EMMET MALONErecalls how Ireland have in the past struggled against teams of amateurs and part-timers

TINY MOUNTAINOUS footballing states: let’s face it . . . the Irish just don’t like it up ’em.

But the fear of your team falling at great heights is neither irrational nor exclusive to these parts.

Giovanni Trapattoni recalled at the start of this week Italy’s difficulties in Andorra where the hosts can make the game feel like “a war”. Not for the first time, the Republic of Ireland manager was slightly mistaken – Italy have never played here – but we got the idea alright.

What haunts Ireland going into tonight’s match, of course, is the memory of Eschen 16 years ago when Jack Charlton’s hopes of triumphantly leading his side to the European Championship in England began to unravel thanks to an excruciating scoreless draw with Liechtenstein that some 3,000 Irish supporters had travelled to watch.

Since then there have been various disappointments, setbacks and at least one outright humiliation but Ireland have just about muddled through when faced with a team made up of players whose day-time occupations can be easily ridiculed for comedic purposes.

And results, as managers and players invariably contend, are ultimately what count in these situations.

They have, of course, a point and in this regard Ireland’s actual record against poorly-ranked sides over the last 30 years is largely respectable with the team enjoying 100 per cent records against the likes of Malta, Luxembourg, the Faroes and, so far at least, Andorra.

What Irish teams rarely do these days, however, is beat teams comprised of amateurs and part-timers at all convincingly and all too often teams labour their way to narrow, nervous wins.

The classic recent example is San Marino four years ago when a collision between Paul McShane and Wayne Henderson late on allowed Manuel Marani to grab a scrappy equaliser. Stephen Ireland subsequently saved the day deep into added time but then manager Steve Staunton didn’t help himself afterwards when he observed: “San Marino are going to be a handful as the group goes on, we knew that. They’re going to develop.”

That game is largely remembered, though, for the sense of wider chaos in the camp it seemed to exemplify and it was overshadowed even during Staunton’s reign by the shambles of Cyprus.

Other ostensibly close scrapes, the 2-1 away defeat of Luxembourg 1987 or the 3-2 win against Malta in Valletta 12 years later simply slip by with the performances – as Trapattoni is always keen to say they will be – largely forgotten, while the points earned are recorded, just the same as the others, in the history books.

When Ireland actually were held in Eschen there was immediately a sharp division of opinion between those, largely inside the camp, who felt the team had given its all but simply had, as Harry Redknapp put it last week, “one of those days”, and those, generally outside it, who, like former player Mark Lawrenson at the time, contended that an error in Jack Charlton’s selection had contributed to what was a poor performance.

Immediately after the game it was put to the manager that Ireland had 40 attempts on goal with 16 on target. Being the ultimate pragmatist, of course, Charlton was entirely unimpressed but he did say he could not remember a game so one sided ending with the two sides still level.

“I’ve never seen a game that was so frustrating,” said the Englishman whose decision to start with John Sheridan and Ronnie Whelan in central midfield rather than opting for Alan McLoughlin was to be widely criticised. “We had some great opportunities but it seemed like it was written in the stars that we weren’t going to score.”

Even now, Alan Kelly, Ireland’s goalkeeper that day and now a member of Trapattoni’s management team, is perplexed by the memory of the game but he readily acknowledges the parallels between and now.

“It was a similar situation to the one we’ll face in Andorra alright,” he says. “The stadium was in the mountains, it was a very dramatic setting, but the game had the air of something that might be played in a public park.

“To suggest it was a great performance would be wrong but we did completely dominate in terms of possession and chances but it was just one of those games. We had something like 40 attempts on goal but somebody kept getting their backside in the way.

“And it could have been worse,” he recalls with a hint of a laugh. “In something like the 70th minute they got a break and one of their lads ended up one-on-one with me but he seemed to get a nosebleed and blasted the ball straight at me.”

Not so much a missed opportunity then as a let off.

But, the cliché goes, there are no easy games in football anymore.

Well, certainly there does seem to be less of them, especially in Europe where better coaching, greater player mobility and improved resources have enabled some associations to field far more resilient sides.

Setting aside the Montenegrins, whose standing when Ireland played them was merely an aberration caused by Uefa’s insistence that they start out in international football at the bottom and work their way up, a glance at the current Fifa ranking table gives a good idea of what can be achieved. Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and the Faroe Islands, for instance, having climbed above many less well-resourced teams from the likes of Africa, Oceania and the Caribbean lie 114th, 118th and 126th respectively.

Both Luxembourg, who made France work pretty hard for a 2-0 win in March, and the Faroes, have taken four points from this campaign while the recent record for Liechtenstein, who were only beaten thanks to a Stephen McManus goal in the 97th minute at Hampden Park in September of last year, reads won two, drawn two and lost three when friendlies are included.

And yet nine games to date in this qualification competition have been won by five goals or more albeit with those doggedly still-developing Sammarinese having featured in more than half of them.

Andorra don’t make the list at all for while they share San Marino’s ranking of 203rd (or worst) in the world, their worst defeats have been by three and four goals (both inflicted by Armenia) and the Germans feature just once, for their 6-1 defeat of Azerbaijan, but the three-times world champion have something of a reputation for making short work of sub-standard opposition.

Even their record is not flawless, though, if you go back far enough. In what must have been an anxious afternoon for all concerned they were beaten 2-1 by Luxembourg back in 1939, their one slip up against their tiny neighbours in 13 meetings while they managed only a scoreless draw with Malta in a European Championship qualifier in Gzira in 1979, four years before Ireland secured an 8-0 victory over the same opponents to set a national record that still stands.

It’s hard to imagine the Germans putting a gloss on a result like that but somebody surely tried.

After Ireland’s draw in Eschen there was certainly the inevitable attempt by those close to the team to look on the bright side and in that Monday’s The Irish Times, the follow-up piece on the game was headlined: “Double success over Austria now seen as key to success for Republic”.

Over the six months that followed the Republic, it turned out, would lose both of those games 3-1 as well as a decisive encounter with group leaders Portugal in Lisbon and, finally, a play-off game with the Netherlands at Anfield.

Slip up tonight and the agony is unlikely, at least, to be nearly so drawn out.