Will more strikers equal less tedium?


Northern Ireland fans probably deserve the summer off after the disastrous Carling Nations Cup campaign, but no such luck I'm afraid.  Nigel Worthington named his latest squad today, ahead of the Euro 2012 qualifier against the Faroe Islands, scheduled for August 10th. 

To be fair to the manager it is a fairly adventurous selection.  He names six forwards in the 23 man panel.  David Healy is back in the frame, Burnley’s Martin Paterson gets a recall and Jamie Ward, the Derby County striker who secured a permanent move from Sheffield United last season, has finally made a breakthrough to the senior set-up.

Another new face is James McClean, who has attracted the attention of a host of English clubs, playing for Derry City in the League of Ireland.  There is a suspicion that he has been promoted too early, with the threat of FAI poaching in mind, but Pat McCourt and Niall McGinn graduated successfully from the Brandywell to become influential full internationals.

In the normal course of events Northern Ireland would be expected to beat the Faroe Islands.  Indeed if the home team plays positively, 3 points will certainly be secured.  On the other hand, Brian Kerr has forged the Faroese into a capable unit and another lacklustre display will mean Worthington’s side struggles.

That means that there’s a premium on forward thinking players.  When Northern Ireland is in possession the ball has to be moved quickly, with intent.  Perhaps a raw, young winger mightn’t be the worst choice. 

The difficulty is that, although I’m not discouraged by Nigel Worthington’s squad, I still firmly believe that the personnel are not Northern Ireland’s major problem.

Our panel will always be a bit threadbare and I don’t buy the argument that there are many alternatives which would revitalise the team overnight.  The problem, in my view, is the style of play.  It’s too slow, it’s too ponderous, the ball is moved constantly sideways and backwards.

Too often, I suspect, a few turgid, pointless passes in the opening twenty minutes are mistaken for possession football.  Northern Ireland has always needed to defend in numbers and soak up pressure.  Defensiveness in that sense is not a problem. 

It's the lack of another gear, the lack of any intent when the team does have the ball - that’s the problem. 

With the best will in the world, I don’t see how that’s going to be turned round simply by selecting more strikers in the squad.  The entire system has to be revisited and the coaching changed accordingly.  That means a different manager. 

It certainly wouldn't guarantee instantly better results, but at least Northern Ireland could give it a go and boy would it be an improvement for the fans who have watched some tedious displays in recent years.  

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 retaine...
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