Republic of Ireland General Discussion Thread 2025 [CLOSED THREAD]

Think we need to move up three places in the rankings to be second seeds in the qualifiers which might help our chances of making the playoffs.

Crazy we still have a chance of making it into pot 2 and goes to show how baffling it is we let two international windows go by without getting our permanent coach in. The NL is incredibly important for us to get our ranking sorted to gives us the best chance of going to USA 2026.

Of course, the Euros Is likely going to drastically change what we need from the next few months rankings wise.

Well at least you are showing your true colours now.

We've always had both.

I've not seen us play a more effective away game than we did against Austria a few years back and that was under MON.

The bar is set low for HH initially, just not losing his first two qualifiers will exceed the last two campaigns but hopefully we get a group draw that could facilitate a bit more ambition than that.

I had it in my head the WC was expanding.

Stop trying desperately to paint me as a Kenny fan.

I was more than happy with the football played under O'Neill and wouldn't say it's at all the same as the "Allerdyce type" manager some people were calling for here.

Canham “claims” as the RTE report put it that Hallgrimsson was number 1 target since the start of this year. He has claimed a lot of things at different stages, don’t know how he’s getting away with it.

I'm happy enough with his appointment in general. Has had some excellent success, but it hasn't all been plain sailing, about the best we could hope for, and if he does anything like what happened with Iceland, we'll all be happy enough.

Sure things with Kenny didn't work, but I think him shifting a lot of our focus to underage will be important for the future, and Heimir seeming like someone who will do the same in terms of looking at the underage structures, that can't hurt, hopefully he'll take an interest in things domestically too. I still think all of that stuff is more critical to our long term future success than anything else.

The being open to Greenwood playing for Jamacia stuff is something that bothers me, I would like him to clarify the situation early so it can be left alone and we can move on with our lives and enjoy something for once.

In the week we have the Women's Soccer Abuse revelations, it's certainly something we could have done without.

And Qatar is a peninsula, in fairness to him

I would say we stopped being competitive since late MON. Maybe we didn't lose much under McCarthy II but we were not winning either or going anywhere.

But ya I agree that we need to be harder to play against and never was it more evident than seeing the amount of long range goals we conceded.

All I really want is to qualify and have the kind of feel good occasions that Iceland or Wales recently had. Style of play doesn't matter to me as long as we achieve that. I just have my own ideas about which style will best achieve it.

Contract runs until the end of the WC and supposedly for €650K a year according to Aidan Fitzmaurice.

are you ecsatic about this appointment ?

Im certainly not

The Greenwood thing likely predates Halgrimsson in that it was their FA that began an ultra aggresive policy of trying to entice as many English with Jamacian heritage as possible to try and improve the team. At one point they called up 12 English players to a squad, and tried to call Ivan Toney. If his bosses wanted Greenwood he couldn't refuse, same as De Zerbi at Marseille.

There was a poster on here a few months back arguing that we’d be better off finishing last in the NL group. I think he and a couple of others were saying it made no difference at all when we made this appointment. A strange argument. I have little time for the way that the FAI dragged the process out but at least the appointment has been made and the new manager has a bit of time to have a look at our squad and review recent games and prepare himself as best possible for the NL games.

Has there been a role assigned for O’Shea? I’d say he might feel badly used by the FAI in this process if not.

While I’d never argue for any team to lose on purpose, I can see the logic in it.

We are extremely unlikely to qualify for the WC. 16 spots for Europe and there are certainly 16 better teams than us. Even if we did well enough to get a decent seeding we’re likely facing teams levels above us even in a playoff.

Should we be relegated to group C then we’d be in with a good chance of being competitive there ahead of Euro qualifying which would give us a great chance of a playoff regardless - without that path Georgia wouldn’t have made it to their first Euros. Couple that with the potential automatic spots for non qualifying hosts and we’d have a few avenues there.

It’s not ideal but group C wouldn’t be an absolute disaster either.

It's funny how many Irish fans can't grasp the level we were shopping in.