Aaaaand breathe. In the East Anglian Daily Times on Friday, you got a sense of how quickly the snowglobe settles. The Ipswich local paper had an interview with our own Dara O’Shea in which he talked about Ireland’s amazing week, his mini-spat with Ronaldo, the global knicker-knot brought on by CR7’s red card, as well as a few choice words for Piers Morgan. It was quality copy, meaty stuff for a small-town newspaper.
But, in a shock move that would seem to be at odds with Ireland’s standing at the centre of the universe, it was also the fifth story down the queue on the newspaper’s website. Ipswich have Wrexham this weekend so O’Shea’s musings had to settle in behind some quotes from the Wrexham manager, a profile of the match referee, a contract update on the Ipswich left-back and a story about one of their players being snubbed for the Championship’s Goal of the Month competition.
So there you have it. The World Cup is all very well but priorities are priorities. Ipswich Town go into this weekend sitting seventh in the table, on the back of a run of four games unbeaten. Even with four of the Ireland squad at Portman Road and O’Shea as club captain, real life snaps back into place very quickly. Just be thankful there are no Scottish players at Ipswich or we might have been washed out to sea altogether.
Sport has no reverse gear. There are 17 weekends between now and the play-off against the Czech Republic in Prague. Throw in midweek games, cup ties and European fixtures and the next time we see Heimir’s heroes in the flesh, most of them will have the thick end of 25 matches played since Budapest. It feels unlikely they’ll all make it through unscathed.
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For once, though, Ireland seem relatively able to cope with the ebbs and flows of player availability. We will obviously fret and fuss our way through the coming winter of club football and agonise over every last injury update between now and March. But while we do so, it’s worth keeping in mind just how many players threw into the pot to get Ireland to this point.
Hallgrímsson’s squad has seen a huge amount of churn in such a short span of time. Just 10 weeks passed between the bookend games against Hungary in Dublin and Budapest and yet seven of the match day 23 in September weren’t in the squad come November, either injured or dropped. Only six players started both games. If half the team can change in the space of two months, it’s a fool’s game guessing where we’ll be in four.
This is especially the case since Hallgrímsson clearly isn’t the type to die wondering when it comes to trying out players. It got a bit lost in the vortex with everything else that was going on but the Ireland manager handed out two international debuts in the Portugal and Hungary games. They weren’t dead minutes to run down time, either. Anything but.
Conor Coventry and Johnny Kenny have been in squads before – Coventry’s first senior call-up happened as far back as March 2021 – but Hallgrímsson chose now, with everything up for grabs, to send them into action. Coventry came on for Jack Taylor in central midfield on 68 minutes against Portugal, Kenny was sent on for the last half-hour as Ireland chased the game last Sunday.
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These were the moments of the most excruciating tension in the whole campaign. You can maybe say he didn’t have a lot of choice, that he turned to Coventry because he didn’t have Jason Knight, Will Smallbone or Jayson Molumby to call on, or that Kenny wouldn’t have got a look-in if Evan Ferguson or Sammie Szmodics had been fit. But none of that matters. What matters is that in the two biggest games in a generation, the Ireland manager felt he had options and trusted them enough to use them.
Hallgrímsson used 27 players across the six matches. Only four – Caoimhín Kelleher, Nathan Collins, Jake O’Brien and Dara O’Shea – started every game. In fact, Ireland had 19 different starters, among a whopping 35 players who made it into at least one match day 23. That’s without the likes of Robbie Brady and Callum O’Dowda, who both missed the campaign through injury.
We can take it that injuries will have their say, for ill and for good. Selfishly, it might not be a bad thing for Ireland if Chiedozie Ogbene has to sit for a few weeks to get himself right. Sheffield United are at the foot of the Championship trying to escape a relegation battle – Ogbene’s hamstrings could surely do without four full months of chasing down lost causes on soft winter ground. No offence, Blades.
We know that not everybody is going to make it to the line for a call-up next March. And that not everyone is going to be in the mix for a plane ticket to the States, if it comes to that.
But right here and now, there’s a group of not far short of 40 players who must all think they have some sort of a chance. It’s one thing for Hallgrímsson to get Ireland to the play-offs. Doing so while expanding the group of viable options is fair going.
The club football industrial complex will grind its gears now and we’ll keep an obsessive eye on how the stocks are looking all the way to March. Transfer stories, form analysis, fitness updates. Stuff that might have passed us blithely by before last Sunday, now it’s going to shorten the winter.
Count us in for it all.
