[Article] Kerr decides to do it his way

thejollyrodger

Kerr decides to do it his way
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=94&si=1258483&issue_id=11473

Brian Kerr has tinkered rather than overhauled the Ireland squad since he has been in charge, and his changes are beginning to take effect

Galling Swiss defeat acted as spur for changes to inherited squad culture

TWELVE months ago, in the aftermath of his first defeat as Ireland manager, Brian Kerr knew it was time for him to be like Frank Sinatra and do it his way.

Since inheriting Mick McCarthy's squad when he was appointed on the second last day of January 2003, Kerr had tinkered rather than overhaul the squad. But, as he walked off the pitch at the St Jakob Stadium on that autumnal Saturday evening, with the joyous celebrations of delirious Swiss fans ringing in his ears, he knew the time had come to act boldly.

He had suffered his first defeat as Ireland's senior team manager and his hopes of guiding the team to Euro 2004 had also floundered. However, the week he had just endured was anathema to all his deeply held principles of football management.

The team had travelled out to Basel too early and their hotel was a mere three-minute walk from the city's Irish pub, the focal point for the 8,000 fans. Not surprisingly, the hotel lobby and bar were heaving with Irish people almost from the moment the team arrived. For Kerr, trying to get his squad focused on a win or bust match, it was frustrating.

"I was not happy in the hotel which was too busy for us to be totally focused. It was all good-natured and very nice and supporters were buoyant but it was very hard to concentrate. To go from the hotel, out the door, onto the bus and go training and know what we wanted. I didn't think it created the right atmosphere I wanted in terms of having everybody totally focused on the game," he recalled this week.

On the eve of the match, when the team had intended to work on set-pieces, a closed training session at the stadium descended into farce after a media invasion.

"I was asked by our media people at the time could the snappers have five minutes to take pictures of the training session. In my niceness, on a good day, I said 'yeah sure' because I felt we were obliged to help them out. And what happened? They were in for 40 minutes and it wasn't a few snappers, everybody was in.

"I learned little bits from those things and I said that in those circumstances again it will be different. I spoke to the staff individually and I spent a bit of time thinking about it. I did a personal review of how I felt the thing had gone since I'd been in the job.

"I wrote down what had been good and what hadn't, all the positives and negatives about the period of time leading up to the Swiss match and, in particular, the Swiss match itself."

There were other things that Kerr felt distinctly uneasy with such as the quintessentially Irish tradition that when the players reported in for internationals, they immediately left the hotel for a night on the town, eagerly sampling the best of Dublin's nightlife.

Occasionally it ended in disaster, the most infamous of which was the night in September 2000 when Mark Kennedy and Phil Babb ended up in court after a Starsky and Hutch routine on the bonnet of a Garda car outside a nightclub in the early hours of the morning.

"It wasn't for me to compromise about the basic things that I feel should be right within the squad like the discipline, the training, the organisation and the demands of abandoning a drink culture for instance. I couldn't compromise on those things or the commitment I wanted from the players whether they are in the team or not in the team.

"If you are in the squad, you are in the squad and you give your all no matter what your role is in the squad. If you want to go and have a moan, you can go have a moan but I don't really want to hear about it that much.

"My job is to try and get the best out of everyone and try and have a winning team. If you want to moan about not being in the team then let's get somebody else who is delighted to be in the squad, whether he is the team or not, or whether he gets five minutes, 50 minutes or 90 minutes."

Another vital moment for Kerr over the past 12 months came at the end of March when Ireland ended the Czech Republic's 21 game unbeaten run at Lansdowne Road, with a wonderful 2-1 victory. It was a brilliant result, but afterwards journalists were buzzing with a different storyline.

There were tales of unhappiness among the team at the bus breaking down on the way to training, at the session being swamped with fans and at being taken on a hospital visit that afternoon.

"The most disappointing aspect for me was that it was probably our best performance since I became manager and yet I have never seen any analysis of how the team played the match. The match reports the next day, I understand, were good but after that, all I heard was what people said about us having a bad day before it because 4,000 people turned up at the training session.

"My attitude to it was Bray unwisely used the training session as a promotion for their next fixture by advertising it on the radio, unknown to me and without discussion with me or the FAI. We ended up in a situation of going to the training ground, which was fine, with a lot of people there.

"On one hand I thought it was fantastic that so many people were interested enough to turn up, but it makes it difficult for people to hear instructions if you are trying to do a session. Other than that I have no regrets about anything else we did prior to that game."

But something else happened on the eve of the match that was fuelling the rumour mill. At the pre-match press conference Stephen Carr had been named in the team but by the time the game kicked-off the following evening he was back in London. The explanation that he had sustained a knee injury in training didn't cut ice with one Sunday tabloid that splashed the headline 'Kerr Faced Players Revolt' on its front page.

There was absolutely no truth whatsoever to that," says a still indignant Kerr. "What actually happened, and started something going in the media, was that Stephen Carr had trained that morning and trained well. He got a bit of a knock in the training match and I was actually beside him when it happened. At the end, he had ice on it and typical Stephen he said he would be alright.

"I went and did the press conference and you journalists were asking me what was I going to do and I said Stephen Carr will play right back and Alan Maybury will play left back. I told you who the full backs would be to give you a bit of something to go on. Later that evening Ciaran Murray, the physio, rang me while I was looking at a video and asked me to go and see Stephen because he wasn't great.

"Stephen said he had had trouble with his knee before and knew it wasn't right. We talked it through and he said he didn't want to risk it because he had too much coming up and I said 'fine'. He wanted to get back to the club and I said 'right'.

"He came back to me and said there was a flight at nine in the morning and asked what time he would have to leave to get to it. I said 'about half six' so he asked could he go to his ma's, which was near the airport, and I said 'yes'. He grabbed his gear, ran out, and some of your colleagues were still sitting downstairs when Stephen went out.

"Then it comes out that he had a row with me. There was absolutely no truth in it. I actually have very good relations with him and all of them. As I said before, I don't do rows with the players. I don't do disagreements. If I have something to say to them, we say it and we move on.

"Some of the lads were disappointed with the way the day went, and it was unfortunate with the way some of things went, and they were disappointed.

"But it was the day before a friendly game. We played out of our skins and the performance of the team was excellent and that was it. There was nothing to it. I was away when the stuff started coming out and I rang Kenny (Cunningham) and couple of the lads and asked them what was it about. They couldn't believe it. They were very surprised but that's part and parcel of it."

Once described as a ferocious reader of newspapers, preferring them to books, Kerr admits that's not the case now. He finds most of the analysis and comment is uninformed and has deduced he is better off not reading it.

"I remember the French manager Aime Jacquet saying that he hadn't read a paper for six months before they went to the World Cup. I know where he was coming from because if you were to be affected by the comments and analysis, it's wrong to read them."

When he stood in a small corridor in the bowels of St Jakob Stadium last October, Kerr spoke to the media about the need to freshen up his squad. Over the past 12 months he has certainly done that by conducting an exhaustive talent search, capping 11 new players in the process, to bring the likes of Andy Reid and Liam Miller into the team.

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thejollyrodger

"We needed a bit of freshness around the team and I needed not to compromise no matter what other people said or what I inherited with the players. I needed to understand where I wanted to go to, how the players enjoyed it, what the players wanted to achieve and how we were going to get there.


"These younger players are starting to mature and there are more of them, but it's going to take a little bit of time. Unfortunately we have some positions where we are waiting and we haven't had the options as quickly as we would have liked."

His search for players doesn't just extend to the top divisions of England and Scotland. The smallest attendance at an English League match last season was for a Division Three game in March when Macclesfield hosted Swansea with 1,513 spectators at the Moss Rose Ground. One of them was Kerr.

"I went especially to watch Lee Trundle but he wasn't playing but I saw Brian Murphy and Shaun Byrne who were playing for Swansea," he recalls.

Forty-four players have now played in the 21 games during which Kerr has been in charge, greatly expanding the pool of talent. However, that brings its own problems and some of those who didn't make the original squad for the opening World Cup qualifiers against Cyprus and Switzerland haven't been slow to voice their disappointment. Rather than be annoyed, Kerr is delighted to see players hurting because they've missed out.

"I like them to be disappointed not to be in the team and wanting to show me that they deserve to be in the team. I don't want lads sitting around happy just to be in the squad and not really caring that they are not playing.

"I want fellows bulling to get into the squad so that when they know I, Chris, Noel, Packie or any of the people I have, are going to a match that they are saying 'I'm going to show him.' These are part of team dynamics that are part and parcel of teams."

Having unsuccessfully tried to persuade Roy Keane to return to international football when he was first appointed, Kerr never lost hope that the Manchester United midfielder would one day change his mind.

"It was in my head that I felt he wasn't really, really happy with the decision he had made not to come back and there was a little opening and a doubt there and maybe that could turn around. It did, but it wasn't something I was hanging me coat up on.

"Part of the job is to keep the options open and not cut people off. I think it is important because it is a limited pool of players we have to pick from. We can't afford to be cutting players out and saying that they are finished or retired or don't want to play international football any more.

"People change their minds on many things and players are entitled to change their minds. I was glad Roy made the moves and indicated he wanted to come back. It was a boost to the squad in general and to the perception that people had of things as well but I don't see it as a personal triumph."

According to Kerr, Keane has fitted in well and is proving to be a big help with the younger players, another indication of the excellent spirit and atmosphere within the squad. Ever diligent, the manager tells a story of watching during the recent World Cup qualifiers for any trends that might indicate cliques were forming within the squad.

"I noticed one day there was a slight trend where a group of lads who weren't Dublin-born were sitting together like Clinton Morrison, Steve Finnan, Kevin Kilbane and I just wondered. But then when I looked at the next meal it was completely different and completely ad hoc.

"It seemed to be just that when people arrive they sit down with whoever is there, and to me that is a good sign in the team. The personalities are very comfortable with each other although there has been a fair bit of change from the team that went to the World Cup."

Kerr wants to bring this team to the World Cup finals in Germany in 2006 and professes himself happy with the return of four points from the opening two games.

"There is not much that has surprised me except the Faroes getting beaten so heavily in Switzerland, because in the last qualification the worst defeat they had was 3-1 to Scotland and Germany.

"Israel haven't surprised me but it was still a massive result for them in Paris. Switzerland will be hard to beat at home and they have also made a lot of progress at under-age level and have players coming through."

Kerr has watched every other Group Four team in person since the World Cup draw was made with the exception of Israel, but as Ireland don't face them until March 2005 he will get to watch them eventually.

However, it is unlikely that his trip will involve the lengths he went to see the Faroe Islands take on Poland in Cadiz last February, days after Ireland had drawn with Brazil.

After watching QPR play Peterborough on the Friday night in London, Kerr was on a 7am flight from Stanstead to the south of Spain and then started his search for the game which was arranged there because both teams were in warm weather training.

He got to the stadium about 2pm and it was deserted. Nobody spoke English nor seemed to know anything about an international match there that day.

He eventually persuaded security to let him into the ground and once he saw television cameras he felt he had the right place. Then, after dining in a local restaurant he finally saw the sign he had been seeking.


"When I was on the way back I saw two kids with Faroe Island flags getting out of a car with their mother and I though 'here we go, it must be on.'

"There were 40 people at the match. It was the most unbelievable international match I had ever been at. There were 15 guys on the far side from Poland with their face painted and other than that it was just the officials from both sides."

Next week, Ireland hit the World Cup trail again with a trip to Paris for a meeting with France followed by a home game against the Faroe Islands, and Kerr will name his squad for those games today.

It took Mick McCarthy three qualification campaigns before he steered Ireland to a major tournament, the World Cup Finals in Japan and South Korea. This is Kerr's first full campaign and he's not prepared to start making bold predictions.

"I have a clear picture of where I want to get to, what I want to achieve. On the timescale, I want it to happen quickly but I know it might take longer."

fúck this stupid 1000 char thing is F'ing annoying. And so too is the stupid min limit :rolleyes: