'Destroyed' - The key moments from former Ireland manager Vera Pauw's explosive interview with Richie Sadlier

Ex-Ireland Manager Vera Pauw.

Vera Pauw says she was “destroyed” by comments made by Diane Caldwell in the wake of her departure as Ireland manager.

Caldwell launched a stinging attack on the former boss ahead of last September’s Nations League game against Northern Ireland when she claimed that progress was made “in spite of Vera being our coach.”

She listed several aspects of Pauw’s management where she felt things could have been better, including “preparation for games… physical preparation, opponent analysis, match tactics, in-game match tactics, changes, systems of play.”

And Caldwell added: “From my position as a pretty experienced player, I don’t think it was up to the standard that’s expected at international level.”

Pauw was speaking to Richie Sadlier on his podcast, Episode, when she responded for the first time to Caldwell’s remarks.

In a wide-ranging interview, she discussed the devastating effect of the NWSL report into alleged misconduct by coaches and how the re-airing of those allegations in an Athletic article ahead of the World Cup changed her relationship with the FAI and the Ireland players.

She gave an insight into the deterioration of that relationship towards the end of Ireland’s World Cup campaign in Australia and revealed that she was in “intense therapy.”

Here are some of the key takeaways from the podcast, which you can listen to here:

Pauw on Caldwell’s comments:

“You know what is most hurtful? Diane Caldwell is a player that… she wanted to leave Germany and I helped her. I got a phone call from a coach in the NWSL. Nobody could know, our video analyst was on a break, so I made a video clip with exactly the moments that this coach was looking for and she got a contract.”

Referencing Caldwell’s struggles for first-team football at Manchester United, Reading and FC Zurich, and how it led to calls for the veteran defender to be axed from her World Cup plans, she added: “Where in men’s football would a player that is given the opportunity, who has only played so few minutes, to go to the World Cup and be part of it?

“In our conversations, all the other technical staff members wanted to put her on the table as a discussion point. I have said, ‘Diane Caldwell is not a discussion point’. Niamh Fahey had a calf injury, she was still dealing with it. With us, she played all the games. I said, ‘if she falls out, who do you trust, someone with almost 100 caps? I would choose the one with experience. Diane Caldwell is not on the table’.

“So I protected her in all sense. She hardly played, she wasn’t on the table as a discussion point, and she does this to me. She made sure to enter the pitch at the end of the last game. She probably had her mind set that she would play her 100th cap at the World Cup or something.

“The fact is that staff members – plural – came to me and said, ‘If Diane is not playing, we need to consider bringing her because of her attitude’. I said, ‘Well, we will manage. I think she’s worth it, she deserves it’.

“Then coming out with this (last September’s comments)…we had planned every single detail. I was angry, I was destroyed. Probably everything that she wanted me to feel.”

Pauw on her successor Eileen Gleeson not punishing Caldwell for the comments:

“(In Gleeson’s position) I would have said, ‘You can go up to your room, pack your bag and leave the camp’.

“I’m disappointed because two weeks earlier we (Pauw and Gleeson) said, ‘Nothing comes between us. We love each other’. We spoke it out – ‘Nothing comes between us’. The first thing she says is, ‘Diane has the right to say things because everybody can have an open opinion and everybody can share their opinion’.”

Sadlier asked what Pauw was going through when she was referenced in the NWSL report, which also included behaviour by other coaches of a sexual nature, when she had only months earlier revealed that she had been raped in the 1980s.

“I didn’t know how to live anymore. And I felt I could do two things; go and find help or I kill myself,” she replied.

Sadlier followed up, saying: “That was a consideration?”

Pauw replied: “It was not a consideration, but they were the only options. I was not ready to kill myself, so I found help.”

Pauw on how the NWSL report affected her:

“I couldn’t sleep. It’s now a year and a half ago and it’s only the last two weeks that I could sleep. I could only sleep with sleeping pills. The impact, people do not realise what it is when they do something like that, the impact is so big on the person.”

Pauw concluded by predicting that she would never be employed again “in the western world” as she had been tarnished by the NWSL report.

Pauw on how she had been since her Ireland departure:

“Not so well. That is clear. I am in very intense therapy to find enjoyment of life again. How can this happen? It is because I am outlawed. And it goes back, and experts have helped me to figure out it, it really goes back to the rape 30 years ago.

“I think the key issue is narcissism in the women’s game is becoming so big that nobody cares about the coach, especially the female coach.”

She concluded: “The issue is, in the western world nobody will appoint me.

“Not because they believe them, in football people know me, but because they don’t want the issues around me. If they appoint me, they immediately get questions.

“And that is why I will never be appointed in the western world.”