It may be a little while yet before his talent is benefitting this Irish team out on the field but Martin O'Neill could do worse than bring Jack Byrne to France for his confidence levels; such is the scale of the 19-year-old's self-belief that he alone could boost the squad's collective rating to 110 per cent, cancelling out Sweden's Zlatan effect in one fell swoop.
Byrne is ostensibly spending a day or two this week with the senior squad en route to the Under-21s but the Dubliner doesn’t sound entirely convinced that he’ll ever leave O’Neill’s group again.
The manager laughs after this early encounter with the Manchester City midfielder and, with a grin and shake of the head observes: "If he backs it up with ability, great; if he turns out to be crap that's his problem. If he's cocky, great; well done, but he might have a bit of that knocked out of him by the senior lads."
Byrne, no doubt, won’t think so. He is endearingly frank when it comes to his estimation of his own abilities and having made it on to a training pitch with the contenders for places in O’Neill’s squad for France this summer, he has already started to number himself among them.
“Although I’m not in the squad,” he says, “I believe in my own ability; that I’m as good as anybody in the squad. I know a lot of these boys are a lot older than me but I think I can affect whatever I do on a football pitch so it doesn’t matter what age I am.
“That’s what sort of player I am; I’m a technical player and I affect games in different ways than maybe Roy [Keane] might have affected them by maybe getting on the ball.
Getting better
“I’m not saying that he couldn’t play football; I’m saying that’s just my key, maybe the last pass rather than the first pass.”
This, remember, is at 19 and the good news is that he doesn’t anticipate losing his hunger to keep getting better: "I always want to improve,” he says, “I never want to stand still. Even if I’d played 150 times for Ireland I wouldn’t want to stand still, I’d want to play 160 times.”
As things stand, he hasn’t played once and the plan is that he will be playing over the next week for the Under-21s against Italy and Slovenia. And O’Neill didn’t sound remotely yesterday like a man who was going to intervene to change things.
Byrne tacitly acknowledges this although he also talks at one stage about going back to the Under-21s if he “has to”.
His ambition to make the move up to senior level burns too brightly to hide, it seems, and it is not something he thinks about only happening in either the medium or long term. “I’m just here this week to enjoy the training sessions and all but obviously you’d want to be stupid if you didn’t want to go to the European Championship for your country.
“If I don’t make this one then I’ll be aiming to make the World Cup, if I don’t make that I’ll be aiming to make the next one. That’s the way it is but of course you want to go and play in the European Championship. I’m playing in the top league over in Holland. Although my team isn’t doing too well, I feel as if I’m doing quite well, so why not?
Believe
“If you don’t believe in yourself, who is going to believe in you? If I went out to Martin and said I didn’t think I was good enough to go to the Euros, he wouldn’t bring me. He might not bring me anyway if I tell him I’m going to be the best player at the Euros but at the same time you want to think that you’re definitely good enough to wear the green jersey for Ireland.”
Byrne, to be fair, is well regarded at Manchester City and has performed well in the Dutch top flight since joining Cambuur on loan. With two years remaining on his City contract, it may not be the last time that he has to head out somewhere to get experience under his belt with a view to making an impact at the Etihad.
He may well be first in the queue, however, when Pep Guardiola arrives this summer; anxious, one suspects, to tell the Spaniard that his day has come.
