Leadership is easy when everyone agrees with you.
It's when issues become difficult, uncomfortable and potentially damaging that you find out most about the people running an organisation.
Over the last number of months and particularly throughout this entire situation surrounding Ireland’s games against Israel I’ve become increasingly concerned by the leadership of FAI president Paul Cooke.
This isn’t personal. I don’t know Paul well enough to make it personal.
My concern is football. Irish football, and how it’s represented and led.
More specifically, the decisions being made at the very top of the association, and whether they have the best interests of Irish football, its supporters and its players at their core.
Last November the FAI General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to instruct the association to ask UEFA for the immediate suspension of the Israel Football Association over alleged breaches of UEFA and FIFA statutes.
Yet immediately afterwards Cooke was unequivocal about what Ireland would do if drawn against Israel.
"Straight off the bat, we would play them."
That comment has bothered me ever since.
Because if your members have just overwhelmingly instructed you to make the case that another association should be suspended, how can the president so quickly and confidently declare that Ireland would play them?
Nobody expects Cooke to make UEFA policy himself. But as president his job after that vote was surely to represent the mandate he had just been given with absolute conviction.
Instead from day one there appeared to be two positions - that the FAI wanted Israel suspended and that they would play them anyway.
When we were subsequently drawn against Israel, another FAI General Assembly vote endorsed fulfilling the fixtures.
I understand the financial argument, although I firmly believe the biggest punishment we would have received was two 3-0 defeats.
And, I’ve written previously on how I believe the argument was weighted unfairly and too heavily towards one side.
I’m not dismissing any of the possible sanctions, I just fail to see how any of them, except for those two defeats, would have been enforced, when UEFA themselves aren’t holding up to their own statutes.
What I hated to see is that the situation was eventually allowed to land at the feet of the players.
Heimir Hallgrímsson publicly acknowledged before the games that some players felt "really uncomfortable" about playing. John Martin went even further saying the decision should not fall on the players because it was not their decision.
He was absolutely right.
Yet days later that is effectively what happened.
Gavin Bazunu withdrew on moral grounds. Hours of meetings followed and the remaining players voted on whether the fixture should be fulfilled. The FAI then publicly announced that a "significant majority" wanted to play.
That should never have happened in my view.
Once players were expressing genuine moral discomfort the association had to own the decision.
Don’t play the game and protect your players.
Putting 20-odd young men into a room and giving them responsibility for one of the most sensitive decisions in Irish sporting history is certainly something that shouldn’t have been announced publicly.
Immediately people begin wondering who voted which way. Players become targets for criticism, rumours and abuse despite having never asked to make an executive decision in the first place.
What concerned me further were Cooke's comments afterwards.
He said the build-up had gone "as well as could be expected" and criticised elements of the media for the pressure surrounding the story.
Yet Hallgrimsson described it as perhaps the most difficult experience of his career while one player had withdrawn and the squad had spent hours debating whether the match should even happen.
Those two assessments could hardly feel further apart.
Even more remarkably Cooke acknowledged that the FAI still did not know precisely what additional UEFA sanctions would have followed a refusal to play.
Did he ask them? Did he tell them the pressures the FAI are facing at home? Did he follow up on the previous letter asking for Israel to be suspended due to breaking their statutes? Did he paint the worst case scenario? Did he tell UEFA how this looks for them if they can’t enforce their own rules? Did he show any bravery?
David Courell told the Oireachtas Committee on Wednesday that the FAI had contacted UEFA approximately 20 times on the Israel issue in the past year, but the nature of the communications was not clear.
For months the dangers of sanctions had been central to the argument for fulfilling these games.
But then again, Cooke did make it clear his view on the fixtures being played after the game last Sunday.
Irish football deserves leadership that understands the public perception.
Perception matters.
Supporters need to believe their association represents them and players need to believe their association protects them.
The president does not have to share my opinion on whether Ireland should play Israel.
Yes, the general assembly voted to fulfill these fixtures, but when his own personal position appeared so clear from the outset, even while the organisation had voted overwhelmingly to seek Israel’s suspension, there is inevitably a question about how forcefully that mandate has been pursued.
I cannot answer what Cooke says behind closed doors at UEFA.
None of us can.
I can judge what I see publicly.
And what I’ve seen throughout this episode is an association repeatedly allowing uncertainty, contradiction and responsibility to travel downwards until eventually the people carrying the greatest burden were the players.
Irish football has spent years trying to rebuild trust in its association.
Situations like this do not help.
