There’s a hint of snakes and ladders about Stephen Ward’s career to date with the Dubliner, who made steady progress after a slow start to his top-level career, having had to pick himself up a couple of times after losing a lot of ground again.
In 2011/'12 he played 38 Premier League games for Wolves, earned almost half of his 29 international caps and played at a European Championship.
But the season ended poorly on a couple of fronts and, having done well to fight back, he’s been sliding again this year with injuries and relegation contributing to the loss of his left-back spot he had won back with Ireland.
Latest ascent
The 29-year-old, though, sees the England and Scotland games as opportunities to start his latest ascent before heading back to a club where, he believes, there is “a great infrastructure” to build on and a manager who believes in his players.
The task for now, though, is to prove his fitness and play some football.
“Yeah, I’m happy to be here,” he says, “”and if I can get a run-out over the next couple of games I can give the manager a headache.
“It’s been a tough year with the (ankle) injury. And, to be honest, I’ve probably only felt myself in the last four or five weeks of the season. It took a lot longer to get myself up to speed.
“The break was healed but it just took that bit longer, there was a bit of complication with the screws but I’m fine now and it’s nice to have these extra few weeks to keep training because I had a season that was cut short obviously.”
Less downcast
In fact, it all but ended back before Christmas although he less downcast about it than might be expected.
Burnley, the club he joined last summer on a three-year deal, have just gone down too of course but he has the air of a man who feels that the tide actually began to turn for him, and even them, a few weeks before the end of the campaign.
Ward made just two appearances from the bench since December, when he last started a game, but his fitness improved in recent weeks to the point where he was very involved with the first-team squad again.
With the club finishing the campaign with seven points from nine, there was, he says, a boost to the collective confidence as the players headed off into the break already thinking of next year’s attempt to bounce straight back.
It’s the sort of positivity he hopes to build on now with Ireland.
“Yeah, definitely,” he says. “We don’t meet up again for another couple of months and lads will have a few weeks off to go away with their families. You want to leave on a positive note. Obviously, I know we got relegated [with Burnley] but we did finish quite strong.”
Nailed down
How much game time Ward might get over the next two weekends remains to be seen but
Robbie Brady
hardly nailed down the number-three shirt with his performance against Poland and O’Neill has been good to Ward, handing him five caps over the first half of the season, including starts against Georgia, Germany and Scotland.
“We owe them one,” he says in relation to the hosts of that night in Glasgow. “It was a bit of a nothing game in terms of clear-cut chances. They got a break from a corner where we switched off a little bit. The manager was disappointed with that and has spoken about it numerous times. Hopefully that won’t happen again.
“But we should have taken a point, which would have been a fantastic result for us. We know we need to be more clinical up-front as well because we created chances. So we feel we owe them one and hopefully with the crowd behind us, we can do it.”
Before that, there is England to contend with, a game that carries no prizes but one which involves an enormous amount of pride.
“Yeah, Sunday is massive,” he says. “It’s going to be a great one for the crowd who’ll want us to do well and get one over on a country we feel is as close a rival as anyone. But it’s a dress rehearsal.
“It will have that sort of derby atmosphere [but it’s crucial] that we don’t get too carried away.
“It’s important that we produce a performance. But it is a game to get ourselves right for what is really probably the biggest qualifier of the group so far.”
