Nothing could have adequately prepared her for the starkly damaging and shocking revelations unearthed last Sunday, some of them involving players she knows personally.
It certainly could not have prepared her for a 10-day international window through which she attempts to steer a side, without a win or a goal in 2024, through another pair of fiendishly difficult tasks in her country’s attempts to qualify for Euro 2025.
Instead, she has been compelled to guide a wide-ranging number of staff and players through an arduous week as they attempt to grapple with a swirl of conflicting emotions.
The distraction – such a trite word to signify the bleakness of the events which have unfolded – was difficult enough to manage without being compromised by other events close to home.
Even if unintentionally the decision of her employers to unfurl their belated new senior men’s manager on the eve of a senior Irish team’s first competitive clash on England soil since 1991 jars with the prevailing sense of Irish women once again being shunted to the sidelines.
Gleeson was reportedly consulted – or perhaps more accurately had it confirmed to her – that an immediate unveiling was seemingly so necessary by the giddy gang in Dublin.
It seems so sadly symbolic, nevertheless, that her heartfelt reaction to last Sunday’s extraordinary investigations were swamped in an utterly unnecessary act of self-sabotage by her Association, however innocent of the charge they plead. Quite a way to misread a room.
At the start of this week, that room included an Ireland women’s squad gathering to quietly watch, with growing horror and distress, the documentary on RTÉ, having read much of the material in the Sunday Independent.
Gleeson then addressed them – many only born in this century, some not from this country – in an attempt to reinforce the message that the past was a different country and that, these days, the women’s game is a far healthier place to be.
The sleeping presence upstairs, in their Castleknock Hotel HQ, of Rosie Russell, one-year-old child of midfielder Julie-Ann, perhaps signified this dramatic shift in culture and environment more than anything.
FAI interim CEO David Courell, along with people and culture director Aoife Rafferty, also addressed the squad as well as issuing their public apology to the former players, reiterating to the current cohort the message that they do things differently now. Postponing the announcement of the new men’s manager might have amplified this.
“For us, we’re trying to minimise distractions this week,” said Gleeson in Carrow Road, asked about the conflicting commitments of the FAI in Dublin and if she had been informed. If she was privately furious, she was disguising it well. “Like you said, it’s been a dark week with the revelations and the players have had to deal with that as players, as women, me as a coach, as a woman. We’ve been trying to deal with that and support the players around that, but drag focus to the games.
“We’ve got media here so we have to maximise, if you want to ask anything about the game and get the messaging around that and not focus on clashes of announcements because there’s not anything that it changes for us.
“It really is batten down the hatches and take the white noise around away from the players. We have enough to deal with the games that we face so it is tunnel focus towards the games.”
Defender Aoife Mannion perhaps more accurately than most reflected the indefinable complexity of switching mentality between the terrifically traumatic to the comparatively trivial exercise of a football game.
Then again, these players are privileged to be involved in such a safe space and, even if the media attention has dwindled this week, do so with much more support than ever before.
“Even though we switch our focus to the game, this topic of safeguarding and historical abuse isn’t going to go away any time soon and it is going to be part of the conversation, and it should be,” she said.
“Right in this moment, MD-1, of course we are going to be thinking of the game, but that shouldn’t take away from what is going on around us.”
Ironically, although Ireland (world-ranked 25) will strive with purpose this evening against the reigning European champions, barring a shock first win in nine attempts – during which they have scored just once (in 1978) and conceded 31 times – the defeat will not mean much in the long term, even if they aim for an unlikely positive result.
The guarantee of a favourable autumn play-off seeding could accompany even a low-scoring defeat and. without suspended Katie McCabe and first-choice striker, Kyra Carusa, perhaps that is all they can wish for. That they can aim to put smiles on Irish faces while sporting their own is, at the very least, something to be thankful for in the grimmest of weeks.
At least that much can be possible, even if so much else has not been.
