Measured against the heady days when Billy Bingham was conjuring some marvellous results for Northern Ireland, it was scarcely an occasion to provoke broad sweeps of the imagination. Yet the sense of fulfilment was real enough at Windsor Park on Saturday as Lawrie McMenemy savoured his finest hour since coming to power in Belfast and Keith Rowland came of age with the goal which gave the men in green and navy their first competitive win in almost two years.
The top line is still the most important in football and when all the judgements had been delivered on a game in which art nearly always finished a distant second to application, the new manager could point with justification to the result.
"To stay competitive, we have to win our home games and this was a start in that direction," he said. "We needed to re-establish ourselves quickly after our defeat in Turkey and in achieving that we showed a lot of character.
"We also showed the public that we have a team of which they can be proud and now, hopefully, we can build on this result against Moldova next month.
"Finland are a big, strong team with the ability to worry any opposition and I thought our players showed a lot of character in the way they got themselves back in the game after a couple of early frights."
McMenemy, sitting like a patriarch in the dug-out while his assistant, Joe Jordan, fretted and fidgeted out on the touch-line, brings an impressive presence to his latest assignment.
The personnel with which he works may not fit everybody's description of world beaters, but in terms of preparation the new management team ensured that the players were up for the job on an afternoon when the attendance at Windsor Park at last climbed into five figures.
Richard Moller Nielsen, the streetwise Dane who manages Finland, will readily identify with McMenemy's challenge of survival. His, too, is a limited squad and when he lost his principal playmaker, Jari Litmanen, to injury just hours before the game, it unbalanced the team to a dangerous degree.
By the time Litmanen was pressed into emergency service some 15 minutes before the end, the game was set on an irreversible course and the Irish had good reason to be grateful for an unexpected stroke of good fortune.
Yet, with the skilful Joonas Kolkka coming close to disguising Litmanen's missing skills in midfield, the Finns had less cause to rue the absence of the Ajax player than the profligacy of Rangers's striker Jonatan Johansson.
"In football you have to make the best of your possibilities," mused Nielsen. "We didn't, they did and that was the difference."
The point was powerfully made in the 52th minute when Juha Reini produced the jewel of the afternoon, a towering 60-yard delivery that was measured to the last spin of the ball for Johansson, coming in on the opposite side of the penalty area. A mere touch with his chest was enough to take the Rangers player past Darren Patterson but, for the third time in the game, he spurned the chance.
Ironically, Rowland's goal, his first in 15 international games, came from roughly the same area in the 31st minute. Michael Hughes provided the perceptive pass and Rowland, a man who has known more travail than triumph in his career, was equal to the task of firing the ball across goalkeeper Antti Niemi into the corner of the net.
That Hughes, one of only two players boasting regular Premiership status in the home team, should figure in the build-up was fitting for, Kolkka apart, nobody could match the sleight of foot which enabled him to beat opponents with even the tiniest adjustment of the ball.
His, indeed, is a splendid talent which doesn't always find the expression it deserves at Wimbledon and, Keith Gillespie notwithstanding, it represented Northern Ireland's biggest asset on the day.
Gillespie, one of the great imponderables in the modern game, was significantly closer to his best on this occasion, taking on defenders with conviction and producing one exhilarating run which took him deep into the Finnish penalty area.
In that there was real cause for optimism but too often the spaces between Iain Dowie at the front of the team and the nearest midfielder were alarming. As ever, Dowie was unsparing in his work rate, but there times, many times, when he looked despairingly to those further back, for support.
Philip Mulryne, at 20 a fine prospect, doesn't as yet have the engine to undertake the role which Roy Keane, his senior club-mate at Manchester United, does for the Republic and one looked in vain for a more positive contribution from the Leicester player Neil Lennon who was too often content to play the game in a restricted area in midfield.
Still, it was a good day for Northern Ireland, perhaps best summed up by Nielsen when he said: "Before the game some people were calling the Irish the underdogs. But I kept telling my players not to expect underdogs but bull dogs".
That ability to scrap for points may be McMenemy's most potent weapon in the short term. And it begs the question - what ever happened Gerry Taggart?
NORTHERN IRELAND: A Fettis (Blackburn); A Hughes (Newcastle), S Morrow (QPR), D Patterson (Dundee Utd), K Horlock (Manchester City); K Gillespie (Newcastle), P Mulryne (Manchester Utd), N Lennon (Leicester), K Rowland (QPR); M Hughes (Wimbledon), I Dowie (QPR). Subs: J McCarthy (Birmingham) for Gillespie (74 mins), G O'Boyle (St Johnstone) for Dowie (80 mins), J Quinn (West Brom) for Rowland (87 mins).
FINLAND: A Niemi (Rangers); J Reini (Genk), S Hyypia (Willem), H Ylonen (FC Haka); J Llola (HJK); A Riihhilahti (HJK), J Kolkka (PSV Eindhoven), S Valakari (Motherwell), T Kautonen (MYPA); M Paatelainen (Hibernian), J Johansson (Rangers). Subs: J Litmanen (Ajax) for Riihilahti (75 mins).
Referee: Zoran Arsic (Yugoslavia).
