Cathal Dervan, Editor
It’s the young people you need to feel sorry for now that September has come and reality has dawned - the old people on the Tesco-like board and in the concreted executive offices lost it months ago, when February came to be precise.
Those young people live in a bubble whilst those kids whose shattered lives are the reason we are in this mess live in a crisis, and one that is not of their own making.
Sometime this morning a bunch of young Irishmen will sit down in a room in Kosovo and do the very thing that others do for them all the time in their professional lives - they will make a decision. It is not something they are used to.
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Lighting up the night...
In their world, everyone is a fixer and they are left to do what they do best - play football. Sometimes they play it very well. As Thursday night’s irrelevance in Pristina proved, other times they don’t play it so well.
For 99 per cent of their career, that game of football is all they have to worry about. Their only responsibilities arrive when they cross a white line and a referee blows a whistle. Then a nation holds its breath.
Some of you might well consider holding your breath as you await the news today, news that has been badly controlled by the FAI all week because they are living in fear of the reality, in fear of what these young men might actually decide now that they have to think for themselves.
That reality is driven by the fact that the old fogeys let these kids down. They didn’t take the decisions that needed to be taken after the draw in Brussels last February.
They didn’t put pressure on UEFA or FIFA or the Irish government when they should have, six months ago, because they are financially behoven to all of them and worried sick that the Euro 2028 cash cow might be sacrificed by making the wrong decision with no desire to make the right one.
That they didn’t consider any alternative decision until a tennis ball fell on the Aviva Stadium against the moral no-gooders from Qatar of all people says it all.
Even when the Irish government abandoned them, the old fogeys failed to open their eyes. On their PR circus last week, they again gave the impression that they are blind to reality with their corporate PR speak.
They hung their young ones out to dry as we would have said back in the day . But today that is not an appropriate analogy as kids wake up without a roof over their head, not just in Gaza but in Kyiv and in Dublin and Cork and Donegal as well as our homeless figures rise.
The decision these young Irish people have to make today is not just about Palestine. It is not just about them finally realising they have been left in a helpless and hopeless situation when they meet today.
It is about growing up and taking moral responsibility. About realising that there is a world and a life beyond a professional contract and a closeted lifestyle.
After holding their heads in their hands last night after a brutal performance, they must lift those heads and engage their brains and their conscience.
Whatever decision they make, we should respect it. Like those kids in Gaza, Kyiv and everywhere else where war is being waged across the world, these Irish kids have been abandoned by the elders, by those who know how to look around corners.
That is the biggest sin of this whole debacle, one that only Irish football could conjure. We are, as Declan Lynch famously said, the dysfunctional sporting body that other dysfunctional sporting bodies call the Galacticos.
There are no winners in all of this. But why, oh why, do we have to be losers again without even trying?
Good luck to those young men in that Pristina hotel room today before their scheduled afternoon flight from Pristina to Debrecen. That’s all I can offer them. Everything else has been stripped away by those who should have known better.
As for Thursday night? Best forgotten. We lost a game of football. That’s all. As a nation we have lost so much more in recent weeks.
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