'It will take a long time to get over it' says Ireland's Jamie Finn on World Cup axe
At least Jamie Finn’s World Cup jilting didn’t become terminal like Gary Waddock and Kevin Foley.
Vera Pauw’s reputation for ruthlessness was never so personified in July when a player who’d started six of the nine qualifiers was culled not just from the team but the squad.
That two of the games she didn't feature in were due to suspension – the first in Georgia to avoid a third yellow card and in Slovakia after she’d incurred it in the play-off clincher against Finland underlined her central role.
And so shock reverberated from within their Belfield campus throughout the country and beyond when Finn’s name was excluded from the list of 23 chosen for the trip to Australia at the eleventh hour.
Shades of Jack Charlton dumping Waddock on the eve of Italia ’90 and Giovanni Trapattoni doing likewise to Foley for Euro 2012 veered into the women’s sphere for the first time.
Pauw offered a teary explanation to the axing; nothing compared to in the anguish of what the player endured.
Four months on and Finn is still coming to grips with how Ireland’s major tournament breakthrough that she was instrumental in felt so distant.
The Birmingham City player was part of the delegation to travel Down Under but merely as a standby player, the pain most acute as a bystander to the occasion of the opener against co-hosts Australia before 76,000 fans in Sydney.
It was one of the odder calls in the reign of Pauw that was unceremoniously halted by the FAI after the World Cup amid a deluge of adverse player feedback.
The one consolation is that unlike the humiliated pair before her, Finn has resumed her international career.
Into Pauw’s place has come interim boss Eileen Gleeson and a permanent manager will be installed ahead of next
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