HARD times. Ireland go into action in Bucharest tonight in a World Cup qualifying game which everybody knows they need to win but nobody thinks they can. Having struggled and failed against a flawed Macedonian team earlier this month, little is expected when they face a formidable Romanian side tonight.
Hard times. When last Ireland. played Romania the venue was Genoa, the competition was the World Cup finals, and the credit unions of Ireland had been pillaged and plundered as the greatest fans in the world made pilgrimage. Ireland won on penalties. That was seven years ago. Mick McCarthy was still a player. This week there are fewer than 2,000 Irish fans in Bucharest.
Hard times. They don't scatter rosebuds at Mick McCarthy's feet any more.
Yesterday afternoon, for instance, tired and sweating after a training session with his team he was forced to fend off massed media ranks in the lobby of the team hotel. The best the FAI could offer by way of a venue was the bar on the second floor. The best the media could offer by way of hard questions was an inquiry as to whether or not this was the end of the road.
Hard times. Mick McCarthy declined yesterday to name his team for tonight's game. "I want to keep them on their toes," he said.
His reasoning is sound but does little to disguise the fact that in terms of choice he has a bare bones bunch to pick from, a mixture of the aged and the inexperienced with perhaps three players in their prime thrown in. "What I really want from this team is for them to show some passion again," said Mick McCarthy.
Hard times. Two of Mick McCarthy's first choice players are suspended. The nation's leading goal scorer has retired. Paul McGrath is in (voluntary?) exile in some sort of limbo. The reserve centre half couldn't be contacted because it was his weekend off. The other reserve centre half is so young they won't let him play with, the other players' razors.
In the dusty old Steaua stadium, on a bumpy pitch made hard as concrete by a spell of extraordinarily hot weather, McCarthy's team face their toughest test of a campaign which has begun to look more like a year's hard labour than a year of football games. They have failed less taxing examinations recently and their chances against a team who have payed five, won five and conceded zero in the competition are viewed as slim. Very, slim.
Ireland's best hope in Group Eight of the World Cup qualifying competition, having dropped points to Iceland and Macedonia, is to finish second and start a play off with another second placed team for the right to advance to the finals in France next year. Even securing second place looks likely to be a struggle.
In these parts a while back, in one long, crazed orgy, Vlad is said to have impaled 20,000 Turks on stakes and left them to die, thus becoming known (with justification, if not imagination) as Vlad the Impaler.
Hollywood being Hollywood, the movies chose to caricature him as Dracula on the basis that he once drank a cup of blood (what does a man have to do to get his trade mark on celluloid?) and he is commemorated today by a sign marking his decayed temporary lodgings in a corner of Bucharest and by the well advertised, full contact, all nude, adult entertainment cabaret show, Dracula's Girls.
Tonight's full contact entertainment between Mick McCarthy's fledgling side and Romania's new Vlads starts at 6 p.m. Irish time. Anything other than a heavy defeat for the visitors will mark a reprieve from what seems like an eternity of hard times.