Irish Correctness!
I saw this newspaper on a bus this morning, as I came home from shopping and having lunch at Canary Wharf.
Irish Correctness!
If you can’t read it, by the side of the headline of Keano 3 Latvia 0, someone has written + Martin in green ink.
Roy Keane on Ireland-France
Roy Keane was very blunt about Ireland on the BBC yesterday. There’s a video on the link, but here’s some of what he said.
France were there for the taking and Ireland didn’t do it. Same old story.
If I’d been there in the dressing room after the game, I wouldn’t be talking about the handball. I’d focus on why the defenders didn’t clear it. They should’ve cleared it.
I’d be more annoyed with my defenders and my goalkeeper than Thierry Henry. How can you let the ball bounce in your six-yard box? How can you let Thierry Henry get goal-side of you? If the ball goes into the six-yard box, where the hell is my goalkeeper?
He has a point, but there is one point that no-one has made in the media.
I play real tennis a lot and like anybody who plays these sort of games, you play to where the ball lands. So if you know if an opponent’s serve is going out, you never run for it. It’s the same in football. Does a goalkeeper jump if the ball is going two metres over the bar? Of course not!
I have not seen a shot of the face of Shay Given, but did he think that Thierry Henry’s handball was so blatant that the referee would blow his whistle? So he didn’t go for the ball as it came back across the goal.
So perhaps the real fault of the Irish team was that they didn’t play to the whistle.
Roy Keane’s Ipswich
Roy Keane may or may not have a hard job to do as manager at Ipswich Town. They played bright football against Real Valladolid on Friday night, with Lee Martin, Pim Balkestein, Jon Stead and Connor Wickham looking particularly bright. I do sometimes wonder that Jim Magilton had two problems; it was a difficult transition from player to manager, as possibly he was too close to them and he didn’t have the contacts amongst other managers when it came to transfers.
Keane has none of those problems.
Certainly it seems his start has been easy.
But his biggest advantage is that just like Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson before him, he will succeed or fail on what happens on the pitch. The people of Suffolk will probably keep quiet about any off field problems, just as they have done in the past. The London media also always finds Ipswich far to far to come for a story.
The Anonymous Widower 