ON THE COUCH:SO THEN, were we in for a "renaissance in Irish football", Bill O'Herlihy wondered, or a "crushing disappointment"? After 810-plus-added-minutes of blood, sweat, tears and cheers, it all came down to this ding-dong against Armenia in Dublin.
Bill: “How scared are you Liam?” Brady: “Very.” Bill: “Very?” Liam: “Very, very scared.” Bill: “How scared are you John?” Giles: “Not too scared, Bill.” Bill: “Eamon?”
Well, Dunphy wasn’t quite sure where to start. It wasn’t that he was petrified, more mesmerised by Giovanni Trapattoni’s team selection. Picking Simon Cox over Shane Long was, he reckoned, “perverse”, and as for playing “Fulham reserve right back” Stephen Kelly at left back and John “more often than not a left back” O’Shea at right back was, he suggested, “unbelievable, surreal” and “again, perverse.” You know, if he’d thrown in grotesque, bizarre and unprecedented we’d have had ourselves a footballing GUBU moment.
Brady felt Dunphy was being harsh, defending Trapattoni by insisting the selection wasn't "that weirdor crazy", which wasn't the most impassioned defence of a manger in the dock ever offered, to be honest. Giles was somewhere in the middle, agreeing with Brady that this is, on the whole, a results game, and Trapattoni had, on the whole, produced them in the group. So we should trust the fella, even if picking Cox over Long was, actually, GUBU.
The panel was, then, a bit jittery, their anxiety not helped by Trapattoni bigging up Armenia in his pre-match chat, their greatest strength, he said, their “enthusiasmus”.
So, it was with no great enthusiasmus that they forecast an Irish win, concerned that the visitors would make it the mother of all squeaky bum evenings.
Off we went, Darragh Maloney bringing bad news from Moscow where Andorra’s rearguard held out just five minutes against Russia. “You’re not surprised, are you?” asked Ronnie Whelan. Darragh said nothing, so you could take that as a “well, no”.
Do you feel bad when you shout “off, off, off, off!” at the telly, in the hope you’ll persuade the ref to whip out his red card? You should. But it worked. Even if it looked a little bit like Cox did unto Armenia what the Thierry lad did unto us. You know, handy-work.
“Did Cox handle it as it came down,” asked Darragh. “I don’t care,” replied Ronnie.
Eleven against 10, then. And then there was the own goal. Apart from that, Armenia had the better of it.
“I suspect you’re not scared any more,” Bill asked Brady.
"No, I'm not," he said, concluding that the Gods were smiling down on us, while belting out lusty renditions of The Fields of Athenry.
Dunphy was ecstatic. Kidding.
“You were depressed watching them, weren’t you?” asked Bill.
“I was, yeah. McGeady? Terrible. Kelly? Terrible. Whelan? Non-existent. St Ledger? Panicky. No football played. Hoofing it up the pitch. If you were a neutral you’d be on Armenia’s side. It’s crude, worse than Jack.”
He didn’t chuck a pen across the studio, though, so he’s mellowed, as did the fear factor when the second goal came, the Armenian sub goalie appearing to play a one-two with Richard Dunne’s tummy.
But then they scored and Kevin Doyle was sent off, which made the bums of Ireland so squeaky they most probably heard them in Yerevan.
No worries in the end, job done.
You could hardly hear Bill, Gilesie and Brady above Dunphy’s ole-ing.
The old ones, eh? “We’re not going to qualify,” he informed Bill.
“We’re not going to qualify?!” “No. That team, the way they’re playing, in that system, won’t beat anyone who’s any good, Bill. We were awful. Awful. This is the worst of Jack. It was painful to watch.
“I’d say the Irish rugby team would have been better playing soccer tonight than we were. I feel offended by that type of football, it’s a curse on Irish soccer that we have this nonsense. You can’t love Barcelona – and Arsenal – and love that rubbish. You have to have beliefs.”
That was Bill’s bubble well and truly burst, Giles’ confession that he found it “painful” to watch adding to his pre-play-off gloom.
Brady, though, tried to lift his sagging spirits by suggesting “the end justifies the means” – “in the manager’s view” – so it wasn’t inconceivable that they’d make it to Polkraine 2012 yet, by hook or by crook.
“Who would like in the play-offs, John,” asked Bill.
“Estonia,” he said.
“I don’t think we can get them, John,” said Brady, and there followed a discussion on coefficients and the like, the class of head-wrecking talk that prompted some to mitch maths in their youth.
The main thing is, though, we’re in the play-offs. And, look, if that doesn’t make you enthusiasmus, nothing will.
