Ronnie Simpson's Blog

Following another fine mess at Croke Park last night against minnows Cyprus, Bill O’Herlihy commented on RTE that a big PR push had been mounted by the FAI in the media to defend Irish soccer manager Stephen Staunton.
 

Bill, who is something of a PR specialist himself, knows that PR is about truth. PR, no matter how good, cannot defend the indefensible. It can’t defend the illogical. And it can’t counter what consumers can see with their own eyes.
 

I freely admit that I cheered when Cyprus scored last night.
 

And in case anyone accuses me of disloyalty, I am one of those who have loyally followed the Irish soccer team at a time when it was neither popular nor profitable. I was there shivering at Lansdowne Rd with a few thousand others long before fair-weathers joined the bandwagon when we started to qualify for major tournaments.  As a kid I caught two cigarette smoke filled buses to Dalymount Park to support Ireland.
 

But I cheered when Cyprus scored because if we had beaten them 5-0 then we were destined for another two years of a manager whose selections have been consistently illogical. Forget the learning curve. If anything, the selections are making less sense.
 

I gave up my €70 ticket last night to watch the game at home because I am disillusioned with a manager and the people who wrongly placed him in an impossible position. This is only the third home match and the first competitive home match I have not attended in 12 years.
 

As the always readable Tom Humphries commented in the Irish Times today:
“If you hand the national team over as instruments for a tone deaf novice to learn on, this sort of tuneless mess is what you get.”
 

PR can’t fool the public. It doesn’t need 100 caps to watch Stephen Kelly and recognise very early on that he is not a left back. That even if he beats a player he has to stop and awkwardly turn back to cross the ball with his right foot. Even if you can’t see this, you can certainly observe that when the manager was forced to change him to right back away to Czech Republic due to injury to O’Shea, Kelly was far more comfortable and effective.
 

It doesn’t need 100 caps to observe that Andy Reid was superb away to Denmark, created two goals and should have been in the starting line up to play Slovakia away. He may not be world class but he is that rare breed that England, for example, don’t have, a playmaker.
 

It doesn’t need 100 caps to have seen at home to Germany that Andy Keogh is not a right sided midfielder. Reid found him all night with passes with which he did nothing.
 

But what did Stan do? Selected Keogh again to play Cyprus, this time alongside Joey O’Brien, another young, untried, inexperienced player out of position in midfield – a position he hasn’t played since he had to do homework.
 

Meanwhile Liam Miller, a specialist midfielder playing regular Premiership football (whatever one thinks about that standard), is left admiring the Mexican waves on the bench. Might this have anything to do with the fact that Miller was left out of the original squad and to have included him would have shown up the manager’s, irrational squad selection in the first place?
 

It doesn’t need….Oh I could go on about Stephen Hunt and all the other totally illogical selections Stan has made or failed to make this campaign.
 

I can’t take another two years of this.  Come on Wales. If defeat to Wales is what it finally takes for the FAI to see sense then so be it.
 

My daughter, who did attend the Cyprus game, calculated that Euro 70 multiplied by the 70,000 who bought tickets comes to Euro 4.9m. We can afford a world class manager.  In fact we can’t afford not to have one.
 

It’s about time John Delaney and the FAI did the decent thing. Pay Stan generously for the rest of his contract. Allow him to resign with the dignity he has earned as a model player. Start the hunt now for a manager who has more managerial and coaching experience than collecting training cones at Walsall.
 

Now that’s what PR is about.
 

P.S. Well done to Newstalk for their excellent soccer coverage. Although surely the cruellest jibe of the week was, when it looked like John O’Shea might miss the Cyprus game due to a dead leg, one listener texted in:  “I  thought O’Shea had two dead legs”.