It seems self-evident at this stage that, barring miracles, Ireland are going to win the next World Cup. At least, we live in hope. A deeply unfortunate confluence of the Hot Press production schedule and the FIFA fixture schedule has served to ensure that I write this column ‘in the dark’ as it were, blissfully unaware of what twists of fate the Austria game has yielded, so I must at least legislate for the possibility that events may have taken a disastrous turn by the time you read this, leaving us already counting the days till 2016.

But right now — Monday lunchtime, the day before Austria’s visit — I feel a good deal less awful about the current state of the Ireland team than at any point since the middle of last June, when the roof fell in and the house burned down to such a harrowing extent that it almost ruined two weeks on the piss in Poland.
The grisly evidence that the team was disintegrating before our very eyes was emphatically confirmed in October, when Germany’s almost effortless 6-1 extermination of Trappy’s Army reduced the Aviva to funereal silence by about the 50-minute mark, with the Boys In Green a shapeless, demoralised rabble, somewhat flattered by the final scoreline.
It was, definitively, the lowest point of the old man’s tenure, arguably more depressing than the Cyprus catastrophe of ‘06 on Stan’s watch, and left us staring bleakly into an utterly hopeless future, wondering were we about to sink as low as Scotland, Wales and the North, and whether there was really any point in fulfilling our remaining World Cup qualifying fixtures.
Now, it’s almost like having a new team to excite over. OK, this is no time to get carried away: a goalless draw away to a less-than-stellar Sweden is hardly the sort of result that would reverberate around the world; we didn’t actually seriously test their keeper at any point; and Shay’s successor David Forde needed to be at his sharpest on a few occasions to stop the Swedes nicking all three points.
But there was vast cause for encouragement in the body language of the Irish players, the sudden outbreak of something resembling freedom and confidence on the ball, the unprecedented willingness to actually try passing combinations rather than lumping the ball towards outer space at every opportunity. Conservatism intruded a little as the second-half wore on, not unreasonably in the context of a high-stakes away fixture. But the overall sense, dare we say it, was of a corner being turned at last.
Sometimes events intrude and, through injuries, retirements and withdrawals, you end up with something approaching your best team by a sort of happy accident. Trap’s hand was forced by the retirements of Messrs. Given and Duff and the unavailability of several others, leading to a situation where the first team featured no less than NINE changes from the starting XI which had looked so old, tired and cumbersome in Gdansk and Poznan.
Only Robbie and John O’Shea survived the cull; for Trapattoni, notorious for his almost Pope Benedict-like aversion to change and modernisation, it was almost revolutionary. The net result was that we looked a million times fresher and more vibrant – and the team’s age profile suggests that we can expect them to get stronger rather than weaker with the passage of time.
Even more strangely, sifting through the minefield of Trap’s verbal observations and attempting to decipher them as best we can, there were times when he almost sounded like a changed man, eulogising the benefits of overlapping full-backs, and mentioning the word ‘creative’ without grimacing painfully. It sounded a bit like Kim Jong-Il singing the praises of the free market, or Bashar al-Assad exhorting all brother Syrians to come together and love one another.
This shocking outbreak of glasnost, added to Il Maestro’s recent tendency to actually bother showing his face at Premiership matches featuring Ireland players, would strengthen the theory that his near-firing last October may well have taken the form of a buck-up-your-ideas final warning from the FAI, an instruction to take off the shackles and allow the boys to spray it around a bit. Certainly, the team looked for all the world as if they were under new management.
An all-Premiership back four looked calm and composed, although we need to be under no illusions that either Seamus Coleman or Ciaran Clark are the finished article defensively. The latter, in particular, is prone to occasional costly slip-ups; he likes to take more than two seconds on the ball, and you can be sure Jack Charlton would have hated him. Coleman’s defensive positioning can be suspect from time to time, but this is more than offset by his adventurousness going forward, and we can expect both players to improve. Marc Wilson is very visibly a significant improvement on the hapless Stephen Ward, who had a disastrous Euros and may never fully recover. Forde grabbed his opportunity with both hands.
Further up the pitch, one good performance doesn’t negate the fact that Paul Green is entirely over-promoted by the current regime, and it is obscene that Wes Hoolahan remains apparently behind him in the pecking order, but the Leeds United man at least offered evidence that he can put in the proverbial shift when Glenn Whelan (still a far safer bet) isn’t available, while James McCarthy looked keen and inventive. Hoolahan’s eventual appearance from the bench at least gives the lie to suspicions that Trap had blacklisted the Norwich playmaker; James McClean offered menace and purpose; Shane Long put himself about tirelessly and with better finishing would have sealed the points.
Obviously, ‘would have’ isn’t going to be good enough to make the cut for Brazil next summer, and the failure to carve out clear-cut chances in Stockholm does nothing to dispel the suspicion that we will still find goals desperately hard to come by. All of which brings us to Austria. As you will be aware, Ireland’s competitive record under Trap is far less impressive at home than on the road: the best team we’ve actually beaten at the Aviva is probably Armenia, and this is an absolutely make-or-break occasion.
Aside altogether from the three points, which would be massive, Ireland need to prove that they can approach a home game as clear favourites, thrive on the pressure rather than wilting, dictate terms from the outset, and win clearly rather than by the skin of our teeth, as has tended to be the case even against the likes of Georgia and Macedonia.
At the time of writing, Robbie has just been ruled out. The obvious replacement is Wes Hoolahan, but that would entail playing 4-5-1 at home with Long ploughing a lone furrow up front. It could well work, but Trap is a 4-4-2 man to the bone. Of the more realistically plausible options, Foul Play’s vote would be – or have been – for Simon Cox to be restored to his actual position at centre-forward, where he has thrived in the past, offering him an opportunity to banish black memories of being landed horribly out of position in Poland last summer. Andy Keogh’s ability to defend from the front may be a valuable option off the bench if, say, we’re 1-0 up with fifteen minutes left.
Head on the block time: I am speculating that by the time you read this, we will have won by more than one goal, and will have taken a grip on second place, allowing the dream of a summertime in Rio to live on for a little longer. If not, it may be time to send out the SOS signal for Chris Hughton, if he’s interested. Fingers crossed...