Malachy Clerkin: Boos for man of the match sum up perfectly those silly Irish soccer fictions

At least the man-of-the-match thing is out in the open now. At least there’s that. In time, when we come to pick the bones out of the Heimir Hallgrímsson era, the night the Ireland fans turned on the announcement of Will Smallbone as man of the match against Greece will stand as a landmark. Like a Go Home Union Jack banner for a new generation, instantly redolent of a time when everything was grim and grey and crap.
Maybe the only surprise was that it took this long. As the boos rained down from the stands to greet the announcement of Smallbone as Ray Houghton’s pick for the bit of crystal, you couldn’t help but feel that this was long overdue. Nothing against Smallbone himself, who was definitely among the least bad performers on the night. But it wouldn’t have mattered who it was. Enough was enough.
You learn to put up with a lot watching Ireland play football. The losing, obviously. The cold in the stands and the quiet of the crowd, sure. The way an Irish midfielder will take a second touch on a ball and then try to make a pass that would only have been possible if played after the first touch — that becomes routine as well. You grow to accept these things as part of the deal.
Folded into the whole experience over the past few years has been this silly fiction, sitting in front of us night after night without anybody shouting stop. Ireland will be 0-2 down in the Aviva as another grim display wends towards its inevitable conclusion and the dude on the PA will come on and give it plenty of welly in announcing that tonight’s [insert sponsor’s name] Man of the Match is … CHIEDOZIE OGBENE!!!
Meanwhile, some swivel-hipped Swiss/Dutch/Greek playmaker who has just buried yet another long-range strike beyond a sprawling Irish goalie will be looking around him going, “Ah here. Did you not see my goal? That guy was s**t!”
And no sooner does the final whistle go but poor Ogbene/Smallbone/Bazunu/Whoever is standing for a photograph with a flunkey from [insert sponsor’s name] and then turning to Tony O’Donoghue to explain away another terrible result. All they did was not be as useless as their team-mates for 90 minutes and for their troubles, they get to be the first against the wall, facing the nation to try and wrap words around what has just happened.
Who would want to be the one to have to do that? Only in Irish soccer could a man-of-the-match award morph into an incentive not to play well. Pure Flann O’Brien, is what it is. Or what it was, at least, until the other night when the few people left in the ground decided they couldn’t take this nonsense any more and let their feelings be known. Good for them.
That’s where we are, then. The stattos will tell you about this amount of defeats in a row and that amount of games lost to teams who aren’t Gibraltar. And the record books are merciless, it’s true. But you’ll be hard-pressed, in years to come, to find a better way to sum up this particular moment in Irish soccer history than the fans booing the man of the match announcement.
It’s just so supremely on the nose for the state of everything. Announcing a man of the match in the first place has become a marketing conceit. It’s been a long time since it was an exercise in picking out the best player in the game. It’s purely an opportunity for [insert sponsor here] to get a bit of screen time for their shilling, to grasp a brief bit of the spotlight, a shard of the reflected glory that comes from standing beside an Ireland soccer player.
Yet it happens because no matter how perilous the state of the national team, people are still invested in it. And so the games continue to attract plenty of eyeballs and even decent crowds. We clearly can’t quit them — the two games in the Aviva last Saturday and Tuesday attracted the second- and third highest attendances in League B of the Nations League so far. They were only outdone by the 70,000 in Wembley for the England v Finland match.
Whatever about filling Lansdowne for the England game, there were still 37,274 through the gates for Greece. And since the FAI’s finances are the only aspect of Irish football in a worse state than the national team, they need to attend to every last sponsor’s whim they can think of. So of course there’s an announcement for man of the match, even when the team is getting its ass handed to it by a Greek side that presumably can’t wait for another go next month.
This is who we are. So much of Irish football is obfuscation, half-truths and accepted fictions. Stephen Kenny was a dead man walking for months but nobody would officially put him out of his misery. Even though the FAI had all that time to line up a replacement, we ended up waiting 231 days for it to happen.
So much of it was taken up with the association talking about candidates having been identified and contractual situations having to be waited out, the kind of recruitment-manager speak that fills space and means nothing. In the middle of it all, John O’Shea got four friendlies that would surely have been useful to a permanent manager.
And then, out of nowhere, Hallgrímsson landed in a country he didn’t know and a culture he doesn’t get yet. Nowhere has that been more obvious than the mini-flurry that happened last week over whether or not he’s actually in charge.
It may well have seemed perfectly reasonable and logical to him that O’Shea and Paddy McCarthy should drive things throughout this window, as he is learning about the players and getting to know what works and what doesn’t. But the reality is that in Irish football, you’re expected to front things out. You can’t admit not knowing something, or that others might be better placed right at this moment as you get up to speed.
That’s not who we are, Heimir. This is Ireland, where we cling to our little fictions for as long as we can get away with. Where we outsourced our football production line to the big factory across the Irish Sea for generations and kidded ourselves that we were doing fine until we weren’t. Where we hand out man-of-the-match awards to players who’ve been on the end of a chasing and don’t think it’s weird until it is.
Two games down and things are as grim as they’ve ever been. All the half-truths and obfuscations in the world can’t disguise the state we’re in.