His club form so far this season has been someway short of what would have been required to embarrass those Premier League managers who baulked at Norwich's €23 million asking price when he looked a likely mover during the summer but Robbie Brady has no complaints, he says, about finding himself back in the Championship.
Brady got Norwich’s second goal in their 2-1 win at Wolves last weekend to move them up to second place in the Championship. The quality of his goal suggests that he just might be rediscovering his Euros form at a nice time for Ireland.
And while he makes no bones about his determination to get back to the top flight, he is, he insists, happy to hang around and help Norwich back up if that’s what it takes.
“I’m not too sure the way things will go,” he says after launching an impressive looking Fingal County Council- and FAI-backed project in Corduff that will allow aspiring professionals to get a taste of full-time football during their school transition year. “There’s another window in January but my main focus now is getting Norwich promoted. It’s a tough job but the rewards are great if you manage to do it.
“The summer went well. It [the Championship] is different in a lot of ways but there are still some massive games in the Championship. It’s a tough league. As soon as the whistle goes, it’s so fast, you haven’t too much time to adapt . . . It’s ‘get yourself ready’ and that’s what I am doing, I’m enjoying it.”
Highlights reel
Reruns of his performances in France, most obviously against Italy, must have been watched back with interest at a fair few Premier League clubs and he certainly enjoyed his own Euro highlights reel once or twice, he admits.
“When you’re playing football with your brothers growing up, cart-wheeling around the green pretending to be Robbie Keane . . . it’s a little bit surreal. But I just have to put this away now until I’m finished because I still have a job to do. I can’t just be watching that 200 times over and over.”
It all sounds terribly serious until somebody checks that he has indeed sat down and watched that famous goal back with his family at least once.
“Only 190 times!” he says with obvious delight, which takes on a hint of bemusement when somebody suggests that it would not be all he would want to be remembered for.
“Ah, it’s not bad, though!” he exclaims, prompting considerable laughter.
“It’s a proud moment and I’ll never forget it,” he says, “but hopefully I can go and do something special in this campaign. There is nothing he could do over the coming week, one imagines, that would come anyway close to rivalling his goal or celebration in Lille but if Ireland do not win both games then the chances of O’Neill’s men making it onto another big championship stage will be severely dented, and Brady says the players will be completely focused even before the manager starts to hammer home again just how much is at stake.
No great shakes
“A lot of people are expecting the win,” he says, “You’re expecting it yourself and it is a six-point week. We need to be going into it like that. They [Georgia and Moldova] are no great shakes but by no means is it going to be easy. We’ll be as ready as we can, though, and hopefully it won’t be as tough as it has been before.
“We never seem to be able to do things the easy way,” he acknowledges, “so hopefully this time we can go and get the wins when they’re there. There was a bit of messing on going on last year trying to qualify, nothing mad, but we got there in the end.
“It was a big target when Martin O’Neill [came in] and the first thing he said to us . . . on the board, he drew France, he drew a map and he drew a circle and put France in the middle and said ‘that’s where we want to be in a couple of years! This is it.’ And we managed to do that.
So, did the manager draw Russia on the dressing room whiteboard as this campaign kicked off in Serbia last month? “Nah,” says his smile breaking out again, “he hadn’t enough ink in his marker for that.”
