France, then. At first, the play-off draw provoked strange strangled noises — as well as many loud exclamations of ‘FUCK’ ‘BOLLOCKS’ and other such eloquent insights — in the HP office. It was a kick in the nethers, no two ways about it. But fuck it, let’s face the music and dance.

The initial feeling of raw terror has now been replaced by a grim, resolute determination to roll up our sleeves and manfully get on with the job (one of the chief symptoms of the psychosis inherent in being a football fan is the delusion that ‘approaching the game in a positive frame of mind’ will make a difference, as if we have any control at all over events as they unfold on the field).
The task looms like an appointment for invasive brain surgery — undeniably terrifying, but you realise it simply has to be done in order that your life may be prolonged and your dreams may be realised. The Ireland squad, it’s safe to assume, feel the same way.
Apart from the near-certainty of a few favourable refereeing decisions over the course of the 180 minutes, France can also call on a squad which is indisputably superior to ours on both an individual and collective level.
With the exception of Shay Given, it can be considered highly doubtful that any of our lads would be even considered for a place in the French starting line-up (assuming, of course, that they were French, which they’re not). At a stretch, Messrs O’Shea, Dunne and Keane would possibly be good enough to make their bench.
But if we apply Sun Tzu’s ‘what is my enemy thinking?’ logic for a minute, it’s also reasonable to speculate that the French will not have been overly delighted to get paired with us, a fact confirmed by the look on Raymond Domenech’s face after the draw was made.
For all our very visible limitations, we’re a doughty and well-organised unit with a coherent (if dull) tactical method and a clearly excellent team spirit. By contrast, the suspicion lingers that under Domenech’s less-than-astute guidance, France have become basically a bunch of under-achieving, cowardly, cheese-eating surrender monkeys whose formidable talent is chronically undermined by a flaky mental attitude and general lack of steel balls — in Ed Helms’ immortal phrase, ‘truffle-shaving, fondue-dipping bidet slurpers’.
Indeed, their nation’s history (most notably during the Second World War) indicates that they are notoriously quick to surrender in military confrontations. Signor Trapattoni, an avid student of military history, will no doubt have taken note of this, and will be plotting their downfall even as we speak.
Before the draw, Trap appeared to attach great weight to the importance of playing the first leg away from home, but John Giles has made the excellent point that this cuts both ways, and it may well be that having the first leg at Croker works in our favour. Even a goalless draw would not be the end of the world, since the team is set up in such a way that you’d always fancy us to nick the odd goal away from home on the counter-attack.
The Gallic tradition of industrial unrest also suggests that they’ll be less than enthusiastic about the prospect of actually having to work for 180 minutes, and we’re the sort of team that force our opponents to put in the hard graft.
I would be lying through my disintegrating, increasingly MacGowan-esque teeth if I told you that I genuinely expect us to beat France over two legs — and, as mentioned, I have grave reservations about the good faith of whatever referee FIFA assigns to adjudicate the encounter — but I don’t think we’ll be brutally murdered, and I think the French are as capable of malfunctioning as they are of firing on all cylinders.
We certainly won’t perish through any lack of dedication, commitment or enthusiasm, though our (relative) lack of actual footballing talent may pose something of a problem.
Elsewhere, kudos to Cork hurling ‘keeper Donal Og Cusack, whose new autobiography appears, from all the extracts, to be a first-rate page-turner. Not just for his courage in publicly ‘coming out’ as gay — though three cheers to him for doing so — but also for his highly amusing dismissal of Kilkenny as ‘Stepford Wives’ and his less-than-reverential attitude to Cork County Board supremo Frank Murphy (‘One thing that seriously pissed me off about Frank was the abuse he would roar at players... I’d sit there thinking ‘Who the fuck does this guy think he is?’)
As you might expect, the innate Corkish tendency to excessive self-regard and patting one’s own back is well in evidence throughout. Cusack’s lacerating deconstruction of Kilkenny, it’s fair to say, is almost certainly motivated to some extent by the green-eyed monster they call Envy. He goes well overboard when he attacks the Cats for not going on strike every few months in solidarity with the Rebel squad, who often seem to view themselves as a 21st-century equivalent of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
The statement ‘We struggled and Kilkenny left us to walk our path alone’ best conveys the ‘aren’t we noble and heroic’ flavour of these musings, and there’s also a thinly-veiled swipe at Henry Shefflin for a Lucozade advertising deal which is surely no-one’s business apart from Shefflin and Lucozade.
But whatever one’s personal feelings about the Cork brand and the whiff of ‘Wir sind die Ubermenschen’ that tends to accompany it, there’s no denying that Cusack’s tome is (by the standards of the genre) an absolute rip-snorter, one of those rare sporting autobiographies where the star’s searing honesty and the ghostwriter’s literary flair combine to produce a rattling good read. GAA pride, indeed. Doubtcha boy, as they say down there.