There was a sizeable amount of trepidation in the air before Saturday’s game, with Ronnie Whelan, never one to be overly optimistic about Irish footballing fortunes, asked by Tony O’Donoghue, as they strolled across the pitch prematch, what his hopes were for the afternoon. “We don’t want a hiding, do we,” he replied, which probably summed up the extent of the nation’s ambitions.
And there was no point, really, pining for the days when giving it a lash could yield a result destined to star on Reeling in the Years. What’s it they say? We are where we are.
Of the RTÉ panel, only Shay Given was overcome with a dose of positivity – “we’re all full of hope and excitement!” – but you could tell Richie Sadlier and Didi Hamann were fearing the worst. Didi reminisced about those Fortress Lansdowne Road days, when the visitors were nearly afraid to come out of their dressingroom. Now? “What’s not to like about coming to the Aviva?”
And while he welcomed the FAI finally finding someone willing to take the job, he had modest enough aspirations for Heimir Hallgrímsson. The Icelander’s chief task, he reckoned, was to get “the better teams down to our level”.
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Roy Keane wasn’t feeling a whole lot more buoyant over on ITV. “What do you make of that Ireland line-up?” Mark Pougatch asked him when the teams were named. Roy gazed upon the graphic for a second. “It’s going to be a big ask,” he concluded.
The next two years, he said, would be “huge” for Ireland, given the “lack of quality” at Hallgrímsson’s disposal. And there were some issues too with the folk who employ him, suggested Roy. “There’s a lot of good people at the FAI, but the ones who are making the decisions probably couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.” Ian Wright nigh on choked from the laughing, while Pougatch turned a whiter shade of pale, this being before the watershed and all.
Richie did similar to Peter Collins. Hallgrímsson having a mere handful of days with the players before this game was a result of the FAI making “an absolute balls of the process”. The mood music for the occasion was, then, a touch on the downbeat side.
Anthem-gate was, inevitably, addressed, the panellists on both channels rolling their eyes at the sheer bonkersness of it all, but as Roy put it, “welcome to the reality of coaching England”. ITV’s Gabriel Clarke interrogated Lee Carsley briefly on the matter, and you couldn’t but feel for the fella, him taking his place in the Irish dugout when he emerged for the match a seeming indication that he’d had enough. Alas, a mistake. “I just came out and turned right. I was on the bench a lot for Ireland, so I know where it is,” as he told Tony after the game.
Speaking of anthems. The worst aspect of the cacophonous booing of God Save Yer Man is that it will launch 100 opinion pieces on how we have yet to grow up as a nation. ITV’s Sam Matterface said that we are merely “separated by a splash of the Irish Sea”, but the psychoanalysis will insist that the chasm is a bit wider than a splash. Fasten your seat belts, it could be a long week.
And it was a long first half. “Maybe it was just meant to be,” said Sam after Declan Rice and Jack Grealish, of all people, made it 2-0. The only consolation that his co-commentator Andros Townsend could offer us was that his old Everton buddy Séamus Coleman is “probably the greatest human being on Earth”. He probably is too, so that was nice.
A greater consolation was that that’s when the scoring ceased, which was a humongous surprise. By 2-0 we’d have been thinking of a Six Nations-like score. Roy put that down to England’s “arrogance”, rather than the quality of the Irish resistance. “They were awful in the second half, players playing for themselves, taking too many touches, trying to play Roy of the Rovers passes – even the subs strolling on, strolling off, showing a bit of arrogance.”
But another decidedly bad day at the office for our lads. “What is different, what do you know now about the manager that you didn’t know before?” Darragh Maloney asked Ronnie.
“Nothing,” he sighed.
But look, Greece on Tuesday. We’ll be full of hope and excitement again. Because we don’t want a hiding, do we?
