Mon to manage Republic of Ireland?

[pauliewalnuts]

I'd have loved the opportunity to sign 15 players like Paolo did. I never got that opportunity.

The problem with that, Martin, is that you signing 15 players would cost about £200m.

[PaulWinch again]

I'd have loved the opportunity to sign 15 players like Paolo did. I never got that opportunity.

The problem with that, Martin, is that you signing 15 players would cost about £200m.

Quite and I'm not sure he's right about his Villa team being excellent in terms of fitness.

[supertom]

I'd have loved the opportunity to sign 15 players like Paolo did. I never got that opportunity.

The problem with that, Martin, is that you signing 15 players would cost about £200m.

Quite and I'm not sure he's right about his Villa team being excellent in terms of fitness.

It's hard to tell. I'm not sure the fittest 11 players in the world could have stood up to the demands of a full season, playing every single game in a Martin O Neill side. Even Milner at the tail end of 09/10 was running out of steam, and he had an immense engine.

It's funny that Houllier had said exactly the same thing though. Indeed it was his approach to fitness, in particular double training sessions, which partly led to most of his senior squad not taking to him. The likes of Dunne and Collins in particular, who liked a few ales of course fell well foul of Houlliers regime.

I don't think we were unfit under O Neill though. We were just a high energy side and he never rotated us at all or made substitions to try and add some energy in games when we'd flag. But at the end of the day, whilst Houllier might have claimed he made us fitter, we ended his season 16 points worse off than the previous one under O Neill's group of chip eating, ketchup guzzling fatties.

[Concrete John]

Interesting for MON to pick out the fitness at Villa as some kind of evidence he knew how to get a squad fit!

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/nov/10/paolo-di-canio-martin-oneill-sunderland

I recall plenty of times where we ran out of steam after an hour.

He's right about Di Canio though.  Total cretin.

When we shipped 7 against Chelsea, John *spits* Terry gave an interview where he basically said that everyone knows what to do agaisnt Villa - wait for us to get tired and then hammer us. MON's Villa were not fit: the same XI was overplayed to the point of burnout, he clearly doesn't understand fitness properly from his comments about diet yesterday (read them, he sounds like Godfrey Bloom) and the style of play, where we never dominated possession properly, meant we did an awful lot more running and chasing that we should've.

This is very true.  I never saw a lack of fitness under MON at Villa, but the extra they had to do due to lack of rotation and ball retention meant it could look that way at times.

As to the football v GAA thing, it is very regional and some counties are hurling counties and some Gaelic football.  Perhaps it's just the regions of Ireland I'm familiar with then, but soccer has always seemed the 3rd sprt in the country to me, despite a large interest in English top flight clubs.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

"I was very disappointed at the outcome. I think I would have garnered the five points necessary to have stayed up and [had] the chance maybe to have changed the side."

Keep talking out your arse, MON. I doubt there's a single Sunderland supporter that would agree with you.

Charlatan? Pot calls kettle black.

[DrGonzo]

It was said of mon that if you'd had a good win at the weekend training wouldn't start until wednesday.  As people have said though training only really applied to 14 players and we had no need of talking tactics did we?

[eastie]

Really surprised that mon would proclaim us for fitness during his reign , we often lost games in the last 15 minutes when visibly flagging and as mentioned john terry even commented on that fact - fitness wasnt great by any means under mon - he wasn't exactly at the training ground all that often himself - fitness under him I would say was definately a problem.

I feel di canio is correct is in assmption as was houllier .

[OCD]

MON seems to be pointing people towards the current Villa side which is an even bigger joke as almost the whole squad has changed.

Even if we were very fit (which we weren't - people are quite right to point out the drop after 60 minutes of a match or the infamous March drop-off), it would have been his coaches responsible for the fitness. MON was too busy watching recordings of NFL matches on a Monday morning to know what his players were like in training. Very professional that.

[walsall villain]

"I was very disappointed at the outcome. I think I would have garnered the five points necessary to have stayed up and [had] the chance maybe to have changed the side."

Keep talking out your arse, MON. I doubt there's a single Sunderland supporter that would agree with you.

Charlatan? Pot calls kettle black.

Surprised he has made any comments, don't recall him doing it before but perhaps he is just trying to rewrite history. He didn't seem quite right in himself the whole time he was at Sunderland for whatever reason.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

Taking nutrition advise from John Robertson says everything you need to know about MON.

[eamonn]

An amusing read but all Villa-tinted-Mon-bashing aside, I do find it a bit sad that he is clearly a bitter man and takes any criticism very badly indeed.

I can imagine him frothing at the gash to put the boot into Di Canio ever since he replaced him. Would no doubt have been effing and blinding him and Sunderland as a club the day they beat Newcastle last season and Di Canio did his exuberant celebration.

As for soccer (never "footy" or "football") in EIRE, among the main field team sports it probably has the most consistently high level of interest if you take it on a region by region basis. Rugby, hurling and Gaelic Football are all hugely popular in certain areas but there's plenty of pockets where one (or two) of the three is under-represented. Whereas I'm pretty sure each of the 26 counties in the Republic and 6 in the north have their own local leagues, mostly from schoolboy to adult level. Don't think you could say the same for the others. Hurling is massive in my hometown, gaelic-football is a joke there with no interest whatsoever and the soccer team (one of twenty two clubs which comprise the only two senior divisions), folded six years ago due to lack of interest*. In fact, I imagine the FAI breathe a sigh of relief if the domestic game manages to go a season without one of the clubs going bust. The lack of investment and therefore interest in the national league is chronic and pretty shameful really - notwithstanding the occasional boon and over-achievement such as Shamrock Rovers (never to be abbreviated as "Shamrock". Rovers only!) getting into the Wafer Cup group stages the other year where they lost every game and sold us a pup (de lad Enda).   

*There are still local, amateur soccer leagues in my town/county though with a decent number of clubs (any urban centre will tend to have from 2-10 depending on the size of the town/city, plus the surrounding villages and bigger townlands in rural areas). But there is no local gaelic football league or clubs there.

And considering each GAA club (again, representing a village or urban area but also, quite frequently a parish) will always have one or both of a hurling and gaelic football team, in theory it wouldn't take a huge effort to field a team of whichever of the two is less popular as the pitches and facilites are already in place. Local soccer clubs encounter more difficulties and the GAA would not be quick to assist them (the "foreign games" mentality still exists, if far less than before - the opening-up of Croke Park to the Irish national team in the 00's a big turning point although that was hardly for altruistic reasons. Renting it to the FAI would have boosted the GAA's coffers quite substantially for an amateur organisation).

[dcdavecollett]

The March 'drop-off' is a footballing myth.

Yes, O'Neill's record in March was poor. Equally, in three seasons out of four, his teams had a good April/May.

Knackered? Not on results.

[Damo70]

The March 'drop-off' is a footballing myth.

Yes, O'Neill's record in March was poor. Equally, in three seasons out of four, his teams had a good April/May.

Knackered? Not on results.

I don't recall him losing any competitive games in June or July so put your money on Ireland for the next Euros.

[eastie]

I see Keane is expressing an interest in Stephen Ireland - why have two stubborn loose cannons when you can have three
Keane comments on mon below-

Roy Keane has returned to the Republic of Ireland fold, insisting he is no monster.

The former Manchester United skipper stepped back into the line of fire with his country this week, as the controversial choice as assistant to new boss Martin O’Neill.

But Keane said: “There’s nothing to tame. I’m not some sort of animal.

“I’m a footballing man. I work hard and push people – sometimes I’ve got that slightly wrong over the years. But I think I got a lot of it right.”

However, the man who caused a national crisis when he walked out of the World Cup squad on the eve of the 2002 tournament believes his reputation as a trouble-maker may work in his favour.

“Hopefully they are in for a pleasant surprise – particularly the lads who haven’t worked with me," he added.

“I know people can believe what they hear and read. If they’re thinking some monster’s going to turn up – and, all of a sudden, I’m quite placid.”

O’Neill described their partnership as “bad cop and bad, bad cop” but Keane said: “I think it’s going to be the other way round, I think I am going to have to be the good cop.

“You obviously don’t know Martin as well as you think you do. He makes me look like Mother Teresa. It should be interesting.”

Keane said he spoke to players in the squad he previously criticised while a manager or TV pundit, adding “I hope we’re OK with each other. There’s not any tension.”

The 42-year-old Old Trafford icon was described as "frightening" by his former United boss Alex Ferguson in his new book.

Fergie wrote: “The hardest part of Roy's body is his tongue. He has the most savage tongue you can imagine. He can debilitate the most confident person in the world in seconds with that tongue.

“What I noticed about him that day when I was arguing with him was that his eyes started to narrow, almost to wee black beads. It was frightening to watch. And I'm from Glasgow."

 

Keane admits he has learned lessons from his spells as manager of Sunderland and Ipswich.

Keane believes his time at the two clubs has been judged unfairly, although he concedes there were plenty of things he would do differently.

He said: “Where do you want to start? We could be here all day.

“The area where I certainly need to improve, and every club manager would say the same, is recruitment.”

But he is disappointed not to have been offered another chance since leaving Portman Road in 2011.

He maintained: “I have no problems with clubs not giving me an opportunity but I would say that some clubs should certainly have spoken to me over the last year or two.

“I felt clubs should have given me another opportunity to get back into football. Not every job, don’t get me wrong, I’m not waiting for the phone to ring.

“But there’s a few clubs I’ve looked at and went ‘I think that would suit me, that would suit my personality’.

“I think I did OK at Sunderland. Even at Ipswich we did OK. But that’s for another day. It’s a long story.”

Keane insists his desire to succeed is as strong as ever but denied he would walk out on Ireland if a leading club knocked on his door.

“I don’t think that will happen,” he said. “You have to live in the now instead of worrying about what might happen.

“You could be sitting at home for the next year or two waiting for the opportunity but the opportunity has come to work with Martin O’Neill and I feel very lucky.”

[eamonn]

Regarding Ireland, it will be interesting if we finally get MON's side on how the Ireland/Milner transfer came about.