Of the many jokes made upon his appointment as Ireland manager regarding Heimir Hallgrimsson’s sideline as a white-coated purveyor of root-canals and extractions, most centred on the idea that watching the Irish team had become much like a visit to the proverbial dentist.
On that theme, as another international week looms, before the pain of the procedure itself is the dread of anticipation, counting down the days until the sound of Amhrán Na bhFiann comes like the whirring of the drill. There was a time when you looked forward to Ireland games, but now you they make you feel like Florida residents anticipating the arrival of Hurricane Milton.
The latter comment is typical of the kind of crazy talk about the national soccer team to which Hallgrimsson alluded after his first assignment in the job, last month’s miserable Nations League double header against England and Greece.
It is now clear that the former Iceland and Jamaica boss thought this was just another small-time, small country national team gig, in which his work would be of little interest to anyone but a tiny band of supporters and a handful of embedded journos.
Instead he has cut the figure of a TV cop who has been posted to a sleepy rural village only to find that the shopkeeper is a serial killer and the post office mistress is running an international cocaine trafficking operation.
“I haven’t been in this environment where there’s so much attention,” he reflected in the lead up to this week’s games against Finland and Greece, seen as the proper start of the Hallgrimsson era following last month’s most flaccid of soft launches.
“That probably was the thing that, not shocked me, but surprised me. I don’t like to lie or tell white lies…In this environment you always need to be careful. There are different kinds of media here, so I need to be careful and probably prepare myself a little bit better than I have done.”
By this Hallgrimsson meant that he is staggered that so many people on this small island care so much about their not terribly good football team, to the extent that this team have a media presence with them that Brazil might find a bit OTT.
Not only that, but when you say stuff that they don’t like, said media go bananas about it for weeks on end. Everyone who ever played for Ireland has a newspaper column, a podcast berth or a TV pulpit from which to batter you, even when you think you are merely dispensing anodyne gobbets of Scandi-truth.
Examples of Hallgrimsson’s aversion to white lies included his claim not to know much about the players in advance of the September camp; an avowed preference to track their progress on his laptop rather than watching their matches in person; and his wish to let assistants John O’Shea and Paddy McCarthy take the lead while he assumed a watch-and-learn role.
In all these cases, cool Icelandic logic met the hot fire of Irish soccer madness. We want the bull to be taken by the horns, not considered at length on Wyscout. We expect our manager to lead from the front. We want to see snaps from the training ground of him pointing and gesticulating. We want press conference declarations of belligerent intent. We want – at all times – to put them under pressure.
Watching the players from the comfort of a laptop is a case in point. As Hallgrimsson has repeatedly pointed out, it is a more efficient use of his time than traipsing the motorways and provincial airports of the British mainland in the hope of seeing seventeen minutes of Jayson Molumby. Instead, using modern technology, he can pull clips of his players in action at the click of his mouse, even if they are only ambling off the bench in injury time.
But Hallgrimsson will have learned that so much of this job is about appearances: being seen to be out there, slapping Nathan Collins on the shoulder after a Brentford match, getting in a huddle with the Ipswich boys at the Portman Road players’ lounge, catching a motivational five minutes with Mikey Johnston here or exchanging a belly laugh with Caoimhin Kelleher there.
It’s rather like an election campaign, when the party leaders must be seen wearing a hairnet in a provincial sausage roll factory to give the impression that they truly understand the needs of the nation.
To that end, the manager has been a more vigorous presence this time, never moreso than in the ruthless defenestration of Matt Doherty. Explaining that decision, Hallgrimsson even gave us the “white lies” we prefer, talking about the need to inspect other options ahead of next year’s World Cup qualifiers, when it is clear that Doherty’s languid pursuit of Christos Tzolis in the lead-up to the second Greek goal last month was a line in the sand.
The good news for Hallgrimsson is that Ireland’s football crazy works both ways. While the trips to Finland and Greece fill most with dread, it doesn’t take much to turn us. Consider the optimism and big home attendances that accompanied much of the Stephen Kenny era based on little more than hopes and dreams and some decent possession stats.
Last month’s results had some questioning the manager’s position already but a good performance against a team two places below us in the FIFA rankings would restore faith. A win and he could be on the on Friday night high-fiving Kielty. Do both and his autobiography will be in Easons for Christmas.
There was enough in a decent first half against Greece to think that Hallgrimsson can get a tune out of this bedraggled squad if he starts putting his stamp on things. In a change to normal practice, he had them train Wednesday morning in Helsinki, rather than the evening before the match.
“If you are in a downward spiral it’s good to do something different in a different country, a different environment, shake things up,” he said, sounding like a man in a white coat with a drill in his hand. This won’t hurt too much, we hope.
