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Have you forgotten what this jersey really means?
Vincent Hogan
Unison.ie
Tuesday October 10th 2006
Or have you become so comfortable, cosseted and wealthy that you simplyjust don't care anymore?
YOU want to believe that the Disneyfication of footballers' lives doesn't pare away core honesty.
That, behind the obese bank account, there will always remain the essence of a fighter. That the simple purity of competition will never cease to matter, never begin to blur.
But, maybe, that's like wanting to believe in scratch-cards and in e-mails from Nigerian bankers.
How does a young man stay grounded while earning - in a week - more than the national average industrial yearly wage for being unexceptional?
What perspective can he have when his agent gets his groceries?
Some years ago, I interviewed an Irish footballer in London. He had been roughly seven years a full-time professional without ever playing regular, first-team football.
Yet, on the day we met, he had just taken possession of a brand new Porsche. With great delight, he detailed the wonders of his purchase, not for a second seeing paradox in the glow of wealth and the absence of achievement.
Fantasy
Maybe we presume too much with people. We are all part of the fantasy and the lie, you see, paying our Sky Sports standing orders, kitting our children out in shirts uncannily like their old ones, thinking nothing of the Far East hot-houses from where they come, of the sponsors' logos and what they represent, turning a blind eye to the culture of grab.
We are, endlessly, indifferent to the till in the corner.
If young professional footballers aren't the most rounded or accomplished of humans, we can't exactly go around nodding gravely, like it's someone else's crime.
Most players aren't bad people. They just exist in bad environments. They mix with their public only when hurrying from players' entrance to car where, once inside, the privacy glass comes in useful for facilitating a brisk getaway.
Playing for Ireland tended to cut through that nonsense.
Under successive managers like John Giles, Eoin Hand, and Jack Charlton, no-one was allowed play precious in a green tracksuit and, by and large, no-one ever tried.
Supporters and media mingled freely with team.
Some of the lobbies that Charlton's men had to famously wade through were busier than Wall Street trading floors. It wasn't entirely comfortable at times and it wasn't entirely practical.
But, always, there was this sense of union between the team and its people.
The feeling of something shared.
That's gone now.
It slipped away almost imperceptibly over the last decade or so, to be replaced by a green replica of the gated communities that most Premiership clubs have become.
The domain that Steve Staunton stepped into when making his international debut as a player back in 1988 would have been unrecognisable from the one he stepped into as Irish manager last January. Staunton may be no Dylan Thomas with words, but anyone who ever watched him play for his country could never doubt the pride of the man.
Could it be that he is now undermined by an assumption that that kind of pride is commonplace today?
There is, clearly, no reason to believe that he is a master strategist at this level. And he, certainly, doesn't carry Napoleon's luck, given the illness suffered by Bobby Robson.
But, as the zeal for a public lynching begins to heat up, is it not pertinent to ask a few home truths of his players?
Staunton is entitled to ask each and every one today what playing for Ireland actually means to them.
Footballers are polished at using expressions of remorse in times of crisis.
They are good at talking up their guilt without ever, necessarily, absorbing it. However unconvincing Staunton's preparation for last Saturday's game in Nicosia, however dubious his grasp of tactic or formation, when a team spills five to the likes of Cyprus, there's a lot more wrong than gameplan.
Burn at stake
We can burn Staunton at the stake this week if - as is eminently possible - the team falls heavily to the Czech Republic at Lansdowne Road tomorrow. But what then?
When Brian Kerr was jettisoned after the failure to qualify for Germany, it was done on the basis that he hadn't got the ear of the dressing-room. And he clearly hadn't. But are we running the risk of just re-heating lust for managerial blood, while the players, habitually, slip into a comfort zone?
They talk of "individual errors" in a strange, detached way, as if considering something abstract and unexplainable.
But when performance is retarded so consistently by indiscipline, it begs the question "WHY?"
Where does the difficulty arise in concentrating for 90 minutes when to do so is the most basic tenet of your day-to-day employment?
Football isn't complicated. It's about people and the chemistry with which they interact.
Most fundamentally, it is about honesty and moral courage.
You can't but wonder about the competitive hardness of players who earn more in a week that many white collar workers earn in year.
What exactly is their motivation in playing international football? Do they really want to be in Dublin this week?
What connection do they feel for the supporters, beyond the swift, trademark gesture at a final whistle?
In fact, what precisely does that gesture mean when they've just played like udder-heavy cattle?
No apology
This is no apology for Steve Staunton.
He may just happen to be a poor manager with a profoundly weak hand at his disposal. If so, the regime that put him in place should now be as vulnerable to condemnation as the manager himself.
But what of the players? Where is their outrage?
Last Saturday night, they should have been able to deal with what was put in front of them even had Mister Magoo filled in the team-sheet. Instead, their contribution was gauche and insubstantial. Again.
If the jersey means anything to them, perhaps tomorrow they might care to show it.
Originally Posted by cheifo
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