The Irish squad looks set to complete its preparations for Euro 2016 in England after Martin O’Neill decided it would be best to give players as much access to their families as possible before heading to France on June 8th.
Ireland play the Netherlands on May 27th in Dublin and Sweden in their opening game of the championships on June 13th, and it had been expected that the players would travel to Austria, or possibly Spain, for much of the intervening period.
At the weekend, however, O’Neill suggested that a venue “in the UK” was now the more likely option, with confirmation of the training camp location expected before the end of January.
Ireland have previously used Arsenal’s facilities just north of London when playing friendlies in the city and the FAI would be likely to have a few options open to it at that time of the year.
The manager played down the chances of another game being pencilled in, indicating instead that he would be happy to settle for some sort of informal training game.
“What we’re looking at, and nothing has been set in stone yet, is actually staying relatively local,” he said. “We’re thinking about it at this minute. We’ve had the opportunity to go to a couple of places, Austria and somewhere else and that sort of stuff, but we thought that we might stay relatively local, local meaning within the UK.
“I think after the Dutch game, we could still play another game, sort of a warm-up match, but we might get the same sort of benefit by playing ourselves in an 11 v 11, or a side made up of certain players depending on where we are.”
With the transfer window now open, O’Neill acknowledged that certain players would need to weigh up whether they wanted to risk missing out on a place in his squad for the finals because they were not playing enough club football.
Asked, in particular, about the ongoing difficulties being encountered by his goalkeepers, he said there was still plenty of time for the situation to improve. In fact, Darren Randolph played for West Ham this weekend and kept a clean sheet as they beat Wolves 1-0 in the FA Cup, but he spends most of his time on the bench. Shay Given, meanwhile, is still recovering from knee surgery.
David Forde has seen more first-team action recently, while Rob Elliot has been doing well, when fit, for Newcastle.
“It’s a wee bit more difficult for goalkeepers, but at the moment I’m not overly concerned by it,” O’Neill said. “We’re talking here at the end of first week of January. It’s not reached a crisis point by any stretch of the imagination.”
O’Neill said, too, that he expected some progress with his contractual situation to be made in the next couple of weeks.
“I think he [John Delaney] wants to get things moving, so in the next few weeks I think there’ll probably be some sort of chat about it.”
