New Ireland manager.

England are ranked 4th in the world, Ireland 59th. 4th ranked Premier league team last season was Aston Villa, 59th was Bristol Rovers. Thats the gulf in class and won't change overnight.

Great win for the u21s though.
It was probably best to get this game out of the way and give HH more of a view of what players he has, and the shapes they take up.

The real benchmark will come against Greece and Finland and they need to be better in terms of organisations, tactics for those games.
 
I didn't think England were that good but Ireland , without been good, made them look better than they were.
I looked at both N Ireland and Scotland last night and they were very poor also.
 
There was probably a clue in the new manager's name.

Hallgrímsson.

It's gonna be all grim son from here.

I'll get my coat...
 
Ireland looked strong coming to the end of the first half... had a great strike ruled out for offside , should have done better with the chances that came out way.
Greece have been better team in the second half though, Irish defenders backed off outside the box and bang, great strike puts Greece ahead.
Looking like we'll open the campaign with 2 home defeats and no goals.

Edit... as I was typing this, Greece hit us on the break and it's 0-2 now.
 
Ireland looked strong coming to the end of the first half... had a great strike ruled out for offside , should have done better with the chances that came out way.
Greece have been better team in the second half though, Irish defenders backed off outside the box and bang, great strike puts Greece ahead.
Looking like we'll open the campaign with 2 home defeats and no goals.

Edit... as I was typing this, Greece hit us on the break and it's 0-2 now.
Same old story. Plenty of possession but no end result...
 
Irish football needs a complete reboot. A strong national team should be consequence of a well-developed management of the sport, not a pursuit in its own right.

What we’re looking at is the consequence of a poorly managed FAI over the last 20 years which has put the status of the national team over the development of the game at grassroots level.

We need to go back to basics and build from the bottom up, creating and developing more players in an infrastructure that will perform to higher standards in the longer term, not in the next year or two.

There are other countries with similar populations who do much better than we do. That’s the standard we should really aspire to.
 
A good bunch of Irish players only comes around every so often ...so we will just have to wait until we have enough Premier League standard players to challenge for anything......no matter who the manager is.
 
A good bunch of Irish players only comes around every so often ...so we will just have to wait until we have enough Premier League standard players to challenge for anything......no matter who the manager is.
I think it will be tougher... before we could rely on English teams taking promising lads and training them for us.
There are rules now players can't go to UK until 18.
They need to be showing potential at that age to be worth taking a chance on, and English teams are now pulling from a pool of talented youngsters globally.
The numbers from the grandfather \ parentage rule dropping dramatically also, as less people emigrating to England.

The coaching structures here need a radical overhaul for us to get competitive.
 
We actually have plenty of young players coming through, u21s are doing well as are most of the underage teams and it is good to see more heading for European clubs in recent years. A young lad joined Venezia in Serie A a few weeks ago from Wexford, another guy gone from Cork City to Benfica over the summer. Brexit has changed things

Recent u19 squad had players playing in 7 different countries
 
We actually have plenty of young players coming through, u21s are doing well as are most of the underage teams and it is good to see more heading for European clubs in recent years. A young lad joined Venezia in Serie A a few weeks ago from Wexford, another guy gone from Cork City to Benfica over the summer. Brexit has changed things

Recent u19 squad had players playing in 7 different countries
Fingers crossed these 'wild geese' come good, and expand our options on the pitch.

I don't think we could go back to the long ball \ direct style even if we wanted to, I don't see any target men.
 
A win, shock! Away from home against a similarly ranked team, although in truth both Finland and Ireland looked very average.
Game could have gone either way but we've lost a few such "cup tie" games in the recent past.

Greece away on Sunday looks tough prospect.
 
A win, shock! Away from home against a similarly ranked team, although in truth both Finland and Ireland looked very average.
Game could have gone either way but we've lost a few such "cup tie" games in the recent past.

Greece away on Sunday looks tough prospect.
A man on the wireless this morning mentioned that it was our first away win in the competition and the first comeback win since 2012 (against the mighty Kazakhstan).
 
Agreed, I'll take a win, any win against anybody. The give-away goal was a shocker of amateur proportions though, sorry guys.
 
A man on the wireless this morning mentioned that it was our first away win in the competition and the first comeback win since 2012 (against the mighty Kazakhstan).
I'll take his word for it, my auld head doesn't stretch back that far these days.
 
Some words of encouragement for the Irish management and team ,in advance of tomorrow's game V Greece, from the great Arthur Ashe......
"Start where you are.Use what you have.Do what you can."

COYBIG ☘️
 
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