Dion Fanning: You wouldn’t trust the FAI to organise an Easter Egg hunt let alone find a new manager
Sometimes with the FAI you wonder if it’s all elaborate misdirection.
When they show up at an Oireachtas hearing having failed to provide documents until a few hours beforehand — with one of those key documents an entirely redacted email — you find yourself thinking: these guys are either very, very bad or very, very good.
When the FAI appeared in front of the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday, they may well have been employing the distraction technique, dead catting, which was said to have been developed by the conservative Australian strategist, Lynton Crosby.
Throw a dead cat on the table, it goes, and nobody will be talking about anything else. Redact everything on an email including your own social media handles, and this might be what distracts from any other stuttering business. When the FAI were done, nobody was talking about their cack-handed search for a manager anymore. So that was a positive.
True, they might look at the FAI and think they wouldn’t trust them to organise an Easter Egg Hunt in the back garden, let alone the search for a new manager, but let’s face it, with the FAI, that’s always priced in.
Soon the FAI will present a manager to the public but it is possible to draw a line from their appearance at the PAC to the search which, with one or two exceptions, has focused publicly on the beaten dockets of UK football.
The FAI may find the outside noise irrelevant. They may produce a successor to Stephen Kenny who fulfils their criteria of a senior Ireland manager who implements a style that is uniformly produced by all Irish teams. Neil Lennon or Chris Coleman look unlikely now.
Lee Carsley unfortunately does as well and he is the candidate who fitted the FAI’s brief and who they could appoint
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