Dutch Courage

I SUPPOSE when you re expecting a kick in the balls, you re happy to just get a slap in the face. Thus, with admirable drollness, did an acquaintance of Foul Play form his response to that riveting, slightly strange match in the Amsterdam Arena the weekend before last.

At the beginning of the night, Foul Play had sat down in front of the TV in disconcertingly relaxed mood, having decided beforehand that Ireland were in for the hiding of their lives, and that the best way to get through the night was to treat the fixture as the first in a series of friendlies, mere warm-ups for the serious business of the Euro 2004 qualifiers.
Ninety pulsating minutes later, all was changed, changed utterly. The only annoying thing about the final outcome was that it almost lent false hope to the entire 2002 enterprise, convincing everybody that Ireland are now in with a realistic shout of qualifying from Group 2, when you know and I know that they just won t, whatever happens.
Perhaps the result was not as startling an outcome as it seemed. The Dutch were without 60% of their normal team due to retirements, injuries, illnesses and other acts of God, and were so stuck for centre-backs that even the great Bert Konterman of Rangers got a game.
Konterman, you may recall, is the floppy-haired maestro who warmed up for the Ireland game by being pulverised at the hands, and feet, of Henrik Larsson at Celtic Park a fortnight ago (the most enjoyable football match, incidentally, that this writer has witnessed in the past decade).
The Plodding Dutchman was back to his, eh, best against Ireland, being caught well out of position for the first goal, allowing McAteer acres of room to get the shot in for the second, and then being hauled off in disgrace seconds later.
Is it worth mentioning that Liverpool put in a bid for this guy last year, were rejected by Feyenoord, and ended up signing Sami Hyypia instead? No, I thought not.
What made the Holland game such a weird viewing experience was that it offered up final confirmation that the Irish team, or at least six or seven of them, are good at football.
By now, they are probably even a better team than England, though this in itself is hardly any kind of a yardstick. But I digress...
Roy Keane we already knew about, and Mark Kinsella increasingly resembles a bargain-basement version of him, which is hardly a bad thing. Robbie Keane, who scored again for Inter Milan the other day, is turning out to be one of the most shit-hot young forwards in Europe.
We are up to our necks in great goalkeepers, Stephen Carr and Ian Harte are two of the most adroit full-backs in England, Quinn looks to have plenty left in the tank, and Mark Kennedy will no doubt be raring to go once he returns to the fold in suitably chastened manner. As for McAteer, if he can pull even one more performance like the Holland one out of the hat during the remainder of the qualifiers, it will be worth keeping him on board.
In fact, we are basically world-class in every position, except in central defence, where we are truly fucked.
Portugal are up next, Portugal with their eyecatchingly colourful kit, their sinisterly swarthy midfielders and their refreshingly offhand approach to the more cut-throat aspects of modern football.
They gave Estonia a good pummelling the other week, but as this is something that every self-respecting football nation has managed to do over the past five years, with the noble exception of Scotland, not too much should be read into it.
And yet I would be more sanguine about Ireland s chances in the group if I thought that McCarthy s main mission in life was the construction of a good team with the capability to score more goals and win matches, rather than repeated attempts to make journalists look stupid with needlessly whimsical team selections and petty point-scoring at press conferences.
He essentially got lucky with the selection of McAteer, inexplicably preferring him to an infinitely more capable player in Gary Kelly, and being rewarded with the Blackburn man s first decent performance for Ireland in four years, when no reading of the form or logic could have predicted it.
McCarthy s dredging of Steve Staunton from the bench for the final ten minutes in Amsterdam, too, signifies not only his depressing paucity of options once we get beyond the first-choice eleven, but an infuriating tendency to overestimate the opposition s capability to hurt Ireland.
A team with a decent amount of savoir faire would have kept their collective nerve and finished off Holland well before van Bronckhorst s equaliser, and I am not just referring to the chance missed by Kevin Kilbane at 2-1.
Yes, we may indeed experience more Amsterdam nights, but there are probably a few more slaps in the face awaiting us.