SLOW DEATH OF THE IRISH GAME

From 1988 onwards, Ireland have enjoyed about a two decade-long love affair with the beautiful game. That relationship is disintegrating and it may even already be dead.

 D. Ray Morton, 31st August 2015.

 

The decline of the Irish twenty-something



For the past four years, this writer used to play six-a-side football on Monday nights. The games were played in a new facility, a lovely artificial grass surface in a suburb of Cork City. As a weekly activity, the games brought a lot of fun and were a nice way to get through the gloomy fog of a Monday evening. After a long run of games, the weekly match is slowly unravelling to nothing, the player numbers simply no longer available. Whether off to Dublin, London, Toronto or Sydney, the young people have left. Some frightening statistics illustrate this with a massive exodus of twenty-somethings leaving the country in their droves. Adding to this, the teenagers are not interested in soccer any more and the lads in their 30s and 40s don't take good enough care of themselves to run around for an hour a week. A small tale of tragedy but an indicator of a bigger picture.

The Republic of Ireland went mad for football from 1988 onwards. They qualified for their first major tournament that year and trips to the World Cup in 1990 and 1994 added to the hysteria. Irish players were of a high level. We had a world-class centre-back in Paul McGrath and midfielders as talented as Ronnie Whelan and Roy Keane. The likes of Damien Duff and Robbie Keane followed. Unfortunately the supply line has dried up. If James McCarthy is the future, that is one worrying future.

Once upon a time, Ireland used to produce players capable of winning the PFA Player of the Year award. Those days are over

 

Ireland play Gibraltar in a Euro 2016 qualifier this Friday in a game no-one really cares about. Then they play at home, after a big GAA weekend, Monday against Georgia. The attendance could be embarrassingly low. The League of Ireland is hanging in tatters, arguably no better than it was in the '90s as some of Europe's other minor leagues develop through sensible investment and advancing through the earlier rounds of UEFA's club competitions. Ireland remains in a quagmire.

Rugby, with the success of the Irish national team, has become the sport of the common man now. This was not always the case as rugby is something of a specialist sport in its own right. It is not as if the average man is fifteen stone of bodybuilt muscle. The sport of the people is a sport played by giants. Not a sport where size, see Lionel Messi, necessarily matters. Despite the fact that thousands still watch the Premier League and the Champions League, Ireland are on the periphery feeling the effects of the more globalised English game that once allowed many Irish, Welsh and Scots to dig out successful careers.

The end is nigh for football in Ireland and it may take many, many years or something extremely radical to change that. Over to you, John Delaney.

MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER WILL NEVER BE AN ACTUAL MAJOR LEAGUE

America's Major League Soccer is steadily increasing in popularity. With foreign superstars such as David Beckham and Thierry Henry having graced the league in recent years and with the interest in the United States national team, there is cause for optimism. However, there are many barriers that will prevent American soccer from truly competing with the best leagues around the world.

D. Ray Morton, 29th April 2015

The United States of America made it to the second round of last summer's World Cup where they were eliminated by Belgium after a somewhat heroic performance typified by the exploits of goalkeeper Tim Howard. America's attention turned to soccer and there is now real hope that this can be built on. Major League Soccer (MLS) have done a deal with the United Kingdom's Sky Sports, further boosting the league's international outreach. Things look on the up and up for American soccer but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this league will ever compete with top European championships despite its potential riches.

There are too many obstacles. First of all, there is no tangible football culture in the United States. We hear of soccer moms and record numbers of Varsity youth players but first and foremost, football is not a game of the people in America. There is no such thing as street football. Slipping on your cleats for a couple of hours of practice a week does not produce real footballers. Football is learned through repetition, endless hours of playing for the joy of the game. That culture simply does not exist for that sport in the US. Street basketball, for example, eventually produces those that become top NBA stars. How can US soccer hope to produce players that will compete with the world's best when they cannot match the amount of hours their top basketball players put in during their development? This is not a sport that can be picked up overnight. Just like the virtuoso musician, the virtuoso footballer does not learn his craft hastily. It is even said now that European academy players do not have that raw ability that world's top attacking talents from South America have. Too mollycoddled, too structured. It is about passing the ball off and staying in position. How does one produce a Luis Suárez in a European academy, let alone an American one?

The talent being the first obstacle, the second obstacle is that the MLS is not even the best league in its region. Liga MX, the Mexican league, is well funded, popular and features play of a much higher level than that found north of the border. Go further south into the Americas and you will find players of vastly superior talent despite the haphazard organisation of the South American leagues. You need talent and organisation. They may have the latter but they certainly do not have the former.

Robbie Keane, since moving to LA Galaxy in the twilight of his career, has absolutely ripped it up in the MLS. Look through a montage of his goals and you will see him score efforts he rarely managed in Europe, this well past his prime and in his mid-30s. The defending is so bad in the league that a top pro like Keane can torment defences with his eyes closed. Watching a typical MLS match, one can see defenders worse than you would find in the League of Ireland, never mind Europe's top leagues. With a limit on foreign players, how can a league improve if the standard of player is so incomprehensibly poor.

Robbie Keane's LA goalscoring odyssey can be described as something of a cakewalk

Of course the argument against this is that with funding, coaching and time, all things will improve. Maybe they will but how much time will this take. It could be a matter of many generations. When Cameroon reached the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup, many pundits predicted an African winner of the tournament within the next few editions. As the United States soccer team improved in the late '90s, the same predictions were made about them. This did not materialise. Many of this blog's readers happen to be based in America indicating that the interest is there. Realistically, you need more than interest to reach the very pinnacle of this enormous, complicated global game.