Ireland v Wales: Soccer and Croker. They said it couldn't be done. They said it wouldn't be done. They never said it would be this boring.
On Saturday Ireland gave up 90 minutes of extempore dullness none of which came close to stirring a drowsy Welsh side. This morning Steve Staunton's chaps lie in third spot behind Germany and the Czech Republic (same points; superior goal difference) although their qualifications to do so are about as convincing as those of a barnyard rooster wearing tux and tails.
Looming disaster salted Saturday with a different flavour than anything we had tasted in Croke Park before. The crowd, a record multitude for a soccer game in the city, might have turned ugly but touchingly they weren't really hankering for a hanging. People came to shake a little enjoyment out of a new era, to surf the tide of novelty that soccer in Croker might bring. They came to forgive and forget. It's just a pity they got such a flat day. Poignantly the quality of their mercy wasn't half as strained as the quality of the Irish passing.
The swapping of the anthems on the sacred sod wasn't the sort of grand theatre to bring tears to Irish eyes but, nevertheless, the home side were encouraged and cajoled until such time as they took the lead. After that all parties waned in their enthusiasm for the project. Noticing the decrepit nature of the Welsh challenge was unavoidable even if it was bad manners to comment on it. It just became a little embarrassing to be roaring anybody on against the Welsh.
Like watching a pacifist hamster paw curiously at a demised mouse in a pit made for cockfighting.
Still. Although they lacked imagination or pattern the Irish at least wanted to play. The Welsh, half of them at least, with Giggs the most luminous of the objectors, seemed profoundly disinclined towards any such exertion.
We Irish expressed our vaunted passion through manic enthusiasm for winning the ball. We expressed a lot of other things through apparent bafflement about what do to with it when it was won. Stephen Ireland, our latter day plague of the minnow classes, scored another winner for us, taking his goal with aplomb when he had a lot of work to do to take it at all.
In terms of a conclusion to the lingering debate over Steve Staunton's future this was perhaps the worst possible result. Death by delusion continues. Three points with a bad performance against a dire team just extends our licence for denial.
We have brought a new subtlety to the old concept of winning without playing well. After that if you want opinion you steps up to the jukebox, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
Steve Staunton crooning about nine points in the bag and a job well done? Players, a boyband, the Millionaire Delusionists, singing angrily against the media who after all gave away those five goals in Cyprus and that comical howler in San Marino. Or perhaps a sean-nós meander about dark tedium and chaos and the quality of the teams we've played.
On Saturday we stepped from the press box above the pitch where the Irish players were congratulating each other to the press room where Dunphy, Brady and Giles, the three great tenors of footie analysis, were belting out the hymn of dirty reality.
It was surreal and reminiscent of another great football moment, the aftermath of the Greek Philosophers, late goal against the German Philosophers in the famous Monty Python sketch. Vis-a-vis the empirical evidence of bad play Staunton is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, FAI chief executive John Delaney via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination and so on and so forth.
The rest of us are just enjoying the comedy. Tune in for the next episode, Slovakia! which takes place on Wednesday night in Croker.
