Crunch Time For Trap's Men

WHEW. We’re still in one piece. Pop the champagne corks and light your cigars. Ten incredibly laborious displays in a row have not only brought us to the brink of the Promised Land; the staggeringly unconvincing manner of their achievement may also have served to ensure that we slip under the radar and will be in a perfect position to ambush Spain, Italy and Germany, or whichever three European superpowers have the misfortune to take us on next summer. Certainly, there will be nobody in their right mind talking Ireland up as an emerging force or suggesting that we’re there to do anything other than make up the numbers. The managers of the opposing nations will be deeply, profoundly reassured when they sit down to watch the DVDs of Ireland in action, safe in the surefire knowledge that there is no element of surprise to this team, no secret weapon, nothing more than meets the eye, and certainly no Plan B if things start to go wrong: just solid endeavour, plain hard graft, endless honesty of effort and a willingness to put bodies on the line.

There is a growing school of thought that Ireland might be horribly embarrassed in the event that we actually make it to next summer’s Euro festivities, but surely it’s a risk worth taking, when the alternative is sitting there and feeling horribly left out of summer’s football showcase for the fifth time in a row. The truth is that we’ve been playing profoundly ugly football since the moment Mick McCarthy was hounded out of office by Roy Keane’s army of adoring cheerleaders in late 2002, and for most of that time, it’s been a losing formula as well as an unattractive one. The only significant change in the last three years is that we’ve become increasingly skilled at finding ways not to lose. Anybody who seriously attempts to argue that they wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to be in this position when Trap took over deserves nothing but scorn.
As was the case in 1990, an intriguing schism is now beginning to emerge between those who feel that the end justifies the means and those who adhere to a purist’s vision of what the Beautiful Game should be about. The harsh truth is that Trapattoni’s Ireland are far duller to watch than Jack Charlton’s crew ever were, even on their off-days. But the point is that the latter crew managed to send an entire nation into delirious raptures with two turgid 0-0 draws, two equally turgid 1-1 draws and a 1-0 defeat on what would subsequently pass into legend as the greatest summer in their history. Even those of us who despair at Ireland’s creative shortcomings, and who would love to see a little more fluency in possession, probably won’t be complaining too loudly if a broadly similar performance carries us to the last eight or further.
I didn’t see any of Greece’s qualifying matches for Euro 2004, but their results were not gigantically impressive on paper (even winning 1-0 in Spain was nothing like the feat it would be now), and upon reaching the tournament, they limped through the first round without exactly setting the world on fire. Three grim-faced, dreary 1-0 wins later, they had conquered the continent. There are a few obvious parallels with ourselves. The team contained nobody who could by any stretch of the imagination be described as a star player, and was overseen by an elderly manager with innumerable decades under his belt on the European scene and a profound inclination towards safety-first, cautious football. They found goals quite difficult to come by, scoring a relatively meagre 15 in the entire 14-game campaign. But they repeatedly proved that as long as you give nothing away, you only need one to win. I might remind the doom-mongers and professional whingers that Henrik Mkhitaryan’s strike last week was the first goal Ireland have conceded in in nine games, and that we had the luxury of being 2-0 ahead at the time in a game which everyone had identified as a potentially nerve-shredding experience. The counter-argument is that your luck is bound to run out eventually (if one believes in the fallacious, non-existent ‘law of averages’), and that Russia ‘could have put four or five past us’ in Moscow. But surely, the salient point is that they didn’t. Aston Villa’s 4-1 weekend defeat at Manchester City offered up disturbing evidence of what can happen if Shay Given and Richard Dunne don’t bring their A-game to the party against first-rate opposition, and it’s entirely plausible that we might be eviscerated next summer by three vastly superior teams, but it’s more likely that we’ll find a way to hang in there against whoever we come up against.
Before I get too carried away (you saw what a catastrophic effect this had on our rugby warriors last week), it may be prudent to point out the inconvenient truth that we haven’t actually qualified yet, that almighty Estonia still stand between us and a place at the Euro party, and that they will almost certainly have been every bit as delighted as we were to see Ireland’s name pulled out of the hat directly after theirs. We are surely entitled to be considered strong-ish favorites on the basis of two defeats in our last 22 competitive matches, but in all that time, the only occasions we’ve won by more than a single goal have been against Andorra (twice) and in Macedonia. This is unlikely to be straightforward.
I’m also not entirely convinced that playing the first leg away from home confers all that great an advantage. Ideally, we will start the game in Tallinn with the same steely-eyed determination already demonstrated in the opening stages of our excursions to Skopje, Zilina and Andorra - indeed, I fully expect to see us establish an early lead. What we do with it thereafter is the worrying part. All known evidence indicates that a 1-0 lead away from home in the context of a two-legged play-off would be taken by Trap as a cue to retreat into a shell of sophisticated negativity, rather than an invitation to go out and seek the goals that would put the tie to bed before we being them back to Dublin. Obviously, even a 1-1 draw would be a perfectly acceptable outcome with the home leg still to come, and any sort of victory would be an enormous boost. But the Aviva can become engulfed on these occasions by a nervy atmosphere which conveys itself to the players. The spectre of Ireland spending the second leg sitting on a tenuous lead and hanging on for dear life in front of a home crowd is inherently frightening, verging on terrifying if we’ve fucked up the first leg and are in the position of having to chase the game.
I must also concede at this point that apart from watching a few minutes of their recent successful sojourn to the lovely surrounds of Windsor Park, I haven’t seen Estonia play at any point in the last ten years. Obviously they are in the play-offs on merit, and any side which has pulled off away wins in Belfast, Serbia and Slovenia must be accorded respect. There are, however, a few recent results in there which indicate that they are capable of plumbing depths to which Trap’s Ireland would simply never sink. They went down 2-0 in the Faroe Islands a few months ago, and going back a little further, they also managed to lose 7-0 in Bosnia. Our old mate Brian Kerr (currently living the dream as manager of the Faroes) believes that the Estonians are profoundly vulnerable to anybody who attacks them with pace going forward. And given how disgracefully Kerr was treated by John Delaney at the tail-end of 2005 when he (Delaney) got it into his head that we needed but didn’t have a ‘world-class’ manager (the man in question turned out to be his mate Steve Staunton), it might at least be courteous of the FAI to give Kerr a bell and enlist his expertise in the weeks to come, as the nation holds its breath and prepares to put to rights the great injustice of 1988, when only a horrendously illegal and blatantly offside goal from Holland’s Wim Kieft prevented us from becoming the champions of Europe. It’s been a long wait, but we can put this to rights, and we will.
This is no time to lose faith and start banging on bitterly about Seamus Coleman, James McCarthy and Andy Reid. We may not have any superstars, but we actually have a far greater pool of reasonably capable B-list players at Championship clubs than has been the case in several years. It’s time to straighten our shoulders, stand tall and keep faith in the qualities which have got us to this point. Estonia, here we come.