One by one the Irish players file out of their dressing-room in the battered City stadium in Skopje and on to the waiting team bus.

Almost an hour has passed since Goran Stavreski's injury time goal consigned them to the play-offs and few of Mick McCarthy's men look like they've started to come to terms with what has transpired.

Now, as a few sneering soldiers look on, Kenny Cunningham tries to piece together exactly how it was that it came to pass. The defender's sense of bewilderment is obvious from the moment he opens his mouth to answer the first of the journalists' questions.

He attempts to pinpoint where the Irish gameplan started to unravel. It's an impossible task, which few of his team-mates seem anxious to share, and after a while his exasperations shows through.

"It's unbelieveable really," he sighs "this place just seems to be a graveyard for us."

The Dubliner admits that there were problems throughout the second half but that, as in Croatia, the team almost survived to get the result intended. Just like Zagreb, though, things didn't quite go to plan, particularly when it came to the last minute defending.

"I don't really know what happened for the goal," he says. "At the start of the game you delegate people to man mark but at that stage you've had substitutions and it's always a bit harder to figure out who is picking up particular players.

"To be honest I didn't realise that we were in injury time. I reckoned there was a few minutes left but they clearly knew that it was their last attack because they flooded the area and slung the ball in there.

"You've got to say that if we got anything on that corner we'd won the game and were on our way but it seems that time and again teams get these sort of goals against us, so now we've got to lift ourselves all over again for the play-offs."

At half-time the 28-year-old believed that things were going well enough for the team to secure the win that would have seen them through. "But we would have been disappointed with the way we played in the second half. At the break Mick just told us to try to take it down and play it around more, try to hold on to possession.

"Instead, we tried to launch it big too much and more often than not it came back at us very quickly. They started to put us under a good bit more pressure and we ended up defending more deeply than we would have intended to. Still, for all the problems, we thought we'd done enough to hold on for the win at the end.

If Cunningham allowed that there was a collective disappointment with the performance in the second period at least one man was excused the burden of blame. "I feel particularly sorry for Alan Kelly. He pulled off a couple of breathtaking saves, really did his share, but there was nothing he could have done about the header, it was just one of those things.

"When it comes down to it, though, he has the consolation of knowing that the saves that he did make kept us in the competition. It may not seem like much now but I'm sure when we go back home, in a week or so, we'll be happy just to still be in with a shout."

All the more so given that the Croatians have had their interest in the competition prematurely ended. That, said Cunningham, stands in its own right as a major achievement and one that shouldn't be overlooked too quickly amid the disappointment felt immediately after Saturday's game.

"It was a very tough group and I think that overall we've done well. I'm not making excuses because we all know that at this level you have to be focused and work hard for the entire 90 minutes.

"But we knew from the match in Dublin, when the Macedonians did enough in the last 20 minutes to show that they were capable of causing us problems. In the end they caused us one or two tonight all right and all it took was them taking one of those chances to leave us in the play-offs.

"To lose out like that, though, it's still very hard."