'Worthless' friendly as Nigel stacks his squad with local duds

Northern Ireland play Turkey tonight, in an obscure friendly in Connecticut.  As usual a dedicated band of supporters have followed the team to the US.  Unfortunately players have shown rather less dedication and the squad is almost unrecognisable.

Nigel Worthington claims that the tour, which includes another match in Chile on Sunday night, is worthwhile.  Having cast an eye over the starting eleven, I’m not so sure.

Alongside a few fringe players and youngsters are a cadre of Irish league ’stars’ who will never in a million years grace a competitive international side.  It’s not like we’re even talking potential here.  These are not overachieving sixteen year olds.

Alan Blayney is to keep goal.   The goalie is a seasoned twenty eight year old professional.  He started out at Southampton, where he made a handful of appearances, and his career has been, more or less, on a downward trajectory ever since.

Rory Patterson, twenty five years old, joined Rochdale as an eighteen year old.  He drifted into the non-leagues, before being picked up by Coleraine.  Patterson is a dangerous striker in the Irish league, but the only threat he presents at international level is to Jackie Fullerton, who can’t distinguish him from Kyle Lafferty.

Nigel Worthington has persistently selected this type of player ahead of full time pros, plying their trade in lower leagues on the mainland.  The result is that friendly matches of this type are a waste of time.

It makes a joke of international football to select the likes of Blayney, Jamie Mulgrew or Robert Garrett.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more