They'll remember this one as one of those night's they got out of jail by the skin of their teeth and as they headed for the team bus outside the stadium in Valletta last night most of the players still looked a little shaken by a combination of the conditions and the closeness of the result.

Obviously struggling more than most was central defender Gary Breen who had had more than his fair share of difficulties at the back. If it had been clear that everybody had been struggling with the task of hanging on through the second period then the Coventry City player's problems were more acute than most for he admitted afterwards that going back out after the break had, on reflection, been a very poor call indeed.

"I should have come off then, alright, because my groin was giving me a lot of trouble. But you want to keep playing, to stay on out there and in the end I'm just grateful that we've gotten away with the win."

The 25 year-old remained a little bewildered as to how it all fell apart so badly for a spell in the second half "but I think it was just a combination of things. The two earlier games, the fact that we were tired and then the heat and the humidity.

"Still, it was disappointing that we couldn't get the third goal which would have killed them off. We let them back into it and from that point on they caused us problems that really we should not have let them cause us."

For Breen's defensive partner, Kenny Cunningham, the result, as well as the way it was achieved, provided vindication for manager Mick McCarthy's decision to rest some his players in Zagreb at the weekend.

"I think in hindsight it was probably a good decision by Mick to rotate the squad in the Croatian game because the lads who played a third game on the spin out there tonight tended to be the ones who were really dead on their feet.

"The conditions were really tough and at the end of the day we haven't played as well as we should have but the result is the important thing and that's gone our way so we won't be complaining too much."

The reason for that, of course, is Staunton's second-half winner which was, smiled Niall Quinn "just the piece of magic that we needed".

For Kevin Kilbane, as for most of his team-mates, the important thing now is that the team are going into the last game in a reasonably strong position to qualify for the finals. "The Macedonia game is going to be the one now and I think it can be a very different story for us," said the West Brom winger. "The climate will be something that we're more used to I think, and so we should be able to go there and impose our game on them."

Breen remained confident, insisting that the supporters "don't judge us on that performance" but the players who have been to Macedonia before and learned to lament the experience conceded that a performance like last night's could lead to history repeating itself in Skopje. "I think this game was a bit of a one off," said Alan Kelly, "because, coming so soon after the Croatia game there were a lot of players in the second half who just didn't have a lot left. We all know what could happen in Macedonia, though, and we know that if we play like we did in the second half tonight then we could end up with the 3-2 scoreline again. I just hope the mistakes of that night aren't repeated this time around."

Predictably, he's not the only one.