Cathal Dervan, Editor
Someday soon, somebody who really cares about Irish football, maybe even in the Oireachtas on Wednesday, is going to ask a very simple question of the Tesco suits and the dithering independents now running the FAI - can we have our game back?
So said a man to me (give or take) in a pub last night, a regular starting point for debating all things sport for men and women like me of a certain generation, whether we like to admit it or not.
It’s an interesting proposal and one that deserves debate. Should the sporting nation give Irish football back to the people and to the players driven under a bus in Debrecen by the very body there to protect them and facilitate their international football futures?
Should Irish football take back power and dIsband the calamitous crew who have systematically run our sport into the ground since they succeeded the last gang who ran it into the ground before it was rescued by a Government with deep public pockets that Irish football is now subservient to?
That’s the same Government that tells the FAI it is independent and subservient but only if it appoints enough independent directors alongside football directors - even if some of those independents never marked a pitch in their life. And wouldn’t know how to.
Can Irish football appoint people to positions of power who actually know the game, including many of those football brains jettisoned in a recent ‘transformation’ that was nothing more than a clear-out of those who didn’t toe the Tesco line?
Can Irish football lose the people in power with some of those Aviva Stadium tennis balls stuck in their mouths who use corporate consultants and corporate speak phrases like new variables, straight line answers and vertical thinking, phrases you will never hear from the sidelines in Dodder Park of a wet Sunday?
Should Irish football abandon its General Assembly, the body that passed the motion to play the games against Israel months after also passing a motion to ban the same Israel from UEFA - an organisation they are members of since 1991 but only because the Asian federation wouldn’t accommodate them anymore back in 1974?
Should Irish football question the validity of a Board and an executive that provided some of the facts but not all of them - gerrymandering Brian Kerr calls it - that inspired the aforementioned General Assembly to vote by 73 votes to 32 in July to back said Board’s recommendation that the games against Israel be played?
Should Irish football give the thriving League of Ireland the freedom to go it alone, to negotiate its own TV deals, to become an autonomous league like so many others across Europe, free from the shackles to its current dysfunctional mother ship?
Can Irish football just start again? File for bankruptcy, financially and morally. Give the Aviva Stadium back to its rugby landlords. Tell the Government it helps elect to stick the money that allows them to tell the FAI to do one thing in February then suggest they should do different entirely as Fine Gael TD Barry Ward did yesterday when his own party’s Minister for Sport was nowhere to be seen.
How would Irish football do this? Create a Federal FAI maybe - let the Provincial Associations take charge of grassroots football, let the League of Ireland run itself, let the federal body take charge of international football. Let football give control back to football people.
Sure the game would be starting from the bottom all over again without a pot to urinate in but so what? It couldn’t be any worse than the latest mess that the Irish franchise for the beautiful game finds itself in.
Yes, I worked for the FAI once upon a time but I was a football man long before I was an FAI man and I will be a football man long after I was an FAI man.
I did my job in the FAI and I was there when we worked bloody hard to rebuild from within after 2019. Some suggested a restart then and I disagreed but now, sadly, some are suggesting a restart again for this failed model. They may be right.
The lack of leadership, the lack of protection of Gavin Basunu and all the players over the past 48 hours, the failure to tackle this problem when it arose back in February, the u-turn on summer football, the endless appearances in the Oireachtas are fuelling the belief in some quarters that it is indeed time to blow the final whistle.
Maybe we should just let the kids play our game and let the rest of us sort out a future for Irish football - without the FAI this time.
Oh and by the way, there’s a game in Debrecen tonight. Or is there?
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