What A Disaster!

As McGowan once said: “Life’s a bitch, then you die, black hell”. I’m writing this fortnight’s bulletin at midnight on Sunday, and I must leave in about three hours’ time for sunny Warsaw, the first stop in an epic adventure which will involve trips to Gdansk and Poznan to watch us slay the Spaniards and Italians. Or at least that was the plan.

Now, the eagerly-awaited adventure has taken on something of a funereal quality: the concept of us even inhabiting the same pitch as the two sides we saw earlier today is almost too frightening to contemplate, and the need for a spot of perspective and a dash of gallows humour has rarely been higher.
After waiting for the big day with slobbering anticipation for the last few months, the experience turned out to be unremittingly horrible. It will be understandable that at this precise point in time, I don’t have any huge appetite for writing about, still less watching re-runs of, the Croatia encounter. But it’s my job. And there is, as they say, plenty of football to be played. Roughly two months ago, I had effectively written off any prospect of Man City overhauling the Red terror atop the Premier League, as had every single other interested party, including Roberto Mancini himself. In other words, you can never rule out the unexpected, and it remains the case that Spain and Italy will underestimate us at their peril.
However, it must be pointed out that Man City had players of the calibre of Aguero, Silva, Toure et al with which to pull off the impossible, while we will be entering the fray with probably more or less the same starting line-up that died a slow, painful death in Poznan. This is no time to start pointing fingers and singling out particular individuals for blame, but it would be fair to say that very few of the players did their abilities justice on the night, and barring an immediate and profound transformation, things may be about to get very ugly indeed.
Foul Play first had an inkling that perhaps this was not going to be our day when the roof fell in in the third minute of play, Mandzukic’s cruelly looping header sailing in slow-motion into the corner as a despairing Shay, who looked considerably short of full match sharpness throughout and will look back on this match in years to come with about as much fondness as Packie Bonner recalls the Dutch disaster of 1994, threw himself belatedly across to get an unavailing hand to it. The only conceivable upside of such a start is the fact that it leaves you with 87 minutes to retrieve the situation, and in truth, the immediate response was pretty impressive, the lads hauling themselves level courtesy of a fine set-piece. Indeed, at about the half-hour mark, you would have said it was going quite nicely. A catastrophic ten-minute spell either side of half-time served as a grim reminder of just how brutally games at this level can turn against you, and the second half was an interminably long and deflating ordeal, the final whistle almost coming as a relief.
Our substitutions made just about enough of an impact to hint that the week ahead may not be completely devoid of hope, and some small measure of encouragement may be derived from the way the players’ heads never dropped. Indeed, a charitable interpretation of the match would contend that Ireland deserved a draw by virtue of the fact that Robbie Keane was denied a definite penalty and Nikola Jelavic’s second goal was plainly offside. But the crushing reality is that all our worst pre-tournament fears about this Ireland team’s wherewithal to survive in such elevated company have been emphatically realised, and Spain and Italy must be licking their lips right now.
Bring ‘em on. We didn’t come here to be eviscerated three times. Or did we? All will be revealed...