A STRANGE, distracting place to come searching for World Cup points. Yet there are symmetries. A team in transition coming to a city in transition. A team at the lowest point in their recent football history playing the side they defeated on penalties at the high point of their greatest era.

Ireland and Romania. Who couldn't but be spooked by the past?

The odd helter-skelter history of Romania is reflected in the face of its capital city. Bucharest is a lovely rag-bag of architectural styles and influences. For instance, the Inter Continental Hotel, where the Irish team are cosseted, stands like an overgrown CD holder at one end of the splendidly-elegant Nicolae Balcescu Boulevard.

The roof of the Inter Continental allows a vista of the entire city. An Irish tricolour flies high above a roof somewhere around the Romanian ministry of the interior. In the distance lies the greatest, most-bloated relic of the Ceausescu period, the Casa Republicii, an attempt by the humble, self-styled "most beloved son of the people, outstanding revolutionary militant, hero among the nation's heroes, architect of modern socialist Rumania" to build the biggest building in the world regardless of its impact on the broad, almost Parisian boulevards and avenues around it.

Two cranes and an army of builders still tend to the scars left behind by the events of December 1989 which led to the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife "academician Elena Ceausescu, luminous example of revolutionary and politician, of a remarkable scientist of world repute."

The Ceausescus finally met their end sandwiched between a rain of lead and a barracks wall in Tirgoviste on Christmas Day 1989. Not many months afterwards, Packie Bonner's gloved hands stopped Daniel Timofte's penalty kick and Romania exited the 1990 World Cup.

We know the delirium to which that moment played at home. In Romania, young and new to freedom, the sight of Packie buried beneath a soppy mountain of Irish footballers doesn't evoke such cheery memories.

On the 21st floor of the Inter Continental on Monday night in a corner of the Luna bar, (avocation rejected as too gaudy by 112 when looking at ideas for their Popmart set) two heroes among the nation's heroes, Packie Bonner and Mick McCarthy, sat on their triangular-shaped, red leatherette low-backed swivel seats and talked for the longest while.

For everyone who caught a glance of them nattering high above the Bucharest skyline, memories of that day in Genoa sprang to mind. No Irish football fan can put the words Bonner, McCarthy and Rumania into a sentence without smiling fondly. The most beloved sons of the people were looking forwards not backwards, however.

"We never mentioned all that," said Mick McCarthy yesterday. "We talked about the Romanian team and then, being footballers, we got to talking about our own players and if we were Premiership managers which of them we would sign up first. A few differences of opinion. Packie and me would talk about footballers for ever. We never really talked about Italy."

Therein lies the problem. The ghosts of the good times haunt McCarthy, Bonner and co as surely as the ghosts of more profound bad times still haunt Bucharest.

The city's transition period is fuelled with bright optimism, however. The football team, meanwhile, must suffer the impatient pessimism of their fans, just 1,500 of whom have come here to see a fixture which has long stood out as the pivotal away game of the World Cup qualifying series.

Nobody expects Ireland to win this evening. A point would be a pub-filling triumph against a home side which has a flawless record through five group games so far.

Inside the Inter Continental hotel, the pressure is as obvious as the decor. A thumping defeat will increase the volume of criticism aimed at the management by the disgruntled proletariat of the terraces who have no time for anything but good times.

McCarthy and Bonner, the luminous academicians of the transition era, place their faith in a rag-bag of young and old players and hope that passion and pride carry them through tonight. The stakes are high. McCarthy has commented often on this trip about the downside of his job being the seeping away of the affection in which he has always been held by the Irish soccer public.

In the bad old days for Romania when Ceausescu was building his Casa Republicii, he sought to install in it a room so big that when filled with the exhaled breath of the sardined thousands within it, a cloud would form beneath the ceiling. In Jack Charlton's Republic, the unexpected scale of the achievements produced a similar natural phenomenon out of hot air. The booze-breathed cloud left hanging from the great days when the big room was full still tends to obscure the realities of a threadbare squad struggling through this tough transition period.

Ireland are in a rough scrap for second place. Great and misplaced expectations are a huge burden for the sons of the glorious revolution. Mick, Packie and the boys have furrowed brows this week.

Genoa and all that dizziness seems a long time ago now.