“It’s an interrogation room here,” laughed David Courell, as the various football correspondents filed into a room in Abbotstown on Friday. One of Courell’s promises when he took over as the FAI’s latest chief executive was to regularise his office’s media engagements and so, this is one of what may or may not become a series of sit-downs. As ever, taking anything as given when it comes to the FAI is a fool’s game.
For now, at least, Courell deserves some credit. Previous administrations were more inclined to wear as a badge of honour the fact that we only ever got to see them answer questions when things got so bad that they had to get dickied up to sit in front of an Oireachtas Committee. Never mind the media, they wouldn’t even allow questions at their own AGM half the time.
Courell has a trip to Kildare Street in his future too, the week after next. It’s not hard to imagine his forebears in the role putting this kind of engagement off until afterwards. Or, more likely, guffawing with contempt at the idea of doing it at all. So, although it might sound like a small mercy to submit himself to sitting in a chair and taking an hour of questions, it’s not nothing.
As for the substance of what he actually said, that’s another matter. Courell is a polished executive, fluent in the jargon-heavy lingo that passes for corporate communication. When it comes to the sort of deflective bromides that allow someone to filibuster their way through a long Q&A session, he would qualify as a native speaker. It may well have been a factor in him getting the job. It certainly can’t have hurt.
And so he was able to evade at least some of the stickier questions that came his way. Predictably enough, he slid neatly in behind the shield of legal advice when the subject of Eileen Gleeson’s legal case came up. Indeed, he gave notice to the Oireachtas Committee that there will be limitations in what he’ll be able to say when he does sit down for his grilling.
As an example, he was asked at one stage about the allegation in the Sunday Independent that the women’s team couldn’t have access to an analyst for a competitive match because he was needed for the men’s team for a friendly. “At this stage we’re at risk of going into some of the really specific elements,” Courell said. “So while I would happily want to answer these questions, I’m afraid it’s one of those situations I’m going to have to decline.”
Throughout the hour, Courell’s tone never really changed. He spoke evenly and reasonably, like a teacher giving maths grinds to a student whose parents are listening in from the next room. He doesn’t lose his cool, he doesn’t get annoyed. If you played the tape to someone who knew nothing about Irish football, you’d come away thinking things were more or less fine. A few speedbumps and disagreements here and there but nothing too drastic.
[ Eileen Gleeson v FAI: what it’s about and why the repercussions could be hugeOpens in new window ]
And yet we all know the dire truth. We all know that the FAI is groaning under the weight of enormous debt, that the men’s national team is a shambles, that the system for developing young footballers is chronically under-funded and under-developed. We know that there are legal cases on the horizon concerning the historical behaviour of coaches of the women’s national team and that the last women’s manager is in the process of taking her own legal action.
We know, too, that Courell is in the job because the last guy departed after having to explain himself in front of politicians for getting cash in lieu of holidays. We know that the whole organisation is being shaken up, with staff deeply unsettled at the prospect of redundancies and nobody giving them clarity as to how many there might be. We know that the whole country sees the FAI as a byword for chaos, failure and incompetence.
Worst of all, we know that even if by some miracle Courell was able to solve every last one of these problems, it would only bring the FAI back to the lowest acceptable baseline of what a country’s football association should be about. Do it all and he will only succeed in getting the FAI to the start of the actual job.
Whether or not he is up to it won’t be clear for a long time and nothing he could have said in an hour-long Q&A was ever going to change that. For now, he comes across as a steady professional and someone commendably uninterested in being anything other than a boring official in a suit.
When it comes to the FAI, that should not be taken as an insult.
