Sometime around midday Friday, as the tweets started to compound and the texts started to arrive from Cobh, Stephen Ireland was forced to take back control of the message. He’d surrendered control in the wake of his retirement from the Ireland team, mostly due to the extent of the humiliation that inspired the estrangement. He never seem too concerned what people in Ireland thought of him. Distance is an unquantifiable luxury for an Irish footballer in England and home, especially for a retired international, is an abstraction. For 18 brilliant months with Man City, his football spoke for itself. Yet injuries arrived around the same time Mancini did. Ireland is not even 25 and it seems that professional football may have passed him by. And as Ireland’s career has bottomed out, the caricature of him – the incredibly arrogant, manager hating, enormous fish-talk owning, training ground legend – a caricature that Ireland singlehandedly-created via the media – has become something close to fact.
Stephen Ireland's $175,000 Fish Tank! from The Final Third on Vimeo.
Yet when the quotes became so outrageous and insulting on Friday, Ireland had no choice but to directly address the nation.
Yesterday’s 23-minute long interview of Ireland by Ger Gilroy on Newtalk was great radio mostly because I can’t think of any other time I actually heard Ireland speak. It also reminded me of something Chuck Klosterman said recently about the Charlie Sheen debacle – Sheen, despite his outright lunacy, had somehow never surrendered control of his message. This resounding feat is mostly a by-product of the absolute media saturation in America. Ireland is the anti-Sheen. He'd tell a French football magazine whatever crossed his mind. Yesterday, he sounded like a dog with his tail between his legs. There was no trace of the bombastic swagger of the man who had glibly slandered the Man City project upon arriving at Villa or dropped his shorts after scoring to reveal his inner superhero. He was crestfallen, insecure. It was like letting the world listen in on the explanation of someone who had been extremely drunk at a party and in the light of day, was apologizing for something they couldn’t quite remember, possibly everything.
It’s incredible that it has come to this. As for what Ireland actually had to say, I believe he was misrepresented in So Foot, but don’t doubt that the bones of what became the now-infamous translated interview exist in that four-hour transcript with the So Foot journalist. The themes – the dislike of the FAI and the hatred for Mancini and his football – are familiar ones. I don't think he denied anything.
But the question remains: what are Stephen Ireland’s words worth anymore? Has he talked so much shit that his apologies are essentially moot? And what if he was so disgusted by this worst wave of bad publicity that he decided to return to the Ireland fold just to rebuild his bridges – would supporters have him back? I think during his third or fourth dismissal of the possibility of him coming back to play for Ireland that most punters simply accepted his intentions and moved on. It’s not quite clear why the idea of Ireland in green still remains that bit tantalizing. He hasn’t played in ages. Neither party needs each other anymore, but strangely both sides in this bizarre saga – Ireland the flagging footballer and Ireland the barely-dreaming footballing nation – keep bumping into each other.
And still, in his own words, Ireland became almost sympathetic - whether it was bigging up Steve Staunton, speaking about his friends in the team or describing the botched interview with Trap which involved talking mostly to Liam Brady (of course, a meeting with a 70-year old who doesn’t speak English isn’t going be disaster!). Ireland had done most of his talking through the British print media, but with only his own words to judge, it became possible for maybe the first time to empathise with Ireland's plight – the aloof, misunderstood loner encamped in the back of the bus full of alpha males that is professional football. Who knows how long Ireland will maintain interest in home. But right now, we're the only people who'll listen to him
