Ah, what’s the point?
It’s hard to be diplomatic. It’s harder to not feel the raw pain of losing your best player of a generation and losing him forever.
This isn’t a run of the mill transfer, it’s someone who is already dominating the Premier League and has been doing so since he was 19 and someone who is going to go on to mark himself out as one of the most influential midfielders in the game.
Imagine what that would’ve done for Ireland. Not just for the team but for the country. The young players. We’re talking about the Keane effect here – a proper footballer, a proper inspiration.
But Rice has made his decision and poor Mick McCarthy and Stephen Kenny are going to have to tidy up the mess left by Martin O’Neill.
Why the fuck didn’t Ireland call up Rice for the Moldova home game in 2017?
That was five months after his Premier League debut (and he was obviously good enough for Ireland before his Premier League debut, before another manager decided he was good enough for a better team at a higher level). Instead, Martin O’Neill brought two goalkeepers onto the bench and kept them there for the whole procession against Moldova.
By the time they got around to looking at Rice, the World Cup campaign was over, Rice was turning heads of agents all over the planet, England were starring in Russia and Ireland were playing out these grim friendlies against Turkey, France and America. By the time they got around to looking at Rice, it was too late.
But that’s looking at it from a completely selfish point of view. Rice is English and he’s good enough to play for England and England are a much better team with much more potential over the next 14 years than Ireland.
It’s disappointing that he played for the Republic and now he has declared his future elsewhere but the same gripe is held by Northern Ireland fans. So many Irish men in the north get asked to play international football as teenagers and they go along because it’s the first team who asks them to do that. If they ever got the chance though, they’d switch immediately to Ireland and that’s what they do a lot of the time.
It’s very annoying to lose a player you’ve invested in from a young age – not just coaching wise but emotionally too – but it’s something that the Irish have done in the past and will continue to do as long as the rules are the same and players can float between different teams for a while.
To that end, David Meyler originally tried to cut through the noise with a measured response to Rice.
But after a backlash of ‘you don’t speak for me’, Meyler deleted his first tweet and was able to laugh about it at least.
https://twitter.com/DavidMeyler/status/1095719808321183744
A touchy time but he should be able to say good luck to a young footballer.
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