Little rascals need to be taught discipline

LockerRoom/Tom Humphries: The little rascals lived in a big old ramshackle house in Merrion Square, and as Christmas crept up on them they were ever so good. No. They were better than that. They were very, very quiet and very, very well-behaved. In fact they were almost perfect.

Why? Because they believed that if they were good they would soon have lovely things to play with and everybody would like them again! They promised anybody who would listen that they were going to be good forever. Goodwill to all men! they said. And it sounded good, even if they didn't understand it. People passing by just smiled and turned their collars up to the weather.

What a bunch of silly billys the little rascals of Merrion Square were. Goodwill to all men! The rascals loved the merry peel of it. Deep down, though, deep in their heart of hearts the rascals missed being naughty. They missed being bad. They yearned to pull each others hair.

And then suddenly, before anyone knew it, it was the end of January and they had been washing behind their ears and minding their manners for nearly two months. That's eight whole weeks! Now they found that the urge to be bold was boiling up inside them until it was indescribable. If they were good for a single day longer they might just explode.

They didn't understand why this was, but they understood that they couldn't control it. It was in their nature. So they hired a hotel room on the edge of the city and they went mad. They brought knives and guns and, naughtiest of all, they brought solicitors. Soon the Red Cow, for that was the name of the hotel, had more blood on the walls than an abattoir.

And then they began to wonder if perhaps this wasn't the way forward. They would be good next week and appoint a manager. And they would be good the week after and maybe look for a chief executive. And then they'd gather in a hotel in two weeks and work themselves into a frenzy and slice the flesh off one of their own. Really, they were incorrigible those rascals.

Incorrigible, but lucky. This week the FAI will appoint an international manager whom they don't deserve. One who understands their condition and forgives it. And they have a Taoiseach who shares that understanding.

Even as the FAI refuse yet again at the first hurdle of reform, the Taoiseach is plotting and planning ways to reward them with a spanking new football stadium. This week he wants to give them a mere 65,000-seater. Still he wants it to be in Abbotstown. Timbuktu with traffic. The PDs are still being obdurate.

Lucky. Yup, the FAI are lucky. Hanging around the international soccer team is the gateway for occasional samplings of lifestyles of the rich and famous. Without being either yourself. Once upon a time a little bit of rumpy pumpy behind the Iron Curtain in Poland was the most that an FAI blazer could expect by way of a perk.

Now, however, circumstance rather than judicious husbandry of the game has provided the soccer administrator ample opportunity to display his tanned embonpoint over excruciatingly tight swimming togs in five-star hotels all over the world.

Do they deserve this luck? Over the years the domestic game has crumbled. You may take the pulse of this season and say that it was better than last season, that the year didn't end in chaos over registrations, that last week's debacle with Drogheda was small potatoes, that so far nobody has been dragged into the High Court.

Yet still the domestic game is a withered thing compared to what it once was. And this past six months the afterglow of the World Cup was overshadowed by a big GAA season, undermined by internal feuding and punctuated with the Genesis report and various resignations and assassinations.

AND the FAI are lucky because nobody seems to care. Nobody expects any better. Because the game in England has thrived in its own vulgar way and because Sky has fed us on it to the point of indigestion, and because soccer still retains the simple beauty of being a game which just requires jumpers for goalposts, this country sends forth an endless supply of fodder for the football mills across the water.

It would be unfair to characterise the FAI as being helpless bystanders in this process. Brian Kerr's work and Eoin Hand's work in this regard has been exemplary and imaginative. The association organises its under-age games structure well and efficiently. But overall the game here does not get the quality of administration it deserves.

It's not for want of good, well-intentioned people. Brendan Menton was a palpably decent man who was in possession of a working brain. I'm sure John Delaney has the same qualities. Problem is that they all know each other too long, they all have old scores to settle, old wounds which fester.

When the three wise men set off to England to find their new manager last week there was scarcely a soccer person left behind in Ireland who couldn't give you a decent breakdown of how the arguments among the three men would run. X would be against Y no matter what. Z went back to the year dot with managerial candidate A. Y didn't rate managerial candidate A and would prefer the flashier credentials of managerial candidate B. And so on.

In big picture terms, last week's argument over who said what to whom in the corridors of the New Otami Hotel in Chiba City last summer is an irrelevance, really. The money has been paid. It is gone. Non-refundable. Time to get over it. Time to get on with it. Time to remove the possibility of it ever happening again.

The whole point of the Genesis report, and the Cass report before it, is to avoid such situations. The FAI got themselves a manager now who understands them and who has the improvisational skills to work around them.

Now the FAI need that high-powered chief executive and they need it quickly. What the FAI don't need is "somebody who understands them". They need somebody who is completely baffled and infuriated by them. They need somebody who will kick bottoms.

They need somebody all the little rascals will hate and fear. They need somebody who isn't interested in going to matches or hobnobbing with players. They have the good cop. Time for the nasty cop.

In this era of stricter sentencing, probably the FAI need Mary Harney to be their governess for the new era.