Larry Ryan: Are we bound by belief in playing it out from the back?

The week has been all about anger and dark arts and set-pieces so there is only one place to start — that new Sky 'Bound by Belief' ad for their Ireland soccer sponsorships. The one where the whole nation, understandably concerned at our tendency — the men anyway — to leak from range, joins the action to give Courtney Brosnan and Gavin Bazunu a dig-out defending a last-minute free-kick. Sadly, the execution is a shambles.

We’ve an extra couple of hundred defenders on hand and we line them out in a five-deep defensive wall all the way across the pitch. There’s a time and a place for width and this is hardly it. You can nearly hear Ronnie Whelan lament that we’ve ‘got to be smarter’ when the equaliser dips past an unsighted keeper.

There are definite Team of Us vibes to the whole thing, to be sure, but it might be unfair to blame rugby’s grip on our marketing agencies for this lack of attention to the basics. In the current climate, we’d certainly get done for delaying the restart too. And I should probably pick up a cheap yellow for delaying the start of a column by 200 words.

Could you correctly call it a ‘figary’, this clampdown on the scourge of delaying free-kicks, currently being selectively piloted at Arsenal matches? No doubt it will be forgotten soon, whatever about the Premier League amnesty on two-footed lunges, elbows in the face, and sundry other forms of assault. Long forgotten, of course, is the old six-second rule for time-wasting keepers.