I'll be honest, the only thing about the Irish team I support are our players. John Delaney and our awful supporters can **** off, both embarrassments in equal measures.
Will the guy have any desire to sort things out with this kind of stuff going on ...... we wont see these 'fans' for years, until we manage to scrape another qualification in 2032.
IMPLEMENT PROPER STRUCTURES DELANEY OR GET LOST !!!
Last edited by A face; 19/06/2012 at 10:52 AM.
The SFAI are the governing body for grassroots football in Ireland, not the FAI. Its success or the lack of is all down to them.
I'll be honest, the only thing about the Irish team I support are our players. John Delaney and our awful supporters can **** off, both embarrassments in equal measures.
Why are the supporters an embarrassment? B/C they are on vacation and don't want to act miserable?
What's childish is people all bent out of shape b/c they thought we would get out of a group with Croatia, Spain and Italy. I mean come on. Santa might be real too.
No Somos muchos pero estamos locos.
Is there a crisis in Dutch football, or just something some considered response would set right?
I think it's dangerous to jump to the knee jerk conclusion that there's a crisis. There should be a proper review prompted by this but it should be objective and not hysterical.
There is no structured tierred system for football in this country, the FAI are meant to bring all of this together and make it work. Its like everyone is going off and doing their own thing and the system is meant to produce players for our national team? Its a complete disaster and no amount of window dressing will wash that away.
I'll take the disaster that was Euro 2012 on the chin but i think the FAI now, when we are in crisis, need to step up and grow a pair ... setout a proper functional structure and get all the stakeholders in Irish football to subscribe to it. Until that happens we are gonna go fookin' nowhere.
The SFAI are the governing body for grassroots football in Ireland, not the FAI. Its success or the lack of is all down to them.
The FAI are part of the issue as techie is no transparency or accountability. Delaney's Father was forced out of the FAI due to irregularities when he was Treasurer yet his son now runs the organization. Says it all to me.
There is no such thing as a miracle cure, a free lunch or a humble opinion.
Tsk,eh yeah! Same old same old FAI, Delaney with his big FF head on him, jobs for the boys and all that (feck I miss Dermot Morgan)
The Irish Sports Council takes governance very much into account when allocating government funding to national sports bodies. Does anyone know whether they have any concerns about the FAI and whether this is holding back funding?
In fairness to Delaney, I feel things have moved forward under him. 10 years ago the crisis in Irish football was kit going missing between Dublin and Saipan, bumpy training pitches, and a certain guy wanting to walk the dog. The kind of things being people want done now are an upheaval of the League of Ireland, and a National Academy. 10 years ago if someone had suggested building something like Claire-Fontaine at Abbotstown they would have (rightly) been told that while the FAI can't organise luggage they couldn't possibly be let loose on a massive project like that.
Bring Back Belfast Celtic F.C.
I don't buy the idea there is suddenly a crisis. Either this crisis has been around for decades and we haven't addressed it (true) or there is no crisis because we have achieved our best international result in a decade. It's somewhat perverse that we have to qualify for arguably the world's elite international tournament in order for people to realise we're not as good as we used to be.
Agree with the evolutionist. Which is not the same thing as denying that a serious evaluation should take place. If it finds out that lots is wrong or not much is wrong is not the real point.
However, I was just googling Genesis 2 to see if I could power-read through its key suggestions about league reform. I had no idea (assuming wiki is right) that it was not actually penned by Genesis at all, but rather by the FAI itself. Is that right?
I still think that although you should always strive for improvement the structure of european football leaves us on the outside looking in the whole time. We are beyond peripheral in the overall scheme of things. The big city clubs in the big leagues couldn't give a hoot about their own smaller clubs let alone the small clubs in smaller countries. I'm sure UEFA would like to be more egalitarian but they'd face furore from the major clubs via the ECA and there is only so much they can do.
The LOI winners get a prize probably around the same as Wayne Rooney earns in a week. The EPL benefits from free marketing from one of the world's biggest (and repugnant) media organisations. It really is an uphill battle.
As I've said before my preference is for the Europa League to be regionalised and the domestic league season reduced to allow for the the top 3 or 4 Irish teams to play against British and Scandinavian clubs in group-like competition regularly, with income distributed generously around the LOI. Such a structure would throw up interesting local derby type fixtures all across Europe from August through to February, with the [8] regional winners going into a Q/F situation. It'd require a lot of thought and careful construction to put together properly.
Although it's already largely intuitive to most of you, some Belgian economists wrote a good paper* on the financial and competitive polarisation of European football, ascribing it to increased TV money in a "closed product market" (clubs can't up sticks and leave to where they could earn more money) and facing an "open labour market" (EU players can go where they get pioad most, post Bosman).
The solution to the imbalance is to at least partially open the product market (cross-border leagues for example) or at least partially close the labour market (unlikely to find favour with the EU). My regionalised Europa League would fit into the partial opening of the product market category.
Other economists have gone the whole hog and recommended a large inter-city European Super League but unless, e.g., Dublin, could enter a franchise team into that, it'd have no positive impact on Ireland.
I honestly wish more Irish people could see just how toxic the EPL is for Irish football. And think how clubs with fantastic European pedigree like Celtic, Ajax etc. feel? Crikey, I remember when Aberdeen and Dundee United were European heavyweights (almost).
Although I'm loathe to support closed franchise leagues, it's hard not to think that European football and Spain and England in particular, have gone too far in letting their clubs run riot over everyone else and that Financial Fair Play can only go so far to bring things back to a degree of normality.
* Here's the paper, a bit dry and academic but worth ploughing through:
http://college.holycross.edu/RePEc/s...ourMarkets.pdf
Last edited by Stuttgart88; 19/06/2012 at 2:48 PM.
Well said, we don't suddenly have a crisis because we lost three games. Different players and different system and we would have been better than we were over the three games.
If there is a crisis then it was just as bad, if not worse, in 1988 than it is now. F**king sensationalist rubbish to pretend that we have a crisis because we lost the three games heavily in Euro 2012. We lost the three games heavily because our manager sent out the wrong team with the wrong tactics. We had the same crisis when we were in the quarter finals of Italia 1990 and the second round of Japan/Korea 2002.
If anything 88 and 90 papered over the cracks. The 02 and 12 teams were more representative of the kind of footballer our system produces that back then.
As Owls Fan is right to point out Belgium, Scotland, Cyprus, Norway etc would probbaly have swapped places with us quite gladly.
barney,
You speak a semblance of truth but myself like a lot on this mb feel that this is a situation where the chickens have come home to roost.
Losing three games is one thing but losing them in the (un)Irish manner in which we did, coupled with the root-and-branch reform required in Irish Football (see Mons). We are in a crisis. It's something a lot of us have known about for a while. It's only just come out to the masses with these 3 defeats.
DID YOU NOTICE A SIGN OUTSIDE MY HOUSE...?
wft? Awful supporters? Unbelievable. So the Turkish and German fans whom I have seen this year supporting their teams even though they have been getting a hammering in the CL are awful. People sit on their backside at home and have the cheek to attack supporters who travel across Europe to support their team in good times and bad as awful. I was at the first game and my friends who are supporters for over 30 years have been at all the games and supported the team yet you describe them as awful and an embarrassment. People have come up to them and appauded their support - only in Ireland, the land of the gombeens, would supporters be criticised for......supporting. I saw the camper van parks in Poznan where guys spent their last few cents to get to Poland and support the team. The roads from Poznan to Berlin and beyond are now thronged with his supporters heading home little knowing that at home there are people who think they are awful because of their unconditional support for the team. Perhaps, in the old refrain, we should only sing when we're winning.
Sometimes I despair.
Last edited by OwlsFan; 19/06/2012 at 3:14 PM.
Forget about the performance or entertainment. It's only the result that matters.
Were Shamrock Rovers fans an embarrassment at White Hart Lane, continuing to sing their hearts out at 3-1 down against a team absolutely miles better than them?
Bookmarks