The morning after. It’s just a bit past 10 and though she is short on sleep and light on breakfast, Vera Pauw is twinkling. She got to bed for just two hours and then started fielding press duties pretty much as soon as her feet touched the hotel room carpet. An FAI staffer asks if she’d like anything and she says just some yoghurt and she sits down to begin.
First, she wants to talk about the Up The ‘RA chant in the dressingroom. Before anyone even asks a question, Pauw apologises, with sincerity and clarity, for the hurt it has caused. No equivocation, no sorry-if-you-took-offence, no shilly-shallying. For almost 10 minutes, she faces into it impressively, shirking nothing, at no stage trying to deflect or make excuses.
In that moment, you can be in no doubt as to the traits that have made Pauw such a force as a coach, ultimately leading to this epochal achievement for her Ireland team. Plenty who have worked with her in the past have much to say about her management style – far from all of it complimentary. But if nothing else, her facility for getting her point across can’t have many rivals in the game.
So when she is asked about tactics that have got Ireland to the World Cup and whether there will eventually be a necessity to do more than keep clean sheets and score on the break, she doesn’t bristle or reject the premise. She replies, in her very Dutch way, that this is obviously what they will try to do by the time next summer comes around.
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“Yeah, of course,” Pauw says. “We need to develop further. We’ve got five clean sheets in a row. We’ve got four goals against, and that’s our strength. Because we always create chances, so we always score in a game. As long as you don’t get goals against and you score in a game you win, right?
“For a long-term strategy, we need to develop further. That is clear. That doesn’t mean that our game plan is not exciting, but we will develop our play, especially attacking-wise. I hope that you’ve seen that we have chosen different games for different ways of playing, to get the best out of the game. If you go for winning, then by times you have to give in other aspects. And against Scotland this was the way we won on tactics. We had a better game plan than they had.”
Just over 12 hours have passed since the final whistle in Glasgow, during which a handful of her players – as well as Pauw herself – have described their game plan as not being pretty. She is asked if they have it as a badge of honour but she doesn’t see it that way.
It’s more that we ourselves have high standards, so we want to develop further, that we can keep the ball under pressure better, that we can play out better
— Vera Pauw
“It’s about winning. If you don’t win, you cannot make anyone proud. The country is proud of us because we’re winning and the heart that we put in. We say ourselves it’s not pretty. Nobody else said it to us. Everybody else said what a bunch of, well I say a bunch of tigers, but others will say, what a bunch of players you have. Because they go to the edges for the country.
“It’s more that we ourselves have high standards, so we want to develop further, that we can keep the ball under pressure better, that we can play out better. We all want that. But if you’re not there yet, then you need to make a choice of not losing it here [in defence], but losing it there [higher up the pitch].
“Because otherwise you will get four or five goals against you if you give the ball away in front of your goal area. If you’re not good in that, then avoid using it. But we need to grow, and we will grow. In a half year’s time you can do a lot.”
The work starts now. Planning, logistics, budgets, everything. The draw takes place in Auckland on Saturday week and Pauw will be there along with the rest of the FAI delegation. Ireland will be in the third of four pots of seeds and once the names start getting pulled, it will all start to feel extremely real.
“During the first party last night we had the first conversations,” she laughs. “So next week we will have a meeting to put everything in order, because it is massive. Everything needs to be planned very early, ordered early and put in line early. Next week we have a day that we are going to discuss every single detail, what we need to do, what needs to be done before the winter, before Christmas, so we are ready step by step for the World Cup.”
But first, the nice FAI chap arrives back with a tray of about 20 different yoghurts. Pauw creases into laughter, picks one for herself and offers the rest around to the gathered press. “I only wanted one!” she says.
Some days, things just go your way.
