HEIMIR HALLGRÍMSSON enjoyed his appearance on The Late Late Show as much as the average person enjoys a trip to the dentist.
Keeping up his former trade might be viewed as a peculiar way to choose to spend his free time but, then, all things are relative.
He appeared on the show on March 7 alongside women’s team counterpart Carla Ward[/caption]
He looks at Ilian Iliev – the man with whom he will lock horns this week in the Nations League play-off – and cannot quite get his head around his double-jobbing.
For the past year and a half, he has combined taking charge of the national team with his day job with club Cherno More.
Hallgrímsson said: “That wouldn’t be possible here, for sure.”
Iliev has been given a stay of execution for the two-legged promotion/relegation decider but his future is very much up in the air.
It is in the wake of the president of the country’s top tier calling for his resignation, accusing him of interfering in refereeing appointments and the cup semi-final draw.
Iliev tendered his resignation with his employers deciding to make a ruling on that after these two games rather than before.
Hallgrímsson said: “It’s always a conflict of interest when you select three or four players from your own club for the national team.
“That is a tough situation to be in as a coach, that’s a different thing and a tricky one for him and the federation.”
On whether the uncertainty will affect Ireland’s opponents he said: “Sometimes, these kind of things will bring players together and they will want to show everyone.
“Sometimes, something in the squad is not clicking and that could make that bigger.
“We will just have to wait and see. It is a strange situation, to be a coach and national team coach at the same time.”
But Hallgrímsson has come to appreciate that the Irish football landscape is not necessarily a tranquil one either.
He attempted to diffuse the row sparked by Stephen Bradley’s angry reaction to him expressing the hope that Shamrock Rovers’ European run could bring ‘career change’ for his players.
He said: “I always feel that doing things together will create better success, than fighting someone from your corner, together we can do good things, and we will.”
But he is not out of the woods yet. The fact that he was sitting in an RTE studio the Friday before last instead of at a match was noted and did not go down well.
He may have been under pressure from his employers to sit alongside Patrick Kielty to raise his and his team’s profile but going to Tallaght Stadium or Tolka Park first and leaving early would have been the smart choice.
On his TV appearance, he said: “I really don’t enjoy things like that but it is one of those things you have to do. There are other things I like more.”
Referring to his usual media engagements, he said: “There are more football persons here and we focus on football.”
But he does like to switch off which explains why he dons his scrubs when he is at home in Iceland. He is bemused by the fascination with this.
He said: “When I go there I normally take a day or two and do some dentistry, to keep my brain active.
“It depends, I did some in December and then in January, sometimes it is not for a month or two and sometimes it is a whole week.
“It is like playing golf, you just switch off and switch on, nobody would say anything if I spent the day playing golf, but it is strange if you do dentistry.
“It is unusual in this part of the world that the coach has another profession, or a university degree, other than football.
“A lot of players then tend to become coaches. It’s not the way we do it in Iceland, being a coach doesn’t pay to be a full-time job so normally you do something else as well.
“So I just happened to go the university route and became a dentist, open a clinic, but I was always coaching alongside it.
“If you are a coach and a dentist you should focus on your dentistry. It pays more than coach in Iceland.
“We have a third division club in our home town, and a doctor is coaching. So there is a doctor and a dentist coaching, that probably doesn’t happy in many cases.”
LOI SQUAD
That he has time to do it might raise questions about his workload as coach but he again revisited his wish to have matches for a squad heavily featuring home-based players during the League of Ireland’s off-season.
But his reference to players here ‘doing nothing’ in December and January may further annoy managers here, particularly as Rovers were playing Europa Conference League matches up until the week before Christmas.
He said: “We have the possibility because we have a whole league of players not doing nothing from November to the beginning of February/March.
“It’s a good step for them, and a platform for them, to take one step there, to maybe go to the national team. ‘OK this is the level I’d like to be in’.
“It gives them a push. It gives League of Ireland respect as well to cap players from the League and it gives us an opportunity as well to look at even younger players. It can be a mix of an under-21 and senior team camp.
“It’s just outside-the-box thinking, what can we do that is different from others in our situation.
“What’s the saying in English? Necessity is the mother of all invention. It’s like this.
“We need to think outside the box because we have only five camps and it’s been week-long camps so it’s really a short time that we’re actually working with the players and we need to find time to increase that, to give players a chance to play.”
There is a similarly short preparation time this around with Hallgrímsson not intending to hold a post-mortem into their last the game, the 5-0 defeat to England in November when Ireland essentially collapsed after Liam Scales was sent off.
He said: “I hope it is a good thing that it is far away now in the memory and especially the Championship players would have played two games a week now for three months.
“So that game is way, way back. We did well up to half-time and then one thing led to another and it was kind of slap, slap, slap in the face.
“It was a bad loss and I think and hope that the players will have recovered from that.”
He said he is still looking into bringing a sports psychologist or life coach into the squad and expressed surprise that the squad had not had one, although Stephen Kenny had brought in David Forde as a performance consultant.
Hallgrímsson said: “You need to feel this person is correct for the squad and for the person to feel good working in the squad so it’s always a process so you don’t hire one without adjustment time in that area.”
