Ireland v Hungary is the biggest international match Dublin has hosted in nearly eight years.
The last home game where there was this much at stake was the World Cup play-off second leg against Denmark when … let’s not dwell any longer on that.
We’ve had some big occasions at the Aviva Stadium in that time – the Euros qualifier against France, the Nations League game against England – but nothing that compares to Saturday night: a new World Cup campaign, where everything still seems possible and the feeling that this time winning might not be totally out of the question.
Indeed, if vibes could score goals then Hungary would already be in serious trouble. Ireland assistant Paddy McCarthy detects an “energy shift”. Heimir Hallgrímsson says the players look like they’ve got taller.
It’s easy to be confident before you’ve had the chance to lose any games. But if there is something more substantial going on here then maybe part of it is because the manager, Hallgrímsson, and his staff have helped make the players’ task feel a little bit simpler and more within their control.
Occasionally Hallgrímsson opens up his laptop to give us a glimpse of what he’s been working on. After the squad announcement 11 days ago, he talked about the specific behaviours and attributes he’s looking for in the team.
In his systematic way, he breaks the game down into discrete areas. You can’t be the best at everything, he says, but you can choose key areas and work on being the best at those.
So Hallgrímsson wants Ireland to be the best-organised team, with consistent structure in attack and defence. He wants to be the best team on set-pieces, citing the recent example of how 10-man Newcastle dominated Liverpool for nearly the entire second half with clever and aggressive use of throw-ins and set-plays.
He wants Ireland to be the most focused and disciplined team, the hardest-working team, the fittest and most physical team. He wants a team that is forward-thinking and attacks fast, a team that is full of good characters and leaders.
You might be thinking that a lot of these principles sound like they are the same basic principle. What’s clear is the overall emphasis is on attitude and mentality rather than playing style or aesthetics.
The approach is more focused and limited than that of Stephen Kenny, who was always concerned with a bigger picture beyond the matches themselves, a wider mission to redeem the values and the image of Irish football. Kenny wanted to show the world that Irish players could really play, but we saw in those three difficult years that urging players to express their creativity doesn’t necessarily make them play more creatively.
Hallgrímsson’s idea is if you get the details right then the big picture will take care of itself. He argues that an organised, hard-working team will reflect the values of the Irish people, whom he believes to be organised and hard-working. Well, some of us probably are.
“If we are not good in these areas, then the criticism, I take that in, I use that,” he said. “Because I really want us to be good in these areas. But if you want us to play something else, it doesn’t affect me. This is what I want you to know, what we are trying to achieve. So at least you can criticise what we are trying to do.”
Jack Charlton wouldn’t have been surprised by any of the stuff Hallgrímsson was saying. Are we then just admitting defeat and retreating to the football of 40 years ago? You could also make a case that the change in emphasis under the Icelander gets us more in line with the football of today.
Kenny’s attempted revolution – with its focus on improving possession and build-up play – was responding to the football trends of the 2010s, when Pep Guardiola’s style conquered the world.
The early years of that global shift were an extremely painful time for Irish football. At the 2002 World Cup we had drawn 1-1 with Germany and with Spain; a decade later, in 2012, we lost 4-0 to Spain and 6-1 to Germany in the space of three months. Those defeats were so lopsided you despaired of ever being able to compete again. Still, if this was the way the game was going then Ireland at least had to try to get up to speed.
But the trend of the 2020s has been towards ever-more pressing and physicality. Arsenal fans in the Arsène Wenger era used to yell “Hooof!” when panicked opponents humped the ball upfield. Arsenal now kick games off by booting the ball out of play near the opponent’s corner flag, preferring to press the opponent’s throw-in high up the pitch than to construct their own move.
Nearly every Premier League team has appointed a specialist set-piece coach. Arsenal are trying to win the league with a style based mainly around set-pieces. Even Guardiola has just bought a goalkeeper whose mediocre passing and distribution is made up for by the fact that he is too massive to get pushed around at corner kicks.
Meanwhile, the referees, apparently responding to the desires of the TV audience, are taking a much more lenient attitude to physical play. At the 2006 World Cup, there were 28 red cards. There were just four red cards in each of the last two World Cups – fewer than there were in the World Cup of 1966, which had only half as many games. “Get into them” is the signal from the game’s authorities.
You can sense a new respect for that precious intangible once scorned by “enlightened” football fans as “pashun”.
Fabian Hürzeler, the 32-year-old German coach of Brighton & Hove Albion, said after they beat Manchester City 2-1 last weekend that the secret of the victory was not tactics but energy – energy transmitted by the second-half substitutes to their team-mates and on to the crowd and back in a virtuous circle.
Here was Hürzeler, one of the generation often derided by their elders as laptop coaches, sounding a bit like a Californicated Jock Wallace, who memorably promised the Rangers fans before the 1984 League Cup final against Celtic: “We’ve got the battle fever on today.”
Paddy McCarthy is right: the energy has shifted. Maybe this time the shift will be more to Ireland’s liking.
