Fantasy

Is it a great shame that Chris Forrester has never won a cap for Ireland, or is it a great thing that the bubble of fantasy has never burst?

Many a fan has questioned the standard of this helter-skelter League Of Ireland season. A better question though, is how much it matters. When Pat’s and Shelbourne are playing out a 3-2 classic, and games are hitting an average viewership of 100,000 people, it’s hard to really give a shit, right?

Especially when the cast of characters – Duff, Kenny, Bradley Higgins – plots, and subplots are ready-made for a pretty good Netflix documentary. Enough professional editing and you might just believe this is actually The Greatest League In The World.

Andrés Iniesta retired this week and was celebrated as a legendary midfield maestro of his world. When the time comes, Forrester will be remembered the same way in his. There’s no harm in that. I just hope the film makers do him justice, preferably with Hans Zimmer music behind the talking heads of Liam Buckley, Conan Byrne and Stephen Kenny.

This, friends, is a nice way of living and the illusion isn’t easily disrupted. There’s no pesky Greeks, Fins or Brits to put us in our place here. Not with a long-shot. Not with a near-post header. Not in this league.

It’s almost like the LOI has assumed a position as Irish fans’ intoxicating feed of post-match pints for every 2-0 Nations League defeat.

If only pints and not deeper soul-searching could solve all of our problems.

The Script

The script writers for Irish Football with a capital ‘I’ and ‘F’ haven’t been so generous. Johnathan Hill’s tenure as CEO was only as depressing as it was tiresome. His gaffes might have brought more intrigue if his predecessor hadn’t exhausted corruption as a concept forever.

Vince McMahon himself would do well to summon characters like Bobby Robson, Giovanni Trapattoni, Marco Tardelli, Roy Keane and Martin O’Neill to draw an audience, but big JD knew how to get eyeballs where he wanted them – and away from where he didn’t want them.

Our new scriptwriter, Dave Courell – who was appointed as the FAI’s CEO on Sunday night following an interim spell – will be working off a tighter budget (Heimir Hallgrimsson is certainly no Trapattoni) but early indications are that he’s got the minerals to keep the association’s key values intact.

The fun began when, on September 25, Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe slammed the door on Courell’s big plans to claim funding from a post-Brexit reserve by stating “All negotiations on the Brexit Adjustment Reserve concluded some time ago”.

You’d hope that this was a rare oversight from Courell and hope the FAI will be better at lobbying with government in future. Fingers crossed too that the FAI won’t regret hiring him rather than the OFI’s Sarah Keane or Munster Rugby’s Ian Flanagan, who were both reported to be interested.

Equally, you’d hope Minister Donohoe would be more interested in assisting Irish Football than *checks notes* Israel.

But let’s know our place.

Dose of reality

Delaney’s legacy does of course live on into today’s world. An Irish team depleted of players born between 1992 and 2000, have assembled under new manager Hallgrimsson ahead of Thursday evening’s match against Finland. Expectations couldn’t be lower but a defeat would leave Ireland on the cusp of relegation to Nations League C.

To be fair, not many expected that to be on the horizon when Ireland beat Scotland 3-0 in the summer sunshine of 2022 but the decline has been sharp and the introduction of John O’Shea to both Stephen Kenny’s and Hallgrimsson’s coaching teams has coincided with that trend.

O’Shea – a man esteemed among his former teammates and once celebrated by Irish football fans – has been vocal in the media this week. He thinks fans are too “derogatory” towards the Irish players and said he would take a win against Finland even if his team plays “terribly”. The issue is that Ireland don’t look close to winning ugly.

Instead, his teams are no closer to winning than woke Kenny’s Ireland. The only real difference is that Ireland’s tactics in the last window made the players look so bad that fans started to boo them.

Hallgrimsson, meanwhile, has begun speaking of “experimenting” by dropping Matt Doherty, even though his original selling point was that he was going to find a “settled team” and show Ireland how it’s done in the Results Business. The cynics among us would suggest this is because the Results Business is proving more difficult than any of our coaches anticipated, but we have no time for such attitudes at Ireland Radar.

Salvation

Should League C be the outcome of these issues, then the state-of-the-nation reflections will be like nothing we’ve seen before – and the competition is stiff.

Under every metric from full-time academy coaches to domestic TV money, it’s where we deserve to be and maybe it’s where we should be. It would be unfair on Shelbourne fans to endure playing their games in the Greek league and the Irish fan experience has been pretty unfair in League B for a while now.

The people crave a land where Mikey Johnston dazzles down the left like Michael Duffy for Derry, where Adam Idah knocks them in like Douglas James-Taylor for Drogheda, and Finn Azaz sprinkles his magic like Chris Forrester in his prime.

If we are relegated, League C could be the depression-session we need.

But yes, standards do matter and the hangover best be life-altering.

Predicted XI: Kelleher; Omobamidele, Collins, O’Shea, Brady; Cullen, Molumby, Knight; Ogbene, Ferguson, Johnston.