How will you feel if Evan Ferguson plays against Manchester United this weekend? There’s a question, now. What if he rattles in a couple of goals into the bargain? What if it’s 10.30 on Saturday night and Gary Lineker is grinning into the camera making dorky jokes about Evan Almighty and Fergie Time and all that kind of cheeseball sass? Are you going to be okay with that?
The question is neither as odd nor as ridiculous as it sounds. When the official Brighton & Hove Albion Twitter account posted pictures on Thursday of the boy prince back in training, they possibly didn’t expect quite the river of vitriol that would flow through in the replies. Even by Twitter’s standards, it turned out to be a rough afternoon for the lads.
“Fresh from his first #PL hat-trick!” ran the caption, (accompanied by a star emoji and another kind of smirky one that your correspondent stared at for a good 20 minutes to try to discern its meaning before mourning the passing of what was left of his youth).
Responses ranged from passive-aggressive eyebrow-raised emojis to slightly more pointed shouts of “Oh, he’s okay then?”, all the way to various charmers interjecting to inform Ferguson that he is a “Bohs c**t”. “Load of bollox” got a run-out. “Injured my hole” was popular.
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This, to put it mildly, isn’t the sort of discourse they’d be used to down in the Seagulls’ social media department these days. Brighton are the darlings of English football right now. At the rate they’re going, they’ll be adding daisy chains and a unicorn to the club crest before Christmas. All their players are about 15 years old, their every goal is a dream sequence and no matter who leaves, nothing seems to halt their progress.
In the past two years they’ve seen Moises Caicédo, Alexis Mac Allister, Robert Sánchez, Leandro Trossard, Marc Cucurella, Yves Bissouma, Ben White, Dan Burn and manager Graham Potter all walk out the door and haven’t missed a beat. Roberto De Zerbi has the intense but kindly bearing of a noble older brother keeping his siblings in line after a car crash has claimed their parents. Everybody watches on in admiration at how Brighton are carrying themselves through a ruthless, unforgiving world.
Everybody, that is, unless you’re an Irish fan scorned. Bad enough that he couldn’t play for Ireland against France and the Netherlands after scoring the first hat-trick in the Premier League by a teenager in 25 years. But to be possibly fit and raring to go in time for Brighton’s first match back? Ah here.
De Zerbi said in his Friday press conference that they’d be making a late call on him, which at the very least means he’s in contention for the bench. If it all works out the way Brighton are hoping, the Bettystown Haaland will spend the afternoon feasting on United’s carthorse defence. In which case, whoever runs the Brighton Twitter account should probably post once and then leave it a few days before checking back in.
We’re not seriously going to do this, are we? Obviously it would be folly to go extrapolating too much from a few dozen doses on Twitter but it feels worth asking the question all the same. We’re surely not going to start picking and pecking at him this early on, souring the first good news story in Irish men’s football for ages?
Ferguson is a month short of his 19th birthday. If he has basically an average amount of luck on his side, he’ll play for Ireland for the next 10-to-15 years. That’s anything up to seven or eight qualifying campaigns for major tournaments with him as a goal machine. We could, with a fair wind, have him still banging them in as far away as the 2038 World Cup. Euro 2040, anyone?
Okay, okay. Settle down, Mal. The lad just passed his driving test, so maybe hold off on ordering up the statue outside Lansdowne Road just yet. But the point stands – the arc of history is long and it bends towards Ferguson scoring goals for Ireland. Now is precisely the time to be treating him with the gentlest of kid gloves.
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This was particularly driven home on Thursday because at more or less the same time as Ferguson was getting back on the training pitch in Brighton, the FAI were hosting their long-delayed press conference in Abbotstown. The Vera Pauw and Stephen Kenny stuff was what grabbed the most headlines but a decent portion of it was also taken up with the nuts and bolts grassroots stuff that will ultimately prove far more important.
Fair to say the picture painted by Jonathan Hill and Marc Canham wasn’t, by and large, encouraging. They’re starting from a bad place, given all the years of waste and neglect by their predecessors. They need more from the government, they need better links with schools, they need everyone pulling behind their development plans instead of jealously guarding their own small patch. And even then, even if all that happens across the next decade, there’s still no guarantee that it will help the fortunes of the national team.
For now, we are who we are. We have what we have. It was, yes, hard to be at the match against the Netherlands and watch on as Adam Idah twice got on the ball in the box with his back to goal in the first half before all-too-generously laying it off. Idah gamely wired into a running battle with Virgil van Dijk for the evening but in those two moments it was impossible not to wonder what Ferguson would have done with such premium possession.
But even so, that doesn’t stop it being the right call for the Ireland medical staff to send him back to his club for the international window. And nor should it mean he has to sit out Brighton’s next game if he and his club decide he’s fit and able for it. An Irish teenager togging out against United at Old Trafford is a cause for joy and hope and optimism.
You’ve fairly lost your sense of what’s good for Irish football if you imagine otherwise.
