Sometimes you just have to laugh. When Declan Rice surged through Ireland’s tattered defence with a series of one-twos and teed up Jack Grealish to make it 2-0, it appeared that football is ultimately just a joke at Ireland’s expense.
Has anyone ever enjoyed a match at the Aviva more than Grealish did on Saturday? Lee Carsley – unlike Pep Guardiola and Gareth Southgate – had trusted him to be the central creative hub of his team’s attack. The boos from the Dublin crowd, far from inhibiting him, just made him feel more important and special. Unexpectedly – gloriously – Grealish was the main character again. He hasn’t felt this alive since he was at Aston Villa.
His goal came at the end of a hypnotic three-minute spell in which England completed more than 50 passes and the only Ireland player to touch the ball was Sammie Szmodics, who intercepted a cross and spun to boot a desperate clearance out of play.
That move was itself the culmination of 15 minutes that were possibly the most one-sided ever played at this stadium. Between Rice’s goal in the 11th minute and Grealish’s in the 26th, England played 170 passes, Ireland just 19.
Ireland had signalled their new, more direct approach early on. Caoimhín Kelleher boomed a couple of free kicks deep into England’s half; goal-kicks were taken short but only so that one of the defenders could then hit it long. The first problem was that we had no target man capable of winning these balls: Adam Idah is no Niall Quinn. The second problem was that once England got the ball, it became horribly apparent that Ireland had no means of getting it back.
When Heimir Hallgrímsson’s Iceland beat England at Euro 2016, the English couldn’t play football like this. If you gave them the ball, they would give it back to you. Their midfield that day was Eric Dier, Dele Alli and Wayne Rooney – a centre back and two number 10s. England played 519 passes to Iceland’s 250, and they lost possession 34 times.
The week after England v Iceland, Guardiola started work at Manchester City. Premier League football is now practically a different sport. In Dublin, England played 713 passes to Ireland’s 203, and gave possession away just 14 times. Their players are doing at international level what they do every week for their clubs. As Rice said after Saturday’s game, “a lot of the players that play at City, Liverpool, Arsenal, we play a similar way, so it’s easy to adapt.”
That devastating first half showed how mad it is to fantasise that a return to some kind of Jack Charlton tactics could be effective in today’s international football. Sure, there’s always the slim hope you’ll force a defender into a mistake, but it’s much more likely that you get piggy-in-the-middled. This is why Stephen Kenny believed Ireland had to become a side who knew how to play with the ball.
Put ‘em under pressure football still exists, but now it looks like what Atalanta did to Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League final last May.
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The Italian team pressed man to man all over the pitch. When any Leverkusen player was on the ball there was an Atalanta player hunting him down. Whoever he might pass to would have another Atalanta player hunting him down.
Matching up man to man all over the pitch obviously meant that Atalanta were playing one on one at the back. This defied the conventional wisdom that you should aim to have one more defender than the opposition has attackers. Atalanta accepted that risk as a price worth paying for the ability to enforce their pressure game further up the pitch.
Compare this to what Ireland were trying to do on Saturday. We played a back five, including three center backs who, most of the time, had nobody to mark. This meant that England had at least two and often three spare players in midfield. They played around the outnumbered Irish midfielders like they were training cones.
Yet the supposed increased defensive solidity brought by the extra defenders was illusory. Trent Alexander-Arnold played a 50-yard pass right through Ireland’s centre for the first goal. “Should never happen, at any level,” said Hallgrímsson.
Maybe it’s time to bin the back five. Yet Hallgrímsson seems reluctant to take any radical step. He humbly admits he doesn’t yet know enough about the players: is there such a thing as being too humble?
When Séamus Coleman was being treated for the injury that forced him off, several Ireland players gathered in front of the dugout for an impromptu timeout. The staff member doing all the talking was Paddy McCarthy, as Hallgrímsson watched on and John O’Shea hovered nearby.
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“We’re all in it together,” Hallgrímsson said when asked who had picked the team. “Hopefully I will have maybe more authority as time goes on.” Yet he seems in no hurry to project that authority or to get any particular messages out there. At the time of writing, O’Shea is scheduled to do Monday’s prematch press conference, which is generally always done by the head coach.
Maybe that makes sense for now, since O’Shea and McCarthy effectively picked the squad and are helping to pick the team. But Hallgrímsson was brought in to be a leader. If the present arrangement continues much longer, he risks appearing superfluous.
How long will it take him to get up to speed? He has been in the job for two months and, according to Marc Canham – who yesterday announced he had been promoted to chief football officer at the FAI – he has known since March that he was the number one choice for the job. That’s a lot more thinking time than a new coach typically has before arriving into a job.
Ideally, of course, our new coach could have got to know the squad over a couple of friendlies, but that chance was wasted after Canham took nine months to actually make the appointment. Still, there have been just 41 players called up to Ireland squads over the last 12 months. It really shouldn’t be taking much longer for Hallgrímsson to get the measure of that initial group, and start making the decisions.