The Irish football post-mortem continued on Soccer Republic on Monday night with pathologists Brian Kerr and Richie Sadlier giving some particularly insightful analysis of the situation.

Both spoke about Irish football at a youth level and how structures can be improved so the conveyor belt of talent can restart and once again begin to produce.

If someone is going to understand the minutiae of the sport at youth level, it is Kerr. A man of his abilities not being utilised to ensure a prosperous future for football in this country is a travesty.

The former Ireland boss spoke about the need for players to have increased contact with the best coaches at a younger age.

There's two elements to this, there's the funding of the development. The funding of the emerging talent programmes which I think has been reduced substantially in recent years. That means there is less contact time with the players around the county with the better coaches. It might be down to once a week, where it was two and three and four times a week. We need to have our better coached players having much more contact time with really experienced coaches by the time they get to 15 and 16. By the time they get to League of Ireland clubs, and what they doing at the moment is they're jumbling around that the players are going into League of Ireland clubs for under 17 National League. For me, that's too late. The contact work, the specialist work needs to be done before that with really specialist coaches

He agreed with Peter Collins' summation that players required immersing in a professional environment early in their development.

Yes. Where the physical, tactical, technical work and lifestyle work is done on a much earlier basis. Our kids have a couple a week training sessions with their clubs and then matches at the weekend. That's typical, that's not good enough. Other countries have moved ahead of us.


Richie Sadlier made the salient point that the way young Irish players are coached has not changed in 20 years.

That's what it was like for me. I last played schoolboy football in this country in the mid 90s. I left in '96 and the system then was you train twice a week and then play at the weekend. That's still the same probably in the majority of clubs now and that's 20 years ago. 10 or 11 years ago, I worked with the Millwall underage structures and at 10 and 11 and 12 years of ages, they were training five nights a week. The parents had an option, you can take a night off but we want you there at least four. These are the youngest, youngest kids. We're assessing Irish football and you can't do it in isolation. You've got to compare it to what the FAs are doing in other countries because when you get to international level, that's who you're playing against. So it's no good to say 'how are we doing compared to 30, 20, 10 years ago?' What's best practised in other countries - how do we compare to that? That's where the conversation needs to be [how are they consistently producing better players?].

You can watch on the RTÉ Player.