Stan the playmaker

Around here we're always complaining that journalists lack a historical perspective. Arguably, many political hacks, with their capacity to rattle off past election results and previous ministerial office-holders, are a partial exception to what we regard as the rule. Sports reporters, too, tend to share with sports fans a frightening store of history's trivia.
But you can know all sorts of information and still fail to impart relevant wisdom. For example, amid all the knee-jerk battering of Steve Staunton, the stereotypical sympathetic counter-reflex was to note that “he was a very good player for Ireland”. This underdeveloped cliché both over- and under-states the role he played in the green jersey and his execution of it.

Staunton was in fact an absolutely crucial player in Jack Charlton's teams especially. We occasionally joked that in that long-ball era Packie Bonner was the side's playmaker, but in reality that distinction more properly belonged to Stan: the ball would repeatedly get to him at left back, and he would hoof it 60 yards towards a big target man or a runner. His left foot was also our major set-piece threat.

However, by the mid-1990s he often seemed to be carrying some injury, and the long balls especially lost their former accuracy. I can recall sitting in Lansdowne Road and watching as one of those hoofed missiles from left-back would run out of fuel and its trajectory tail off like a golfer's shanked shot, often all the way over the sideline for a throw-in.

Here's the point: Stan would keep trying, over and over, refusing to learn from the evidence of his own eyes that he was not really capable of gaining advantage for his team this way. His decline was an underestimated factor in that of the side, and it was a mercy when he was relieved of that position. Now, do you think the FAI, and the media, could have learned something from that history?