Corcoran's comments at odds with Delaney's

FAI president Milo Corcoran has warned that the reforms of the association recommended in the recent Genesis report may take up to five years to implement.

Speaking in Athens yesterday, Corcoran said that making changes on the scale envisaged to both the voluntary and administrative sides of the organisation would require a good deal of work on ensuring that people co-operated willingly with the process.

"You can't brow-beat people into something like this," said the Waterford-based official, "and so it's going to take time to get right. I know John (Delaney, the FAI treasurer) would like everything done yesterday but there's a lot involved here and I think we have to be careful that we take it one step at a time."

Step one clearly involves hiring a new chief executive and here, too, Corcoran envisages less urgency being applied than Delaney. "If we have somebody in place for next June when the a.g.m. takes place, then I think we'll have done fairly well. After that a lot of the responsibility will rest with that person to get on with the rest of the process."

Corcoran's comments are completely at odds with Delaney's in the aftermath of last week's press conference at the Burlington Hotel, where Brendan Menton said that he was stepping aside in order to let a new person come in and take on the job of implementing the recommendations.

Delaney has said several times since that the job should be filled within three months and that substantial changes will have been made within 12 months, after which time, he added, the commitment of the association to reform itself could be fairly assessed.

At least in part Delaney's assessment of the situation was based on his interpretation of the unanimous vote at the Broad of Management meeting last week to endorse the report's findings.

That was widely taken as implying that there was a willingness on the board's members to surrender considerable power while Delaney himself went as far as to state that it should by no means be taken for granted that even the officers of the organisation would automatically be entitled to be among its directors in future. Corcoran seems much less convinced that the required support will be forthcoming without a good deal of cajoling.

The president, meanwhile, said that the name of the outsider asked to advise the association on the appointment of a new manager would probably be revealed over the coming week. "We've met with one person and if he agrees then that's that, although if he says he wants a second person to be involved then that's his call and it might mean keeping everything under wraps for a little bit longer."

Meanwhile, Philippe Troussier, Japan's World Cup coach, has become the latest manager to be linked with the Irish manager's post.