Martin O’Neill positive about Poland and beyond

Having regularly bemoaned the lengthy periods of inactivity through his first few months in the job and itched to get going on the competitive front, Martin O’Neill looked happy enough to have a little time now to reflect on his first year in charge in the wake of Tuesday’s game against the USA.

In terms of recent holders of the post, he is currently sitting mid-table after 13 games but he has the air of a man who is getting to grips with a task he initially found a little alien. On the competitive front, Friday's defeat in Celtic Park has meant that the squad break for the Christmas on a little bit of a low but with every one of Ireland's rivals still to come Dublin, it's hardly surprising that the northerner remains positive about Poland in March and beyond.

In the meantime, he says, there will be plenty to keep him busy with the progress of players at their clubs to be monitored through a key part of the league season. O'Neill is acutely aware of the fact that boosting the confidence of a player like Robbie Brady by playing him in a friendly in which he scores twice is of only limited value if the Dubliner ends up in the doldrums back at Hull City.

“I might have mentioned about knowing your best team,” he says, and while these things change in a monthly basis, I think I have a fair idea now.

“So they might have come here, done so well in the game and end up having to hang their hat on that (in March) if they’re not playing regularly at club level because their managers don’t pick them. I’m hoping that’s not going to be the case for many of them – but it might be for one or two...”

The northerner seems happy, at least, that he has broadened and strengthened his options over the course of the year he has been in charge. There has been little enough change in the grand scheme of things even if favourites like James McClean and, particularly, Aiden McGeady have been given bigger billing but players like David Meyler, Richard Keogh and Stephen Quinn have all repaid the faith he has placed in them while the debuts handed to Cyrus Christie and David McGoldrick this week would appear to confirmed their ability to play meaningful roles over the latter half of the qualification campaign if required to do so.

“I knew he wouldn’t let us down,” the manager said of the Derby full-back’s performance against the USA. “He played well and put a marker down which was great and I think he feels pretty good about it.

Asked about the 22-year- old's ability to challenge on the left hand side of the defence too, O'Neill was cautious: "You never know in time whether players can play in different positions. Someone asked me six or seven months ago did I think Seamus Coleman could play wing-back. I think I said, hopefully, I think he could. But sometimes full-backs like that wee bit of protection so that if they're isolated out there they're almost treated like a winger.

“It is something we would want to have a look at. Maybe to get our best players on the field and we might have to look at a 3-5-2 formation at home which I think is possible. The problem with all of those things if you want to be really technical about it is that sometimes centre-halves don’t really like to go out to full-back positions. But I’m not so sure that the players we have here would be reluctant to do it, as long as we practiced it.”

As for McGoldrick, he noted that the Ipswich player had missed out on pre-season due to an injury and “I think you could tell that at times during the game, but he gives you a little bit of something that I think we possibly hadn’t possessed up there. He’s a different type of player to anything we’ve had before.”

It will be interesting to see whether McGoldrick's arrival impacts negatively on Wes Hoolahan who has been one of the biggest winners in the squad under O'Neill so far. The Norwich City star is clearly a fan favourite but despite involving him pretty prominently in his first seven games in charge, the manager strongly suggested after the 7-0 defeat of Gibraltar that he has reservations about the Dubliner's ability to justify a start place in the bigger away games.

The Scotland starting line up raised a bigger question than that, though, with Robbie Keane dropped and left to lament afterwards that the style of football he craves has simply gone out of fashion. Shane Long may finally, after a few false starts, be about to topple him.

Keane, like O’Neill, will have some quiet time over the winter to ponder what 2015 might hold.