James McClean certainly made an impression during his first appearance as a pundit on RTÉ on Tuesday night.
The Wrexham star recently retired from international duty with the Republic of Ireland, and was on call to cast an eye over his former teammates as they took on the might of Portugal in Aveiro.
The game would turn into a rout, with Ireland looking vastly out of their depth against one of the favourites for EURO 2024 glory.
Despite how the game would turn out, the pre-game chat around interim boss John O'Shea was positive in the RTÉ studio. McClean, who spent five years playing alongside the Waterford man at international level, said that he felt O'Shea deserved to get the job on a permanent basis, saying that he had made Ireland "hard to beat."
McClean seemed to throw something of a dig at previous manager Stephen Kenny in doing so - something which he would then double down on in since-deleted Instagram stories late on Tuesday night.
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James McClean doubles down on Stephen Kenny criticism
When asked about the "nastiness" that had defined Irish teams of the past, James McClean said on RTÉ's coverage of Portugal v Ireland:
It's a trait that's served us well. We qualified for two tournaments, EURO 2012 and '16. We got to a play-off under Mick McCarthy [for EURO 2020]. If Mick had been in charge, we may potentially have gotten to three in a row under that style of play.
I think nowadays you can get sucked into the whole 'Total Football' and statistics. Yeah, we had 59% possession, but a lot of it was across the backline, and we lost the game.
We've always been hard to beat and, I think, in the last few years we've gone away from that. We've built our foundations on [being] hard to beat and having a bit of nastiness about us.
Of course, Ireland were anything but hard to beat in Portugal on Tuesday night.
Nonetheless, it was the dig at the "last few years" which raised eyebrows with Irish fans, given McClean's somewhat infamous frostiness with the recently departed manager Stephen Kenny.
With the 103-times-capped international taking some flak on social media for his comments (which also erroneously attributed the EURO 2020 play-off to Mick McCarthy), he took to Instagram to post graphics supposedly backing up his point.
Imagine my shock😂😂😂 https://t.co/sFO0UU3j1r pic.twitter.com/Iie7tvMIUO
— James (@JamesColeman00) June 11, 2024
Alongside a dig at fans calling out his takes, he also posted the group tables from various qualifying campaigns, showing the three under Martin O'Neill which had seen Ireland - at the very least - reach play-offs for major tournaments.
Screenshot via @JamesColeman00 on Twitter
McClean has since deleted the somewhat incendiary stories, which mocked what the Derryman saw as unfairly different perceptions surrounding the managerial reigns of Stephen Kenny and his predecessors.
However, the 35-year-old did take to Instagram with a post on Wednesday morning, defending his take on an era of Irish football during which he played a pivotal role on the pitch.
Takes from it, since Martin was appointed in 2013, we have qualified (2016) and have come very close to qualifying [for the] World Cup 2018, EURO 2020, which I stand by that Mick started the campaign and should have been allowed to see it out...the important thing is we always competed playing a brand of football that was often criticised (but it worked for us), until the last few qualifying campaigns.
We haven't competed and truth be told we were out of contention pretty early on in those groups playing a different brand of football, that's not a dig out on Stephen either that's just facts.
In my opinion we have gone backwards in the past few years (proofs there in plain sight, it's the reality of the situation) and we need to get back to at least competing and being in contention going into the last game or two of each campaign with a chance of qualifying.
Though James McClean is objectively right in saying that the level of the Irish national team has regressed in recent years, most fans would appreciate that the discussion is somewhat more nuanced than simply looking at tournament qualifications and picking rights and wrongs from that.
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