Champagne Football by Mark Tighe & Paul Rowan

Author:Mark Tighe & Paul Rowan [Tighe, Mark & Rowan, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844884940
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-09-16T22:00:00+00:00

10. Promises, Promises

In 2018, the make-up of the FAI board and the decline of the men’s team were at the forefront of John Delaney’s mind. The association was facing new rules that would by 2019 require all sports bodies in receipt of state funding to limit directors’ terms to nine years. This would entail significant change on the FAI board: by 2019 seven of its eleven directors would have been on the board for more than twelve years. Delaney, the longest serving with eighteen years, would be exempt from the rules because he was Chief Executive.

The governance code for community, voluntary and charitable bodies had existed as best practice since 2012, but sports minister Shane Ross ordered that state funding be linked to adherence with the code in the wake of the Rio ticketing scandal.

Delaney now accepted that the FAI would introduce term limits of a maximum of eight years for directors, thereby more than meeting the state’s requirements, but there would be exemptions for current board members to allow them to see out their terms of office. Cody could stay until 2020, when he would be eighty. Murray would remain Treasurer until 2021, when he would be eighty-two. Full compliance with the code would come slowly. ‘Stability’ would be retained for the next three years, Delaney assured the FAI directors.

On the managerial front things were not so stable. Martin O’Neill’s bid to become only the third Ireland manager to qualify for a World Cup finals ended in November 2017 with a crushing 5–1 home defeat to Denmark in the second leg of a qualification playoff.

After the match, O’Neill went for his traditional – and mandatory – post-game interview with RTÉ’s Tony O’Donoghue. The soccer correspondent’s live interviews with O’Neill had become more entertaining than some of Ireland’s matches, as the manager became increasingly tetchy in the face of any perceived criticism.

O’Donoghue asked O’Neill if Ireland had become ‘a shambles’ after his substitutions and if the result was a ‘humiliation’.

‘I would say we were well beaten,’ a clearly irritated O’Neill shot back.

When O’Donoghue listed off the games in which Ireland had let leads slip away, and the home games they’d failed to win, O’Neill riposted by listing Ireland’s impressive away results. He prevented O’Donoghue from interjecting several times. By post-match standards, it was a long and tough interview, but it still didn’t look good when O’Neill walked away as O’Donoghue tried to ask a follow-up question.

O’Neill was out of contract after the qualifiers finished. Coming into January 2018 he was being linked to a number of English club jobs, with Stoke City, Everton and Nottingham Forest all showing interest.

At the 14 January meeting of the board, Delaney told his fellow directors that O’Neill had been offered a new contract before Christmas and said he would sign, but he hadn’t yet done so. He feared that O’Neill could take a job offer and leave the FAI without a manager. The FAI had been paying O’Neill, as Delaney believed they had an oral contract.

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