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Irish Voice Sport

Front Page News Is Bad News

October 4, 2007

By Cathal Dervan

IRELAND came to a standstill on Sunday afternoon as World Cup fever gripped once again, but not for the first time this year a national team ripped our hearts out as great expectation turned into massive deflation yet again. For the second time this autumn an Irish side swimming in a sea of hype and hope has fallen flat on its face. Just as the soccer team’s European Championship dream bit the bullet in Prague three weeks ago, so the rugby team are now out of a major competition with little more than a whimper.

The defeat to Argen-tina in Paris on Sunday was the final straw for Eddie O’Sullivan’s team, but not, it seems, for the coach. His four year contract extension, signed before the tournament began, means he will stay on at least until he gets some opportunity to atone in the 2008 Six Nations championship.

To survive beyond that he has to get rugby away from the doom and gloom headlines of the last 48 hours, and away from the attentions of the news editors and news hacks who decide the front page news.

Once you make the front page all changes. Eddie knows that now, but our national soccer team have known it for a long, long time.

Some years ago, away back in the early seventies, the Polish soccer team arrived in Dublin for one of their many friendly games against the Republic of Ireland at a time when even the Iron Curtain couldn’t keep the Football Association of Ireland blazers away from the likes of Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan and Gdansk.

Long before Ryanair offered budget airline prices to the east, and even longer before Poland’s labor force helped to sustain the Celtic Tiger way past its sell-by date, the Irish and Polish soccer teams knew each other inside out.

There was an unexplainable affinity between the two nations purely because it seemed like the only side Ireland ever played in soccer friendlies in those far flung days were the Poles.

That helps to explain why football fans in this country took great delight when Jan Tomaszewski denied England a place in the 1974 World Cup finals with his one man heroics at Wembley in the October 1973 qualifier that ended in a 1-1.

Just six days later Poland and the goalkeeper dubbed a clown by none other than Brian Clough arrived in Dublin for yet another friendly fixture against their Irish friends.

There was much media interest in the visit, simply because the Poles had ended Alf Ramsey’s final World Cup dream not eight years after the nation that gave the game to the world had reclaimed the ball at Wembley with victory in the 1966 final.

As always happens when sport becomes big news, the papers allowed the story to leave the normal confines of the back pages. Thus news reporters who knew little or nothing about soccer and even less about the likes of Lato, Deyna or even Tomaszewski found themselves camped outside the Gresham Hotel to get the inside track on sport’s latest heroes.

The photographers weren’t far behind them. One of the snappers, a man who wouldn’t know the difference between Drogheda United and Manchester United, was soon dispatched by his editor to take a picture of the Poland coach.

Guess what? He arrived back with a beautiful picture of a spanking new CIE coach bus parked outside the Gresham, the very bus used to transport the Poles to their training ground and to Dalymount Park for a game they subsequently lost 1-0 to a Miah Dennehy goal. True story.

Why do I tell you this? Well, the timing is apt and timing is everything in sport, as O’Sullivan will tell you just a couple of days after his World Cup exit but, crucially, just a couple of months since he agreed and signed a four year contract extension with the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU).

Ireland’s rugby coach is in the horrors right now. Fresh from watching his side’s hopes of global domination get kicked black and Sacre Bleu by Argentina in the Parc Des Princes on Sunday, O’Sullivan’s career is in freefall.

The fact that the stories of his demise are now front page news tells you all you need to know about Irish rugby’s fall from grace. Not one paper offered a sympathetic headline on the front or back pages on Monday morning.

Not one columnist, with the possible exception of Tony Ward, suggested O’Sullivan’s status as Ireland’s coach for the long haul to the 2011 finals is untouchable.

Some papers even went over the top on their news pages, as they have done with soccer boss Stephen Staunton in recent times.

Eddie’s face was even imposed on a Kermit the Frog image as the Sun denounced him as the new Muppet of Irish sport on Monday morning, a title previously and unfairly bestowed on Dundalk’s finest son, the aforementioned Staunton.

It is all rather sad. Just two months ago the nation looked forward to a World Cup like never before, and the IRFU’s decision to reward O’Sullivan for three Triple Crowns in four years was hailed as fantastic foresight before the Lions got hold of him.

The cost of the contract, over €1.4 million in total, was seen as a pittance next to the potential revenues to be generated by the team that Eddie built on the back of a successful run to at least the World Cup semifinals.

Now all is changed, and we know how wrong we were to bathe in optimism. It all went horribly wrong in France, and once the news pages get involved you know someone is going to pay a price.

The players won’t. They never do, even though they were the ones who underachieved and underperformed on the pitch.

Some will drift into retirement, all will drift back to their clubs and their provinces and find a new cause to chase and a new product to endorse come the winter and the Heineken Cup.

In the meantime O’Sullivan will become the centerpiece of speculation, objection and maybe even controversy. Such is the way of the world and the way of the national coach – unless CIE and not the IRFU are your paymasters!

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