Ken Early: Hoolahan key factor in defining game

If team spirit is an illusion glimpsed in the moment of victory, then you could say the same thing about managerial ability. When you win you’ve got it, and when you lose . . .

There are also unfortunate cases of managers who don't get much credit even when they win. A man who falls into this category is the Barcelona manager, Luis Enrique. Enrique's demeanour at his press conference after Barcelona won the Champions League last week was fascinating. You would have expected him to be exultant, but instead he came across as bored and irritated.

It was a bizarre sight. A man who had just won the treble – who stood at the absolute pinnacle of achievement in his profession – who didn’t seem happy at all. What was going on?

Well, Enrique has a bad relationship with the Catalan press. Although the treble represented the ultimate vindication for his much-criticised regime, he understood that when his media enemies were doling out the credit, the name of Luis Enrique would figure a long way down the list behind names like Messi, Suarez, Neymar, Iniesta, Busquets, Pique and so on.

And maybe he reserved an even deeper contempt for those former enemies who would now change their tune and acclaim him as a managerial genius simply because his team had just won a game rather than losing it.

Pass judgement

At the root of Enrique’s dissatisfaction is a sense that the media who pass judgment on him every week are in no way qualified to do so. “Sometimes work has to be judged on things other than results,” he said.

The problem he shares with all other football managers is that the vast majority of their work is hidden from public view. Ultimately the only thing people have to judge them on is results.

This evening Martin O’Neill faces one of those sliding doors moments which will determine how people judge his time in charge of the Ireland team. If Ireland win, then O’Neill’s work up to this point will be considered a success. If they lose, then all his work will be questioned. His work will have been the same in either case, so either way the judgment seems unjust.

If O’Neill is feeling any pressure at the approach of this defining moment, it was not in evidence at yesterday’s press conference, where he adopted the gently soporific persona he favours for such occasions. Rather than answer questions he often simply agrees with them, or even praises them with a politeness verging on gentle sarcasm. “You’ve struck it absolutely . . . it’s exactly that . . . the point you made at the beginning I think is right” and so on.

Eventually someone hit on the idea of asking a question premised on an assumption O’Neill could not possibly agree with. In the manager’s opinion, why was it that Ireland’s qualification campaign “has stalled”?

O’Neill allowed himself a disappointed pause, like a teacher who thought he had explained everything only for a pupil to blurt out something that revealed they hadn’t listened to a thing he’d said.

“We got beaten by Scotland, by a goal scored in the 75th minute, and we drew with Poland. And the game before that we drew with Germany, in Germany. I think they are world champions, and I think they’d won that three months earlier,” he explained, with an air of pained forbearance. “I’m not so sure it’s been a real staller, but everyone views it differently – that’s why we’re gathered here, debating some points. You see it from that viewpoint. I don’t.”

O’Neill was never going to accept that the campaign had “stalled”, but everyone understood where the question was coming from. You could entertain another debate around the issue of whether this is a campaign that has stalled, or one that hasn’t quite got going yet.

Either way, not many people would argue that the drive for Euro 2016 is racing ahead with the momentum of a runaway freight train. When the FAI’s chief executive is responsible for 90 per cent of the buzz factor surrounding the national team, something is not right.

It’s hard to think of a single protracted spell of good football Ireland have played in the group to date, with the exception of a respectable second half showing against Poland – against a side that dropped too deep trying to protect a lead. This is a team that can’t remember what it feels like to play well and win.

Sense of pessimism

That sense of pessimism was there long before O’Neill, of course. There is a sense that Irish football hasn’t quite recovered from what happened at Euro 2012, and that three years on, the team has yet to deliver the kind of performance that can bring true closure to that nightmare.

We've never really believed "you'll never beat the Irish". It's more that we'd like to think you'll never beat the Irish that easily. Our essentially optimistic self-image has survived many failed qualification campaigns. The unpopularity of the Steve Staunton regime was rooted in a sense of collective disbelief and indignation – five goals for Cyprus? This can't be happening to us!

Scrapping our way through Trapattoni’s first two qualifying campaigns, hanging in there against teams like Italy, France and Russia, there was a sense that the gap between Ireland and the best teams in international football was the sort we might be able to bridge on our best days.

After Euro 2012 we could no longer believe that. Cruelly, it was made plain to us that we were no longer within shouting distance of the best teams. We saw that if Spain was the sun at the centre of the European football solar system, Ireland was a lonely lump of ice adrift in the impenetrable darkness of outer space.

Trapattoni was too much of a realist for the job of restoring our confidence. He had always believed that deep down we were fundamentally a terrible team and seemed nonplussed at the idea that people could blame him for what had happened in Poland.

He departed with a warning that the next manager would not do things any differently, and his warning has largely been borne out. Yesterday O’Neill even used one of Trap’s favourite catchphrases when he talked about the need to look after “the little details”.

He also said: “There is a very strong spirit in the side. We’re good at some things, not so clever in others, but I don’t think we will be defeated by another team having more spirit than us.”

Trapattoni used to praise Ireland’s spirit too, like all foreign coaches do when they have to talk about Ireland: “We are not great individual players like Messi or Ibrahimovic, we have no creative like Ronaldo or Messi, but we are a good team with good balance and good attitude.”

That was Trapattoni before the Sweden match in March 2013 but really it could have been before any match.

Heavy hint

One difference between O’Neill and Trapattoni is that O’Neill is prepared to pick

Wes Hoolahan

, and in the closing stages of the press conference yesterday he dropped a heavy hint that Hoolahan would start.

Hoolahan was injured for the match away to Scotland, and in his absence Ireland went with a muscular, hustling game plan based on direct balls towards Jon Walters and Shane Long.

They learned that night that they were not strong enough to push Scotland around. Hoolahan’s likely involvement holds out the faint hope that today, Ireland can find another way.