Emmet Malone On Soccer: With his team's dream of going to Portugal for next summer's European Championship having been shattered in Basel over the weekend, Brian Kerr may well now find himself following in some of his predecessor's footsteps as he seeks to reorganise and rebuild for the 2006 World Cup qualification campaign during the year ahead.
Senior FAI officials say that Kerr will be given as much freedom as possible when it comes to the team's movements over the months ahead and there are expected to be offers from the United States and Europe to participate in events. Within the last few weeks, however, the FAI has received an invitation to play in a tournament in Japan in May of next year. The event would most likely be scheduled for between the end of the European league seasons and the start of Euro 2004.
On Saturday evening Brian Kerr suggested that his team's next game would probably be in the Czech Republic in the middle of next month. FAI chief executive Fran Rooney said subsequently that that was just one of several invitations being considered at this point by the association but if both trips end up being confirmed, it would mean the new manager bringing the team back to two of the countries most closely associated with Mick McCarthy's six-year reign.
It was in Olomouc, in March 1998, that McCarthy embarked on a dramatic overhaul of the Irish squad with the likes of Mark Kinsella, Damien Duff and Robbie Keane amongst more than half a dozen players to be capped at senior level for the first time. A little over four years later, Ireland's trip to the World Cup finals in Japan marked a coming of age at senior level for many of the players the then manager had brought into the squad.
Having very much persisted with the group he inherited from his predecessor, Kerr may now start the process of putting his own stamp on the panel back in the Czech Republic. If only, he must wish, he had the same sort of number of players just queuing up to be handed their chance at senior level.
In reality only a small handful of Ireland's underage internationals from the past few years have developed into players with the potential to challenge for a place in Kerr's side. Liam Miller is by far the most exciting prospect, and the nature of Saturday's game underlined how desperately the Republic needs the young central midfielder to fulfil his enormous potential. Sean Thornton and Andy Reid are the two other leading candidates for a run-out at the higher level next month with another two or three talents of note still too young to be seriously considered at this stage.
Kerr said when announcing his squad for the trip to Switzerland that he and his management team knew the next generation of Irish players better than anyone and he is clearly right. He will also be keenly aware of the shortcomings of a group that, though they only suffered their first defeat of his reign at the weekend, had only won well in one (at home to Georgia) of six competitive games since he took over.
The question now is whether, having failed to extract the improvement required from this group - particularly against Group 10's other two main teams, to salvage a top two finish and perhaps the play-off against Wales that the Russians now face - he must find enough new blood to make a significant difference.
Even if he does unveil some hidden gems, however, it seems hard to imagine how the campaign for a place in Germany is not going to be largely fought with the same group of players that have just fallen so dramatically short of what was required to secure a place in Portugal.
With Roy Keane having declined his invitation to return, Dean Kiely departing despite his attempt to persuade him to stay and Gary Kelly also deciding to call it a day, Kerr could do without losing any more from what is basically a very shallow pool of players.
Assuming almost all of the current panel does remain available to him, then his other major task, he confirmed after Saturday's game, will be to bring a greater level of tactical awareness to a team that has been left somewhat behind by the way in which the game has developed across Europe over the past decade or so. Rooney said on Sunday that it is not out of the question that the team will start its World Cup campaign in the spring rather than the autumn, depending on who the Irish are drawn with in December, but it seems that there is plenty to occupy Kerr even if he has the entire year with which to work.
The FAI, meanwhile, also has some work to do over the months ahead, Rooney admitted, with the chief executive remarking during the journey home from Basel that his aim is that the association will have been substantially modernised by next autumn.
With up to €3 million in revenue lost because of the team's failure to qualify, funding will be a major issue for the organisation's new boss who confirmed that the target is to secure more than three times the €1.4 million received this year in government support for next year. Even within the association there are some who are sceptical about his prospects of securing such a rise at a time when public funding for sport is generally being cut back, but Rooney insists that the government has, just as in relation to the stadium issue, given commitments on which it now has an obligation to deliver.
A whole range of other issues, including the association's revenue generation from commercial sources, are also being examined in the hope that ways can be found to bring in additional cash some of which, it is intended, will be used to fund a national development plan that Kerr has played a major part in devising. Assuming things go to plan, the fruits of their efforts may not become visible for a while yet but even after the nightmare of the weekend the scale of their respective tasks is obvious and so neither of Irish football's two most influential men are going to have the quietest of years in 2004.
