REPUBLIC OF IRELAND TRAINING CAMP:QUITE A few of this week's participants would appear to be a fair way off forcing their way into the senior squad on a regular basis but for Hibernian striker Anthony Stokes the camp is – after a season in which he scored 23 goals – an opportunity to re-establish himself in the Ireland manager's thinking.
The Dubliner concedes it may take quite a bit more than a good end of season squad session before he can seriously challenge the incumbents for a place in Giovanni Trapattoni’s starting line up, but a good showing this week, and perhaps next, could go a long way to helping him regain some of the ground lost during his time on the margins at Sunderland.
“I’ve said it all along,” he said yesterday after training in Malahide, “it doesn’t matter if I go out and score 40 or 50 goals in a season, it’s still going to be very hard for me to get into the Ireland team with top-class players like Robbie (Keane) and Kevin Doyle. So you have to be patient and try to make a good impression around the squad. You can only do as much as you can and hope the call comes at some stage.
“Probably the best thing I could have done was getting out of Sunderland, though, and I’m glad now that I made the decision. I think I was going backwards there, I wasn’t playing games and my fitness was terrible. And that affects your whole lifestyle because you’re not concentrating on your football as much as you should be.
“You’re much more inclined to go out (for a few drinks) if you know you’re not going to be playing at the weekend, that’s just a fact of life.
“Once you get back in the team, it’s different,” he observes, although not entirely so: “Well, I went out a lot of times this year but I went out after games where I scored two or three goals. I felt like I deserved it.”
This may well be at least one reason he says he is enjoying his time in Scotland. “We qualified for Europe and I’ve been scoring a few goals which were the main things.”
There is, of course, the unpredictability of it all too, he acknowledges, in the wake of the club’s recent 6-6 draw with Motherwell.
“It was the weirdest game of football I’ve ever been involved in,” he says with a laugh. “Honestly, I don’t think I’ve even seen that in under-12 or seven a side games I’ve played in. We were leading 4-2 at half-time, then I came out and scored two and game over – I thought – and then they came back and scored four. And they might have won it. It was one of them. I don’t think it’ll ever happen again.”
There have been times when Stokes seemed almost as unlikely to bounce back but he is, he insists, happy with his lot at Easter Road and he is not in any great hurry to earn a move back to the English Premier League.
“I’m just taking it easy at the minute. I’m enjoying my football, I’m playing, I’m scoring goals and that’s all I’m really worried about. I’m not thinking about getting a move or anything else. I think that sort of thing went to my head in the past, I think I was probably too young. “
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