It's especially exciting to play in Ireland

Bill Belichick wasn't entirely across the news that the Republic of Ireland football team are playing their biggest match in over eight years this week.

The NFL's most decorated coach was informed of as much during a press conference with the Irish media to promote this year's Aer Lingus Football Classic at the Aviva Stadium where his University of North Carolina Tar Heels will face the TCU Horned Frogs (Texas Christian University) at the end of August.

After being brought up to speed, he was loath to offer the Irish team too much specific advice nor encroach too heavily onto Heimir Hallgrimsson's turf.

"Right, well I don't know too much about soccer," Belichick told reporters. "My advice would be to keep the ball out of your net. Start with that."

The eight-time Super Bowl winner - six times as head coach - adopted a more avuncular persona with foreign reporters than he did with the workaday NFL press corps during his glory years with the New England Patriots, where he tended to be ultra-guarded and often waspish.

By contrast, here he was happy to get into the spirit of things and expand on the topic with more general advice for the Boys in Green ahead of a momentous week.

"Obviously, they're a very good team to get this far. And so I think you've got to rely on the things that have gotten you to where you are. Don't try to be something you're not. Don't try to do something you've never done before.

"They wouldn't be where they were if they weren't good and they weren't successful at doing certain fundamental things well."

Notwithstanding his Croatian roots, Belichick is a hardcore gridiron man and was never going to be stuck talking about soccer for very long.

Intermittent college football games had been played in Ireland in the late 1980s and 1990s and again in the 2010s, until the Aer Lingus Classic became an annual fixture on the calendar in the 2020s.

There was considerable buzz when Belichick's North Carolina team were announced as one of the participants this year, given their coach's legendary status in the game as a name familiar to even casual followers of the sport on this side of the Atlantic.

"What's attractive [about the fixture] is it was offered, so we accepted (laughs)," Belichick said.

"I've played in several international games in my NFL career. It's exciting to play abroad and especially in Ireland with the great history there and the fans' love for American football.

"I've coached in a lot of big games. I've coached in a lot of games, period. But you certainly remember the ones like this, the international games, because they're different, they're unique, they're special.

"It'll be a great experience to come to such a welcoming country as Ireland and play in this Classic.

"We have sent our operations team over to check out the stadium, hotel and training facilities and everything looks great. We are looking forward to coming over and seeing Dublin and playing in a great stadium."

It won't be Belichick's first time in the country, though it's been a few decades since he set foot here.

"Yeah, I was in Dublin for a Bon Jovi concert," he recalls. "It was a very festive atmosphere in the summer, it was right after the fourth of July. Around '94 or '95. I spent a couple of nights there and listened to Jon rock the city."

It's three years since Belichick's glittering NFL career ended, where he established himself as the most successful coach in the league's history.

He won his first two Super Bowls as a whizz-kid defensive co-ordinator with the New York Giants in the late 80s and early 90s.

(Incidentally, Belichick was one of the masterminds of the last Super Bowl broadcast live on RTÉ in 1991, when the Giants shocked the favoured Buffalo Bills in Florida. The late and beloved Brendan O'Reilly - who never quite fully adjusted to NFL terminology - waxed lyrical about the Giants' "winning try" as he wrapped up the coverage in the early hours back in Montrose.)

After a tumultuous stint with the Cleveland Browns, he subsequently went on to rewrite the record books with the New England Patriots, winning six Super Bowls as a head coach.

While his first season at UNC was far from successful, he stresses that he's enjoying the rhythms of the college game and is considerably more optimistic for his second season in charge.

"You have a lot more time with the players," Belichick says. "The players are here every day for academic work and classes and so forth, so we have a lot more time to work with them.

"The opportunity to develop players in colleges is much greater. There's more opportunity to coach on the field, to interact with the players which I enjoy a lot.

"I mean, look, they're both good. You know, I've had a great life of coaching, an opportunity to coach at both levels."

There is an added Irish dimension to the game, with Newry born kicker and punter Adam McCann Gibbs joining Belichick's Tar Heels from Penn State last November.

McCann Gibbs, another graduate of Tadhg Leader's kicking academy, had earned a scholarship with Penn State before switching to North Carolina late last year.

"We saw his workout from some of the coaching videos that he had," Belichick told RTÉ Sport.

"And he's got a big leg and certainly seems to have the ability to perform at this level. But he's never played American football.

"And so these practices will be very important for him this spring to see that he acclimates to our style of kicking a different ball and so forth.

"He'll have a great opportunity to earn that playing time opportunity. But there are other people who he'd be competing with and we'll see how all that plays out.

"Again, he's a very talented player, but one without very much experience in our game. And we'll see how quickly he's able to acclimate to that."

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