Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Doctors do not generally give great credence to mooted ‘miracle cures’ or non medical interventions. Often they explain supposed success for such methods by pointing out that people simply do not stay sick indefinitely, they get better, or regress to the mean. The reverse is also true. If someone is feeling unusually buoyant, healthy, full of beans, they will return to a more stable plane. Normal service will resume. Such appears to be the case with the Northern Ireland football team. After three years of extraordinary results, optimism and confidence, the international side has regressed to its mean of mediocrity. What is more, the manager, Nigel Worthington, appears quite happy to allow this regression to continue unabated. He believes Northern Ireland played well on Saturday night , as the team slumped to an abject 2-0 defeat against indifferent opposition. Admittedly Maribor was not an easy place to secure three points. The Slovenes kicked, hacked, shoved and elbowed North

Norwich’s Sammy Clingan has been withdrawn from the Northern Ireland squad for forthcoming matches against Slovenia and San Marino. On Saturday he played the full ninety minutes against Derby County, converting a penalty despite his side’s 2-1 defeat. During the last Northern Ireland match Sammy picked up a shoulder injury which kept him out for two or three club games. Norwich’s manager, Glenn Roeder, reacted with consternation . “The bottom line is he's ended up with a shoulder injury and if he'd been at home with us it wouldn't have happened. There's nothing you can do about it. FIFA are the ruling body and you get sanctioned if you don't let your players go. I'm at the stage now where I feel like trying to stop them going but I know it's like King Canute trying to stop the tide coming in, you can't do anything about it, they have to go." Given the circumstances and timing of Clingan’s withdrawal, it is tempting to conclude that Roeder has ...

Come Saturday night we will know a lot more about Northern Ireland’s chances of qualifying for the World Cup in South Africa. Come Wednesday night the Green and White Army will have a fair idea whether it is even worth dreaming about an African odyssey come the summer of 2010. Put quite simply, if Northern Ireland lose the first two matches of the campaign, then the rest of the group games are merely for FIFA ranking places, we’re not going to the World Cup. Failing to qualify for South Africa would not, of course, represent abject failure for Nigel Worthington’s squad. Realistically, it would be a fine achievement to top the ‘group within a group’ which also includes Slovenia and Slovakia. Overwhelmingly the Czechs and Poland will be favourites to progress, but in the European Championships we regularly defeated opposition of a similar standard (and better, the eventual champs for goodness sake!) at Windsor Park. Naturally, expectations have risen commensurately. However, North

I was saddened today by the announcement that Lawrie Sanchez has been sacked from his job at Premiership club fulham. Sanchez has been given a ludicrously short period of time to make an impact as the West London outfit’s manager with the club’s descent into the relegation zone and four defeats in the last five convincing his chairman Mohammed Al Fayed to wield the axe. What Al Fayed knows about football isn’t worth knowing and I would suggest that he has made a mistake with this display of impatience. The ex-Northern Ireland manager’s departure coupled with continued uncertainty about the future of the current incumbent, Nigel Worthington, has led to some speculation that Sanchez could be asked to retake the reins of the international team. I doubt that either the IFA or Sanchez will be as quick to consider this route. Sanchez was after all quite open about his desire to return to club football. His achievements as Northern Ireland manager were remarkable, but he did leave midwa

Having been initially positive about Nigel Worthington’s appointment as Northern Ireland boss, I was worried to read, amongst an unrepentant exegesis of his arguments for withdrawing Phil Mulyrne and Paul McVeigh from successive Northern Ireland squads, the following debilitatingly negative analysis of the current playing squad: "Without being disrespectful, this team isn't like the side that had names like McIlroy, O'Neill, Armstrong and Jennings."We have only a handful of Premiership players but they have big hearts." Whilst the actual factuality of Worthington’s statement is hard to contest, given recent results, given the amount of confidence instilled in the team under Lawrie Sanchez, given that a new manager might be expected to try and boost, rather than destroy, the confidence of his new charges, the comment is a deeply unhelpful one. My immediate reaction to Worthington’s appointment was certainly positive. I see the new manager’s task as maintaining a s...