In so many ways, last Thursday evening was an aberration. That is not what it felt like at the time but, by their nature, feelings can be flighty.
A team for which, let’s face it, there was no love was suddenly adored. It was like one of those big wet kisses at the end of a wedding, long after the band stops. In that moment, you meant it with all your heart but you wouldn’t put that feeling in writing.
On Sunday evening, our feelings for this Ireland team returned to room temperature. They have stumbled through this qualifying campaign, utterly unconvincing in four matches against Poland and Scotland, their peers in this group. What they achieved in two matches against Germany was extraordinary; what they did against Georgia was more than Scotland could manage. On those results, the campaign hinged.
The feverish group-hug that greeted the arrival of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane as the management pair at the beginning of this qualifying campaign has been replaced by a kind of detached scepticism. We couldn’t believe our luck when we rubbed the lamp and these two genies jumped out. How many of our wishes have been granted? It may seem niggardly to conduct an audit on something like that but the preliminary figures are not great.
The team lacks identity. We don’t know what they are trying to be; they don’t know either. Identity has nothing to do with talent. It is the outcome of clarity, structure, leadership and spirit. Spirit is an organic element that flourishes in the right environment; the other elements must come directly from the management.
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So, what have they given us? A certain amount of confusion and a kind of benign chaos. Team selection has been in constant flux. On eight occasions in the qualifying campaign, Ireland have made at least three changes to the starting 11. Injury will always be a factor but Ireland’s appalling disciplinary record has been a major contributor to that instability too.
Twenty four yellow cards and one red were issued to Irish players, a new record for any Ireland team in any qualifying campaign. The garbage-time bookings for Jonathan Walters and John O’Shea on Sunday night were witless and wounding to Ireland’s chances in the play-off but they were consistent with a team whose endemic indiscipline has not been rooted out. That is a management failure.
But if everyone is available, do they know their best 11? Do they know which system of play optimises the resources at their disposal? There is no evidence to suggest they do. In those circumstances, how can a team’s identity be formed?
The irony of last Thursday night’s triumph was that it resembled the best days of Giovanni Trappatoni’s unloved reign. Remember what Trappatoni brought: stability, structure and a kind of tactical totalitarianism. We might not have liked how the team was set up but Trapp was absolutely certain about what he wanted and it was up to us to reach an accommodation with it; he wasn’t going to bend.
Under Trapp most of our best performances were away from home because in his system, we were better without the ball. We were compact and hard to break down. In one sequence of eight matches between May and October 2011 Ireland didn’t concede a goal; Italy, Scotland, Croatia and Russia were among the teams kept at bay.
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Under Trapp we often played like the away team at Lansdowne Road and that was the case again last Thursday night: desperate clearances, bodies huddled together in the last ditch, playing in spasms on the counterattack. Nobody made the comparison with Trapp after the Germany match because it would have been a gross offense against the mood of national rejoicing but the resemblance was undeniable. Admittedly, Trapp couldn’t generate a performance like that on the last occasion Germany visited Dublin but by then he had lost the dressing room, wholeheartedly.
For a long time our fall-back identity as an international team was that we were more than the sum of our parts. We cannot make that claim now. Look at Northern Ireland: the 11 that started against Greece last Thursday night contained three Premier League regulars; the Republic’s starting 11 in Warsaw contained seven and another on the bench, Shane Long, who has a long-established Premier League pedigree.
Northern Ireland topped their group with a squad of journeymen, galvanised by the inspirational management of Michael O’Neill and playing with absolute clarity. They know exactly what they are trying to do and how they are trying to do it.
The Republic of Ireland has a manager who is vivaciously charismatic and an assistant who is an iconic figure in the history of Irish football. And the team has no identity.