February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“I’m over the moon with my debut and playing in front of my home crowd was fantastic,” he said. “I’m just looking for more of it now and hopefully it will happen in the next few weeks. The lads have been fantastic and made me feel more than welcome. It’s been a long time coming and it was just nice to be out there.”
The reference to his home crowd was particularly odd. After all, when he signed a four-year contract with Manchester City two years ago, there was a clause inserted in the deal where Preston North End, the club selling him, stood to receive more money if Macken ever won a senior cap for England. Isn’t his home crowd, then, actually the people who smashed up Lansdowne Road back in 1995? You know, the gullible fools who now forgive David Beckham for going missing at Euro 2004 because he played well against Ukraine in a meaningless friendly.
“You never say never in this game, and if the chance to play international football came along I would have to take it seriously,” Macken said last February, at a time when Northern Ireland were also hot on his trail. “As a professional you always want to test yourself against the best. There are lots of players now in all kinds of sports who have taken advantage in the loopholes in qualification, but I haven’t heard anything from Lawrie Sanchez since I was told that I qualified for the Republic through my nan and granddad. I keep an open mind on these things.”
Fantastic stuff. Macken reached his mid-20s without ever realizing he was eligible for Ireland through the grandparents rule. This sounds like a man who’s really been paying a lot of attention to the Irish international team through the years, doesn’t it? He claims to have had a great relationship with his late grandfather yet didn’t cop that the beloved granddad, being from Cavan meant he was eligible to wear a green jersey.
“My grandfather passed away during the summer and it`s a shame he`s not here to see it,” said the 26-year-old striker, “though I know he`d be very proud that I am representing Ireland.”
Even allowing for the fact that professional footballers are invariably not the sharpest tools in the shed, this sounds like a guy who only woke up to the existence of the other island sometime in the last 12 months. He may well carry an Irish passport, but the section entitled “Divided Loyalties” on his own Web site doesn’t deal with the legitimate dilemma faced by many footballers growing up in Irish families in England. It’s actually all to do with the problems facing a Mancunian kid who supports City but gets signed by United as a teenager.
This whole episode reeks of the same kind of convenient embrace of nationality that brought Clinton Morrison into the fold three years ago. Remember how Tooting’s finest initially tried to parlay Mick McCarthy’s interest in him into an England call-up. When that tactic failed to work (England having far too many attacking options to have to resort to a sometime Birmingham City substitute), he tried to turn on the charm. With disastrous results.
Morrison told Irish reporters he knew all about the “emerald stone” that everybody in Ireland liked to kiss in order to become more loquacious. When that failed to win him admirers, he unspooled a couple of yarns about his love of Guinness. Sickening stuff really. Although he stopped short of referring to his new country as Eire — a grievous crime for which Mark Lawrenson, Kevin O’Callaghan and a few other Irish internationals down the years should have been strung up — he deserved the welcome he got from Pat Dolan.
“When they put Clinton Morrison’s name on an Irish team sheet,” said the then St. Patrick’s Athletic manager, “they may as well have RIP engraved on Irish soccer’s gravestone.”
It will certainly be a unique feeling for Irish fans the night they have to cheer on a strike tandem made up of this pair of opportunists in a competitive international.
If Macken had turned up for the Bulgaria game and been honest about his intentions, it would have been easier to stomach. Had he simply admitted that he’d no previous regard for Ireland, had been thrilled to represent England at the Under-20 World Cup back in 1997, and was now merely capitalizing on a FIFA law change to enjoy a belated and unlikely senior international career, we could at least have commended his candor. Instead, he fed us the usual ersatz attempt at fervor, complete with a quote about how he found himself in the English set-up.
“At the time my selection for England’s youths team was just something that came out of the blue for me,” Macken said. “I was moving from Manchester United to Preston and before I knew it, I was in Malaysia. I regretted playing for England when I realized I could have declared for Ireland.
The poor lad. It sounds like the FA blazers drugged him and smuggled him onto a plane like the A team used to do with B.A. Baracus back in the day. How else to explain him falling asleep in the north of England and waking up in Asia at a football tournament known as the little World Cup.
“I spoke to Brian in the summer and he asked would I like to come and play. As soon as I got the call, I was more than happy to come and represent Ireland.”
Thanks a lot, Jon. We’re glad you were happy to come. It wasn’t like you had anywhere else to be on an international Wednesday night.