 minutes and got no reward?
You forget how to show for a ball, how to play a one two? How to spring a quick counter-attack? How to take an aerial ball on your chest instead of heading it back to the opposition?
You are spot on - you reap what you sow.
apart from duffy, doherty and coleman, when fit, what players are producing performances week in week out?
most of our players are in and out of their teams most of the time.
Last edited by jbyrne; 14/10/2018 at 8:43 PM.
Question for you. If you could wave a magic wand and be granted one of the following wishes, which would it be?
Have Declan Rice come on board and hope that he will be the player that totally transforms Ireland's style of play?
Or see a coaching system put in place which develops Irish kids to actually play proper football (like, I dunno let me think of a country that does it with a similar population - yeah I got it - Uruguay)
This is what I think too. We can see some examples around Europe of teams whose players are not better than ours overall, but whose team performances are clearly better than ours. They show just how much can be achieved by adopting a system which best exploits the resources at their disposal.
For the money available for the management team, we should absolutely expect no less than that, but we are not getting anywhere near it.
It is that simple for me - the FAI are paying enough to expect a management team who can consistently produce a team that is at least the sum of its parts, but the management team are consistently failing to do that.
Last edited by osarusan; 14/10/2018 at 9:07 PM.
I'm going to agree with jbyrne here in saying that there seems to be a bit of an overreaction to the performance (although I will admit I didn't see the game and will accept that our play was pretty poor and unadventurous)
While it's true that Denmark's players are not are not at the absolute top teams, they are still mostly EPL, Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga, Ligue 1 and Ajax players, which would be considered "top-tier" - by that definition 9 of their 12 who played last night play for "top-tier" teams, compared to 7 of our 14. While they were (thankfully) missing Eriksen, we were missing four EPL players (Coleman, Ward, Brady and McCarthy) plus two of our current striking options (Walters and Maguire). So a 0-0 draw against a team that took Croatia to penalties in the World Cup is a creditable result, especially after the two competitive hammerings we'd received, even if the performance was poor.
We also need to have a bit of perspective about the nature of this Nations League tournament and what it means to us. While it would be nice to top the group, get a second seeding for the qualifiers and get promoted to League A for next time around, even relegation to League C after a couple of losses and poor performances this time around would not be a disaster - even if we finish third and don't qualify through the regular qualifiers, we will still get a last-chance shot in the play-offs in March 2020 as long as no more than 4 teams from League C qualify through the "traditional" route. If 5 or 6 do, then last night's point could yet prove to be instrumental in ensuring we get that shot - it could also keep us in the League B play-offs, rather than getting dragged up to the League A play-offs. Note - two teams in League B currently have 0 points and one other has 1. It also keeps us in contention for a second-place position that would make us second-seeds for the main qualifiers.
So we still have something to play for in the Nations League tournament itself. However, we are still a team in transition, both in terms of formation and players. I know MON has come in for a lot of criticism for stubbornly sticking to a particular style of play, but he seems to be using this time to test a new formation (3-5-2/3-5-1-1) which, after a rocky start, seems to be starting to fit us. In terms of players, between retirements and injuries to key players, he appears to have been given lemons, but at least seems to be trying to make lemonade out of it by giving as many new players as is reasonable a chance to establish themselves in time for the main qualifiers. Last night seven players who I think are not yet fully established internationals got some valuable experience (Doherty, K Long, Arter, O'Dowda, Stevens, Robinson and O'Brien). This gives us a deeper pool of players to choose from come the March games. As a result, by the time those last-shot play-offs come around, we will have a better squad than we do now. We may even be able to add a couple of more options, if players like Jimmy Dunne, Aaron Connolly, Caoimhin Kelleher, Ronan Curtis and Josh Cullen advance their careers over the course of this season.
So I utterly disagree with mark12345, who says the best thing is to lose to Wales and tear everything down to build a different model - I know there are issues with MONKEANO (particularly the KEANO part) but O'Neill is already building a somewhat different model, albeit of necessity, and should be given a shot to see it through. In his two campaigns so far he has achieved the upper end of our reasonable expectations in one (reaching the last 16 in Euro 2016) and the lower end of our reasonable expectations in the other (second in the group, knocked out in the play-offs, albeit badly). I think he is still well capable of getting us through to the Euro 2020 finals and at this point we should only start talking about getting rid of him if he fails to do so or if the main qualifiers start really terribly and/or there is more trouble in the camp. After all, Mick McCarthy took three attempts to get us through to a major tournament.
The following players out of the most recent squad have appeared in greater than 75% of their teams league games this season:
Randolph
Duffy
Christie
Keogh
Egan
Stevens
Lenihan
McClean
Hendrick
Arter
O’Dowda
Hourihane
Williams
Browne
Long
Robinson
O’Brien
K Long, Clark, Williams, Meyler - not regulars
Maguire, Hogan - injures for most of season, regulars at time of injury.
McDermott - not the top 2 English leagues but regular.
Doyle - not in top 2 English leagues, not regular.
I agree.
Total overreaction.
We looked far more solid than we have in a year.
It’s an improvement.
Either our players are as bad as the players from San Marino, Andorra, Lichtenstein, Malta etc or it’s the embarrassingly amateurish coaching staff, take you’re pick. The free kick that Cyrus Christie was supposed to receiving in the 2nd half sums up this coaching staff.
If O’Neill was giving the Irish job the respect it deserves would he not jettison Roy Keane . Keane is a way more trouble than any coaching ability that he brings which appears to be very little .
The O’Neill managerial-ship could do with a coaching over-hall . Its time for O’Neill to bite the Bullet and tell Keane how it is . He then should be looking out for a coach that is willing and able to put the work in .
If O’Neill is unwillingly to go this way then he should leave with Roy Keane .
Why should the assistant manager take the blame and the actual manager get off scot free? Surely they must go as a pair? O'Neill is responsible for team selection, tactics and coaching. End of story.
Maybe, just maybe this is the most leaderless and talentless group of players we've ever had. Maybe it's the most directionless and tactically poor management team we've ever had. I'm inclined to think it's a perfect storm of old school management meets new school players and there's a fundamental breakdown in between.
One of the biggest criticisms of modern players is that they're over coached and have lost the ability to express themselves on the pitch. That's not just in terms of skill, that's adaptability too. They're coached specifically to play in systems and told where to be and when to be there on the pitch. When they meet a coaching team that just picks the team and expects them to figure it out for themselves, they're lost and that's evident on the pitch. There's not enough quality or leadership there to cover over the lack of a well defined and coached system.
O'Neill loves athletic players like McLean and Christie because they play more like the old school, they use their athleticism to cover ground and negate the lack of technical quality or a clear system. While we don't have a huge amount of quality coming through a lot of the players in the current squad are more technical and less physical, particularly around the midfield, players like Hourihan, Browne, Williams, Arter, Hendrick, O'Dowda. They've all proven to be decent players at premier league and championship level, yet they've all looked a bit lost in an Ireland jersey. For me that comes down to a lack of instruction and coaching from the management team, just as much as a lack of character and quality from the players.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Tallaght Stadium Regular
I agree. I heard this morning that Christie was only told where he was playing an hour before KO but that he had an inkling because of training. He has never played senior football in central midfield before.
Apparently hadn’t played that position since he was 14 .
I though he did ok for a player that had not played that position much . Another option for him for club and country . It worked reasonably well even though its not very good offensively . It will be interesting to see if they do it again against Wales . for some reason I doubt it . Wales would be fore-warned and would probably plan better to take advantage of a player playing in a position he is not experienced in .
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