Soccer

Declan Rice and Jack Grealish brush off boos to be England’s two best players against Ireland

Reception given to former Ireland players was loud and ferocious but they were both unruffled by it

England's Jack Grealish and Declan Rice after the game. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
Malachy Clerkin at the Aviva Stadium
Sat Sept 07 2024 - 20:05

And now, the England team for tonight’s game ... BOOOOOOOOOO!! Number four, Declan Rice ... BOOOOOOOO!! Number 10, Jack Grealish ... BOOOOOOO!!! Ladies and gentlemen, please stand for the national anthem of England ... BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Okay, so then what? So you boo Declan Rice and you boo Jack Grealish and you scream along, puce-faced and spittled, when the Lansdowne Road PA system plays Put ‘Em Under Pressure. You puff yourself up to your full height to boo God Save The King, even though plenty of people around you are shaking their heads at the nonsense of it all.

Right. And what happens next? The same thing that pretty much always happens. Good players play good football, they ignore the noise, they perform. On a night when the scope and size of the job on Heimir Hallgrímsson’s hands became ever more apparent the further the game went on, Rice and Grealish were the two best players on the pitch.

However begrudgingly, you have to hand it to them both. It’s a long time since two players have come to Dublin and found themselves on the sharp end of such a loud and ferocious reaction as they got here – if it has ever happened at all. From their first introduction 40 minutes before kick-off, they weren’t so much booed as carpet-bombed with invective at every turn.

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And it couldn’t have mattered less. They were both supremely, entirely unruffled by it all. Between them, they barely misplaced a pass all evening and put in what was essentially a routine night’s work. Rice scored the first goal and then laid on the second for Grealish. As flies to wanton boys were Ireland to them both. They killed us for their sport.

What else could we have expected? Rice and Grealish play week-in and week-out for two of the biggest clubs in the world. They spend a couple of hours every three or four days getting screamed at, put down and called every name under the sun in a wide variety of languages and accents. They know the road in games like this.

Jack Grealish of England celebrates scoring his team's second goal. Photograph: Carl Recine/Getty

And so they just knuckled down and treated it like any other away crowd that needed silencing. In that respect, they got their work done inside the opening 25 minutes. For the first knockings of the game, Rice seemed maybe a bit standoffish, a little removed from the fray. It wasn’t that he was shirking anything, just that the game was happening in the places he wasn’t and he was fine with it.

Grealish, meanwhile, seemed to be revelling in the hate. He got involved in an early spat with Chiedozie Ogbene that sent the crowd into fulmination and smiled ruefully when Nathan Collins nailed him for the first of many fouls of the evening. He went looking for work all the time, getting himself on the ball with tidy touches and insistent interventions.

Grealish’s one mistake came after 10 minutes, when Matt Doherty harried him from behind and sent Ogbene raiding down the right. The move finished with a Sammie Szmodics shot that Jordan Pickford palmed away but the fact that Ireland were able to create a chance at all was obviously sweetened by the fact that it started with a Grealish error.

And then Rice went up the other end and scored the opener.

Will Smallbone had him covered and then he hadn’t, left watching on as Anthony Gordon went through on goal. Caoimhín Kelleher and Nathan Collins did their best to bail the water out of the boat and they deserved better than for Rice to be free to follow up unmarked to sweep the ball to the net. All the boos in the world count for nothing when a ball-watching midfielder doesn’t do his job.

Rice ran off to the England supporters behind the Havelock Square end and did that palms flat thing that footballers do when they’ve scored against their old club. To see it happen in an international game only added to the all-round weirdness of the fixture. Throw it in beside Lee Carsley becoming front page news for not singing the anthem and a fat bloke in an England shirt loping out of the crowd to stand in for the England team photo before being hauled away. Let history record that all of these things happened.

And, naturally, Grealish made sure he happened too. By the 25th minute, Rice was the supreme performer on the pitch. He was lording the midfield, breaking up play and pushing England forward. Then he got on the ball down the England right, played one-twos with Kobe Mainoo and Bukayo Saka before squaring for Grealish to bury his finish.

It was a terrific goal and Grealish was having none of the palms-down celebration. He jumped and punched the air and turned to take the acclaim of his team-mates. Rice was first on the scene and the pair hugged it out. All hurdles jumped, all boos silenced.

This is the killer aspect to the whole thing, of course. You watch Ireland play in these games – and, more pertinently, games against teams far lower down the rankings than England – and it is so obvious that the players Hallgrímsson so badly needs are exactly a Declan Rice and exactly a Jack Grealish. An all-action midfielder and a tricky inside forward. If they were hardy centre-halves or promising goalkeepers, maybe it wouldn’t sting like this.

That said, whatever sting there is had mostly worn off by the break. Such was the gulf in quality between the sides that by half-time, a lot of the fight had gone out of the Ireland crowd. Grealish and Rice both got on the ball in the 46th minute.

Hardly a boo to be heard.

Malachy Clerkin

Malachy Clerkin

Malachy Clerkin is a sports writer with The Irish Times