Vera Pauw’s unforgivable sin was to stand up for herself

Well, that lasted all of a nanosecond. One moment, Vera Pauw is a hero, making sports history for Ireland and leading the St Patrick’s Day parade as grand marshal. Next moment, she’s the biggest villain since Cruella de Vil. Her execution was completed even before the charges against her were made publicly known. Ciao now, Pauw, decreed the Irish Football Association. Oh, and thanks for the memories.

If Pauw’s name had been Jack the Lad or Roy of the Rovers, the whole country would still be fulminating. The “blazers” would be choking on their prawn sandwiches, and billionaires would be dispatching their private jets to rescue the one jettisoned overboard. There would be blue bloody murder.

An opinion poll for the Sunday Independent has registered that a 52 per cent majority of the public disapproves of the FAI’s decision not to renew the Dutch coach’s contract to manage the Republic of Ireland’s women’s squad. They just don’t disapprove strongly enough to bother doing anything about it.

When Roy Keane was ejected from the Saipan men’s camp on the eve of the 2002 World Cup, Civil War Mark II erupted in Ireland. You were either with Keano or you were with Mick McCarthy, the manager. Entire families were split. Friends fought. Bertie Ahern, the taoiseach at the time, tried in vain to negotiate a peace agreement. Twenty-one years later, the ashes of the squabble still smoulder. For anyone partial to a peaceful life, Saipan has joined politics and sex as topics of conversation best avoided.

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Considering the unprecedented success she achieved with the women players, Pauw’s hasty dismissal from the Ireland camp is every bit as astonishing as Keane’s dismissal from Saipan. As recently as 2017, women footballers were being so contemptuously treated they threatened to go on strike because of the FAI’s obdurate sexism. By contrast with the relative pampering of their male colleagues, the women had to share their kit with junior squads and change out of their clothes in public toilets. They were paid nothing for lost wages during the time they spent away from their day jobs in the national training camp and the FAI was refusing to negotiate with their professional representatives.

[ From washing men’s underwear to playing at sold-out Sydney stadiums: Ireland’s winding road to the Women’s World Cup ]

“They are the dirt off the FAI’s shoe. That’s how [the FAI] see them,” said the players’ solicitor, Stuart Gilhooly, at the time.

To rise from that morass of disregard to qualify for the first time for the Fifa Women’s World Cup five years later is a phenomenal achievement. The women’s success generated new streams of advertising showing the players as role models for girls, and created big television audiences for RTÉ, with the FAI basking in the whole glow. The buzz was uplifting. So was the commitment demonstrated on the pitch by Ireland’s players under their manager’s guidance. So what was Pauw’s crime that warranted her abrupt elimination?

Mark Tighe, the reporter who broke the John Delaney-FAI scandal and co-wrote with Paul Rowan the inside story about the former chief executive’s lavish perks in a book called Champagne Football, can be depended on to know what is happening behind the FAI scenes. It seems the stern-faced Dutch woman’s unforgivable sin was that she had the gall to stand up for herself.

After a US investigation of some coaches’ conduct criticised her treatment of players while training the Houston Dash the year before she came to Ireland, Pauw defended herself against the findings. She denied the allegations and said the investigation was unfair. The FAI backed her. Soon, though, the worm turned.

Instead of sending her packing with her professional reputation damaged, the FAI should have commissioned a statue of Pauw to stand on a plinth at its Abbotstown HQ

Pauw was told not to discuss the issue, freshly regurgitated in Athletic magazine, when she and the team captain, Katie McCabe, appeared at a joint media conference before the squad flew to France for the World Cup. She disobeyed. For about 20 minutes, Pauw answered questions about the allegations, saying she needed to keep fighting the “lies”. Tighe has reported that it was “as a direct result” of her flouting the instruction not to discuss the matter at the conference that negotiations to renew Pauw’s contract were paused.

Whatever the truth of the accusations made against her – one being that she fat-shamed Houston Dash players, including one who had an eating disorder – Pauw is entitled to defend herself. Had she not done so, her principles would have joined her reputation under the microscope for scrutiny.

Besides, if the FAI should have learned anything from the Delaney period of shame it is that attempted censorship is counterproductive. The organisation’s former boss discovered that when he unsuccessfully applied to the High Court for an injunction to stop Tighe’s original scoop being published.

When Keane refused to stop criticising the FAI, at least half the country admired him all the more for it. His impudence, as some people saw it, elevated him from sports stardom to super stardom, attracting a legion of new female fans to boot. But, if obstreperousness in a man can be an aphrodisiac, in a woman it is a crime punishable by a firing squad at dawn.

[ FAI made the right decision on Vera Pauw but they have to come out and own it now ]

The other purported reason Pauw fell out of favour with her Irish employers was because they objected to her coaching philosophy. Anyone even slightly au fait with the women footballers’ spectacular success since she took the job may have to read that last sentence again. Yes, it seems, the men in suits in the office thought they knew better than the woman who brought the national team to the World Cup stage for the first time.

Instead of sending her packing with her professional reputation damaged, the FAI should have commissioned a statue of Pauw to stand on a plinth at its Abbotstown HQ.

Streams of young girls joined the soccer ranks after seeing the Irish women arrive on the world stage. Seeing was believing. Experts hailed a new dawn for women in sport.

We may need to adjust our TV sets as, this week, all the talk is about the men’s game again. Pauw has been consigned to a footnote in history, and all those girls and women who felt galvanised by her achievement have seen the thanks she got. For the female of the species, it’s deja vu all over again.