Players eligible for Ireland

O’Neill is a very very good coach and did a fantastic job for us! A few things killed us that Denmark play off result was a nightmare unfortunately and it’s very hard to come back from something like that rightly or wrongly!! 

Things like serious injuries to key emerging players (Brady McCarthy,Coleman) and the likes of Grealish and Rice granny rulers who 30 years ago might have played for us switching killed a nation that stopped producing players for 10 years and couldn’t really afford to lose them!! 

Put those 5 without any injury issues at their best into the fray now with the 2 goalkeepers,Doherty,Collins,Egan, Cullen,Parrott,Obafemi you would have the makings of a very decent side!! 

Roy Keane the bust up with Walters aside yeah blaming him is a bit pointless it’s easy to blame him! The rest of the players in the main speak very highly of him (Meyler,Coleman the best examples) 

Jobe is apparently eligible alright - Jude is obviously tied to England now.

Pepe is also Portugese by residency, we're highly unlikely to get many players that way. Other than Ogbene, I don't think we've ever had any player qualify and be good enough through naturalisation.

The next generation had Grealish, who we rolled out the red carpet for. He always had an eye on playing for England long-term, even when he was with us, if he was good enough. Kane, we never stood a chance. Bamford was with us underage and didn't fancy it. As Mick McCarthy pointed out, he was approached several times (by him, not even counting other managers) and he didn't show any interest.

Slightly younger, pretty sure Conor Gallagher and James Maddison have been approached several times each. People struggle to accept it despite the examples I listed of lads like Noble, Naughton, Kitson and O'Hara etc, but some lads are perfectly happy backing themselves and accepting one cap for the country they're from, rather than taking caps from other players for a country they don't identify with; like Kevin Davies, they'd be happier with one cap for them than numerous for us.

Who are these players we need to be more aggressive pursuing? Our underage squads are historically filled with players born in England. Sure Noel King sides were majority English-born, regardless of talent! A lot of his mainstays ended up drifting down the leagues or out of the game altogether. You even have lads like Shane Long and Richard Dunne asking young clubmates if they're eligible (Sean Morrison, Ciaran Clark).

No stone is unturned with the FAI in this regard, one of the few criticisms you can't level at them.

There's no point comparing our situation to Morocco's anymore than there was comparing it to Wales. A few months ago people were insisting we should follow Wales model and cap every Tom, Dick and Harry who's eligible for us at the earliest possible opportunity to tie them down. Now everyone's saying that they only have three good players (Allen, Bale and Ramsey) and they're goosed without them; doomed to a bleak period in the International wilderness.

It's a different situation with Morocco as Pingini pointed out with many different factors, be they socioeconomic, religious or cultural, not to mention the closer generational links. I've known people from that background born in countries like Germany and France and the majority would genuinely identify as both e.g. Algerian/French. Look at Ozil, Ibrahimovic and Zidane. They were good enough to play for whoever they wanted to so went with Germany, Sweden and France since they were born there and more likely to win or compete for trophies, but they're vociferous in identifying culturally as Turkish/Algerian. Probably, largely, due in part to the aforementioned socio-economic factors and disquiet in the majority immigrant urban centres they were born in.

Pepe is of no relevance really. England don't have the player depth Brazil have and noone of Pepe/Deco's quality is ever going to play in the LoI.

TL;DR - how do we pursue eligible players even more aggressively? Who, specifically, are the players we needed to be more aggressive in keeping in the fold?

*Take into account the likes of Delap/Egan-Riley/Barry have already been called up and have decided to stick with England after sampling both countries.

*And yes, I know people will label Rice as the player we should've been more aggressive in tying down but a lot of this is based on apocryphal stories of him being in the squad for the Moldova game, when he wasn't, and was probably quite happy sticking with the under-21s.

Bloody hell. Journeymen approaching thirty like Jake Clarke-Salter toying with the idea of declaring for us yet some people continue to insist Grealish would've accepted a call-up when he was at Notts County against all the available evidence when he was clearly intent on playing for England. Yeah, he's going to accept 3 minutes at the end of a game against Azerbaijan at the age of 18 and throw away any possibility of an international career with his first choice. Not even going to mention Bellingham or Kane because they've never even commented on Ireland let alone being linked with our underage setup let alone our senior team. I'm Irish and it would be a crime against football if Bellingham threw away the possibility of World Cup semifinals and European Championship finals by somehow getting hoodwinked into being tied down by us. 

You don't make your play, you don't get any results. Of England's current crop, James, Keane, Maguire, Rice, Grealish, Bellingham, Gallagher, Maddison, Bamford, and Kane were all eligible. If we'd seriously went after every single one of them (as you can be sure teams like Morocco, Wales, and even England themselves would have if they were in our position), we'd quite possibly have got a couple of them and we'd be a completely different team. 

Rice was literally in the bag and we still dropped the ball, all because no one had to common sense to think it might be wise to give this dual eligible, potentially world class talent a couple of minutes off the bench in a competitive game. It's unforgivable and we're in a far worse position because of it.

That might sound intuitively correct, but I'm not sure it stands up to scrutiny. There are plenty of Muslims who line out for Spain/France/Belgium/Holland/Germany etc which is where these players come from mostly, it's only in recent years though that Morocco have been really successfully in attracting players that are good enough to represent their birth countries to represent them instead. It's hard to view that as anything other than a concerted effort on he part of the Moroccan federation.

It also fails to explain why countries likes Wales and Canada have had great success with dual eligible players - in Wales case there's no great anti-Welsh prejudice in England which would explain why people of Welsh ancestry would cling more closely to that than usual. In Canada's case basically all of their players are from an immigrant background and eligible for different nations, you would expect that stark cultural differences might lead them to favour their parents countries, but in recent times virtually none of them have.

Again, I'm not sure that's true. Most of France/Belgium/Hollands Muslim players are North African, Germany's are mostly Turkish or North African, and Spain's are mostly West African or North African. They all look "different" to the native born population and they're all Muslims, I'm not sure why it would be automatically harder or easier for one to integrate over the other (if anything, West Africans in Spain and Turks in Germany get a particularly tough ride).

I think if there's any further proof needed that most of this is simply down to Morocco's insistence on aggressively pursuing dual nationals, we need only consider the recent eligibility rule change - which was largely prompted by Morocco continuing to pursue a player (Munir) who was no longer even eligible for them! They have been so insistent on this path that they have literally pushed FIFA into altering the rules to their benefit; meanwhile we won't even give a few minutes off the bench to top class talents who have come through various levels of our youth system.... We deserve to be where we are for our stupidity.

Again, that simply isn't true. Basically every country (from minnows like San Marino, to giants like Italy, Argentina, and Portugal) has extensively made use of the eligibility rules regarding qualification by descent and naturalisation.

The statement that we've "milked the granny rule" suggests we've somehow taken advantage of a loophole, which is just pure ignorance. Our state offers citizenship to individuals with an Irish parent/grandparent, we've done nothing more than follow the same logic our state does. It's absolutely incomparable to actual "loopholes" such as what teams like Qatar were doing in the past (ie paying young lads from the other side of the world to live there for a few years so they could get them into national team).