Charlton era not to be dismissed

Almost three years into Mick McCarthy's reign as national team manager, the frame of Jack Charlton is still casting a long shadow over Irish football.

The Charlton era may long since be consigned to history but time hasn't diminished the debate on the merits or otherwise of the system which took Ireland to two World Cup finals as well as the finals of the 1988 European Championship in Germany.

Recently David O'Leary has revived the controversy in a newspaper interview in which he had some trenchant comments to make on the life and times of his old manager.

During a playing career which spanned 20 years O'Leary was widely acknowledged as the quintessential gentleman of football, a man who invariably eschewed the leading statement and only rarely brushed with authority in almost 800 first-team games for Arsenal and some 68 appearances in the national team.

Now elevated to management at Leeds and exposed to the higher profile which goes with the calling, the temptation is to forsake deeply-held beliefs and lead with the chin. Some of the recent statements attributed to him fit that category and, in the interests of objectivity, deserve to be challenged.

Speaking of Charlton, he is quoted as saying: "Jack's organisation was crap". And again: "His coaching was not the greatest".

Charlton's record is beyond such a reproach. Inheriting some gifted players from Eoin Hand and producing some equally talented ones, he built a side which was perhaps just two players short of going all the way with his European challenge in Germany.

That was the measure of his qualities of organisation and to suggest otherwise is to question the judgment of the vast majority of those who found in the Charlton years the stuff of dreams.

It is true that the end product masked the mundanities of a strategy based largely on bypassing midfield and putting the opposition under pressure by the simple expedient of the long ball played out of defence. It didn't fit everybody's description of the way the game should be played but, as O'Leary himself has long recognised, the top line is still far and away the most important in any football report.

With the inclusion of young players like Stephen McPhail, Jonathan Woodgate and Alan Smith in his side, the new Leeds manager has shown he intends to pursue success, in part, through creative skills. Yet when he sought to make his first big-name signing it was to the pragmatism of David Batty that he turned. Jack Charlton could be pardoned a knowing wink when he heard the news.

The story of O'Leary's 30-month exile from the Ireland team is well documented and later in the interview he refers to the treatment he received from the manager as "disgusting".

That will strike a responsive chord with many, but as one of those who rang the bell for the Arsenal player in the early stages of his estrangement from the Ireland manager I believe that results vindicated Charlton in his team selections.

O'Leary, who had built an outstanding career around pace and his shrewd reading of the game, found himself unable or unwilling to adjust to a system which put the emphasis on early contact with opposing forwards.

And with the option of utilising any two from three outstanding centre backs, Paul McGrath, Mick McCarthy and Kevin Moran, there was only one realistic judgment to be made.

David O'Leary is correctly regarded as one of the outstanding home-grown talents of the last 25 years. But to attempt to distort history, as he has done, is unacceptable.