So, we made it, and the mass hysteria of two weeks ago didn’t prove to be horrifically premature. Euphoria was dampened slightly by the nature of the second-leg performance against Estonia, with Shay Given’s second howler in as many home games causing especial alarm. All in all, it was a display that would not exactly send shivers down Spanish, Dutch or German spines, and serves to strengthen the suspicion in some quarters that we are going to Euro 2012 purely to make up the numbers, add a dash of colour, craic and general paddywhackery to proceedings, provide Polish and Ukrainian pubs and off-licences with enough loot to retire on, and sing endless bars of ‘The Fields Of Athenry’ while studiously averting our eyes from events on the field, as Germany (or whoever) eviscerate us 5-0 in a cold-blooded, merciless extraction of revenge for all those billions their hard-working taxpayers pumped into infrastructure in Leitrim back in the days when the EU seemed like a decent idea.
It is always difficult to be objective about Ireland, at least if you happen to be Irish, but any steely-eyed, unsentimental examination of this team’s performances over the last three years would lead to the conclusion that we will not be winning this tournament, and will have an almighty task on our hands to make it past the first round. The first thing that strikes you about the 16-team line-up is how blood-curdlingly strong it is. Unlike the 32-team World Cup, where a few duds from such far-flung outposts as Honduras and North Korea will always gatecrash the party, the Euros is a truly elite affair with a stunningly high overall standard of football, a standard Ireland have only intermittently attained (or, if we’re honest, haven’t attained at all) in the course of our progress to the Finals. The flipside, of course, is that we are very hard to beat, having survived trips to Italy, France and Russia in the last couple of years with our heads held high, and the unique dynamic of tournament football might well suit Trap’s Ireland down to the ground.
The fear, obviously, is that we will simply get shown up as hopelessly inadequate by rampaging hordes of vastly superior footballers. The two qualifying games against Russia, in particular, contained much that was disturbing. You will recall that they raced into a 3-0 lead at Lansdowne before we mounted a mildly stirring comeback to render the final scoreline vaguely respectable, and then massacred us once more in Moscow on an evening when Richard Dunne, acting almost as a one-man Iron Curtain, somehow stemmed the tide and, with the aid of some profligate Russian finishing, enabled us to escape with an almost obscene point (as it turns out, we could have lost that one 5-0 and still would have made the play-offs).
We may need to steel ourselves for much more of this kind of thing next summer, nerve-jangling occasions wherein the foreigners lay siege to Shay’s goal for vast stretches of the 90 minutes and an entire nation offers up prayers to St Anthony to spare us the guillotine. Though there are months to go before the big kick-off, the Finals draw takes place in a few days’ time, and it might be timely at this stage to take a look at the enemies who lie in wait for us, with a view to figuring out who we wouldn’t mind facing and who we’d prefer to avoid at all costs.
In terms of the four seeded nations, it isn’t difficult to conclude that we would be infinitely safer taking on either of the two host nations (Poland or Ukraine) than the other pair (Spain and Holland). Both host nations bring remarkably undistinguished recent form with them, the consistent pattern of recent results indicating that neither side can be regarded as in any way superior to Ireland, and even home advantage (and the prospect of searing summertime heat) shouldn’t unduly faze an Irish side which has become fairly adept at negotiating away fixtures since the ascension of St Giovanni to the hot-seat.
By contrast, the notion of facing Spain is simply too scary to contemplate. I was in the Nou Camp last weekend to behold Barcelona’s 4-0 evisceration of Zaragoza, a matter of days after the Boys in Green had huffed and puffed their way to a 1-1 draw with the Estonians, and it would be reasonable to state that there was a contrast of styles between the two spectacles. This was particularly pronounced on the pitch, where the silky Catalan conjurors appeared perfectly comfortable giving and receiving passes without any apparent compulsion to hoof it up the pitch in the hope that big Lionel got his head on the end of something. Gerard Pique’s headed opening goal from a set-piece did have a whiff of Route One about it, but the general flavour of the occasion couldn’t have been further removed from the stuff we see at the Aviva, and did nothing to alleviate the feeling that we would do very well to stay away from these lads and hope they come a cropper against somebody else.
Much of the same applies to the Dutch, though I witnessed long passages of their recent 3-0 capitulation at the hands of Germany, with utterly clinical finishing from Herrs. Muller, Ozil and Klose surely sending a chill through the rest of the continent, leaving no doubt that they are by far the biggest threat to Spain’s ambitions of winning an unprecedented third major international tournament in a row. The nightmare scenario is that we draw both of them in round one. Among the second-seeded nations (Germany, Italy, England and Russia), my opponents of choice would be the Italians, especially if we were to encounter them in the first match. They have a time-honoured tradition of starting major tournaments quite slowly, would probably approach an opening fixture against Trap’s troops with the mindset that a point would be acceptable (in stark contrast to Germany’s crush-kill-destroy-exterminate approach) and looked pretty piss-poor in the last World Cup. They’ve embarked on a spring-cleaning process since then and introduced a few new faces, but I would see no undue cause for us to panic. Russia, for reasons that became abundantly clear over the 180 minutes they played us off the park in Dublin and Moscow, would be best avoided.
Opinion is sharply divided over whether it is desirable for us to come up against England. My initial gut reaction is ‘no thanks’, based on a couple of factors: firstly, that the overall quality of their personnel is indisputably superior to our own. Secondly, that we have an unblemished record against them in the modern age (three draws and two wins: I’m including the aborted 1995 contest at Lansdowne when we led 1-0 and were absolutely slaughtering them before Combat 18’s Nazi takeover of the stadium brought an abrupt halt to proceedings) and I’d kind of like to keep it that way. Certainly, the thought of them beating us next summer would do much to ruin the entire experience.
On deeper reflection, however, there may be grounds for thinking that this is a contest to be relished rather than feared. England routinely breeze through the qualifying stages of major tournaments before invariably stuttering and stumbling on the big stage, descending into acrimonious disarray as the rabid hounds of Fleet Street howl for their heads at the first sign of a misplaced pass. Manager Fabio Capello (whom observant readers may have noticed bears an alarming physical resemblance to Hot Press generalissimo Niall Stokes) has not yet conveyed the impression of being completely in control of events, bulldog captain John Terry is already showing distinct signs of wear and tear, Trap would definitely relish the grandmasters’ chess-match aspect of the experience against his old adversary, and the nation would surely be roused into a frenzy dwarfing that of any match the team has participated in since the summer of 1990. There is something about the cut of Robbie Keane and Richard Dunne’s jibs that leaves one in absolutely no doubt that a battle with England would be the match of their lives, and all in all it may well be a risk worth taking, especially if the alternative is a joust with Russia or, heaven forbid, the Germans.
This leaves us facing any one of Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Sweden as third seeds. Here we reach the point where I cannot reasonably claim to have seen enough of the teams’ recent displays to make a definitive pronouncement about who I’d prefer to face, but I’ll admit that on the night we qualified, with a total lack of competitive tension attaching itself to events at the Aviva and several screens in front of me in my workplace streaming action from across the continent, I allowed my attention to wander to the Portugal-Bosnia play-off second leg, where the rampant Portuguese ran riot en route to a preposterously stylish 6-2 win, which would not leave me with any great eagerness to watch Ireland facing them any time soon.
The Greeks, with all due respect, would stand out as the most desirable of the options available to us. They won the entire thing back in 2004 with a sequence of grim-faced, aesthetically unpleasant 1-0 wins, in a smash-and-grab raid which Trap has more than once alluded to as his template for this Ireland team, but they haven’t looked any great shakes at major finals since. Croatia are, one suspects, a little more well-serviced with flair and invention in the attacking department than our good selves, but the relatively pedestrian Swedes wouldn’t strike terror into anybody, and though entitled to respect on the basis of their general consistency, shouldn’t hold any great fears for the Green Army.
So, the doomsday scenario would see us face off against Germany, Spain and Portugal. An altogether more fortuitous roll of the dice might leave us licking our lips at the prospect of battles with Poland, Greece and Italy. There is no way we are going to get an ‘easy’ draw one way or the other, at this elevated stage of competition. The big guns are out in force, and we are among them, entirely on merit, as a result of our heroics in slaying the might of...well, Slovakia, Macedonia, Andorra, Armenia, Estonia. But let us not dwell too deeply on all the things that might go wrong. We’re here, and we mean business. Bring it all on.