This has all got a bit juvenile. Needlessly so. Managers come and go from sports teams all the time. Their time reaches its natural end, whether they personally agree with that assessment or not. They leave the stage, the search begins to replace them. In a grown-up world, there is both an acceptance of reality and, if required, an explanation for it.
Vera Pauw’s failure to have her contract extended came as no surprise to anyone who has followed the journey of the Ireland women’s team over the past four years. The mood music around her relationship with the players has not been good since qualification. From early in 2023, a series of incidents, varying in size and seriousness, had put a strain on things that was visible to those keeping a close eye.
Let us count the ways. There was the introduction of granny rule players in February to edge out squad stalwarts, even though they weren’t always obvious upgrades. Critically, there was the reheating of the Houston Dash allegations at Pauw’s behest a fortnight out from the World Cup. There was making Katie McCabe sit through a 40-minute press conference the day before their final warm-up game against France, while Pauw took question after question and hogged the focus of the build-up.
In Australia, she pulled the team out of the Colombia friendly mid-game and talked publicly afterwards about the fear in her players’ eyes. There was the half-time substitution of Lucy Quinn against Canada, which some players only found out about as they walked back out on to the pitch. Finally, there was the all-too public battle of wills with McCabe during – and particularly after – the Nigeria game.
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None of these, by themselves, is the reason Pauw is gone. But they form part of the mosaic. The FAI had other problems with her regime, particularly around strength and conditioning and how she was out of step with some of the professional clubs in England from which she drew her squads. All of it added up to a more complete picture. When the association did its debrief to the board on Tuesday night, it formed the view that it was time to end the relationship.
Clearly, Pauw disagrees with how it has all been handled. Her statement on Thursday night was critical of the FAI, a sentiment she doubled down on in her interview with RTÉ’s Tony O’Donoghue on Friday. She is aggrieved at what she sees as interference from the association, both before and during the World Cup. It is her suspicion that the decision to get rid of her was taken before they left for Australia.
She could well be correct in that, in spirit if not in letter. The FAI will never admit it and when they do eventually surface, they will presumably point out that a review process was carried out professionally and taking all stakeholders into account, etc, etc. But it was obvious heading to the World Cup that Pauw’s personality and her my-way-or-the-highway approach was running out of road, both with the players and with her employers. It would have taken something pretty special at the tournament to change that.
The Athletic article was an inflection point. When the allegations from her time in Houston first surfaced before Christmas, the FAI stood four-square behind their manager. They were of the not unreasonable view that it was unfair that she be lumped in with the likes of Christy Holly and Paul Riley, who faced far more serious accusations but had received broadly similar bans from coaching in America. There was no suggestion that it would affect her status as Ireland manager.
But in dredging everything back up in early July, Pauw caused the build-up to the World Cup to be dominated by questions about her past. In the days that followed the article, FAI chief executive Jonathan Hill went to the team hotel in Castleknock and spoke to players and staff to check in on the team environment. It is this sort of intervention that Pauw now appears to view as a breach of the team bubble.
She is, of course, entitled to feel irritated by what she sees as meddling from above. But at the same time, it’s difficult to fault the FAI for taking the temperature of the squad and staff at a time when Pauw was making headlines throughout world football over allegations about her behaviour and her coaching methods. Her steadfast denials that she had done anything wrong notwithstanding, the FAI has a duty of care to its players.
All of which has made the association’s silence this week a glaring error of judgment. The World Cup changed everything about women’s football in Ireland. It changed expectations, it changed attitudes, it changed (hopefully) the future. But most of all, it changed the number of people who have an interest in what is going on with the manager of the Ireland women’s team.
There is a vast constituency now who have never heard of the Houston Dash or the Athletic or the granny rule players or any of that but who want to know why Pauw got shafted after bringing Ireland to their only World Cup. And the longer the FAI spend not explaining it to them, the more they waste the goodwill this whole adventure has earned.
The association’s official explanation for this silence doesn’t hold water. Their stance is that we have entered the international window for the men’s team so they can’t be seen to overshadow the France and Holland games by talking about the women’s team. But this is nonsense.
For a start, Stephen Kenny was happy to talk about Pauw when asked on Thursday morning. More to the point, the FAI’s refusal to expand on Tuesday night’s 193-word statement has only extended the general level of interest and curiosity. They are not scheduled to make any public comment until the middle of the month, after the men’s games have been played. That may change, now that Pauw has come after them.
If it does, it will only make their failure to do so earlier look worse. They hung their players out to dry in the middle of the week. Whether deliberately or not, the FAI allowed the impression to go abroad to the general public that Pauw was forced out by an ungrateful playing staff who didn’t like being criticised by their straight-talking Dutch manager. The association can’t possibly have been unaware that this had become a mainstream view of the situation. Not to mention an incorrect one.
The players were certainly aware of it. Several of them were contacted by The Irish Times in the days that followed and though none wanted to go on the record, their anger at being painted as misguided little snowflakes who’d suddenly got notions above their station was palpable. After four years of working for Pauw, they found the idea of player power having forced her out ridiculous. The FAI got rid of the manager, not the players.
They were consulted as part of the review, naturally. They gave their views, honestly and without fear or favour. What the board of the FAI did with that information was up to them. The decision, ultimately, was to move on without her. But the players didn’t – couldn’t – make that decision. It is to Pauw’s credit that she has only spoken of them glowingly since the decision, particularly McCabe, with whom she says she has no problem whatsoever.
Now that the decision is made, Pauw’s place in Irish football history is secure. The respect for what she achieved in the job shouldn’t be mealy-mouthed or grudging. She changed everyone’s idea of what seemed possible in women’s football here. She deleted all the old excuses for not competing. She made Ireland enormously difficult to beat, a particularly precious currency at international level.
There were plenty of players who improved out of sight under her. Courtney Brosnan was seen as an error-prone goalkeeper with an unsure club future when Pauw backed her at the start of the World Cup campaign. She became the cornerstone of qualification, despite many still classing her as the third-best keeper in the squad. Even at the World Cup itself, Heather Payne’s displays at right wing-back were a triumph of coaching after she had spent the qualifying campaign as a lone striker.
And though not all of the granny rule players worked out, Pauw did find a few gems on her travels. Lily Agg, Sinead Farrelly and Aoife Mannion are all established professionals who can drive the team through the next qualifying campaign, supplementing the likes of O’Sullivan and McCabe and bringing young players like Abbie Larkin and Izzy Atkinson through the next stage of their career. Pauw has unquestionably left the Ireland team in a better place than she found it.
But cycles come to an end. By the end of the World Cup, it became clear that the manager’s headstrong insistence on her own values above all others was gradually losing her the dressing room. The FAI weren’t deaf to that fact.
And nor should they have been. For one thing, player-centred coaching is at the vanguard of all sports, regardless of code, ability or gender. For another, it would be hypocritical of Irish sport in general to spend the summer holding these players up as such great examples to girls and women everywhere, only to ignore them when they have something important to say.
The FAI took it all into account and made their decision. They owe it to everyone now – players, public and Pauw herself – to come out and own it. The greatest ever achievement in women’s football in Ireland is starting to sour and curdle.
Hiding away isn’t helping matters.
