Ireland have nothing to feel hard done by here. It’s not that Wales were much better than Eileen Gleeson’s side or that they will be any more of an adornment to next summer’s Euros than the girls in green. But they have played Ireland three times in the past 18 months and lost none of the games. There’s no arguing with those numbers.
Ultimately, Ireland fell to the oldest hurdle in sport. When they were on top, they didn’t make their case on the scoreboard. They whipped in a series of potshots and set-pieces but couldn’t make any of them count. It left them vulnerable to something going wrong. The penalty that nobody but VAR spotted early in the second half was that something. Wales inched into a lead they never really looked like giving up.
The first goal was always going to be vital here and to their credit, it was clear that Gleeson’s side weren’t going to die wondering. For all the passive-aggressiveness that came out of the Wales camp over the past week, Ireland clearly took the view that this was a game against bang-average opposition.
The safe play would have been to out-bang-average them, to clog the game into a quagmire and try to nick something down the stretch. They tried a different road.
Gleeson set her team up here so that Katie McCabe and Denise O’Sullivan were both operating at the higher end of the pitch. Sounds simple, maybe. But there have been plenty of nights when one or other of them were given defensive roles and only released to threaten when Ireland had gone a goal down.
Not here. Ruesha Littlejohn and Jess Stapleton anchored the midfield and waved O’Sullivan up the pitch. It meant she was freed up to loiter around between the centre-circle and the edge of the box, drawing Welsh players to her and freeing up the wings. She cracked the crossbar in the first half from exactly that spot, bending a gorgeous effort past a beaten Olivia Clark.
So Ireland went for it. Problem was, McCabe went for it so forcefully she couldn’t be effective. O’Sullivan being a menace on the edge of the box meant there was space out wide and the Ireland captain attacked it at every opportunity. But she had one of those nights when she couldn’t tell the difference between competitiveness and ill-discipline.
For all her gifts, it’s no secret that McCabe’s petulant side sometimes gets the better of her. She could and probably should have been sent off in the first half. She got pulled back on one foray down the left but the Spanish referee played advantage and when McCabe subsequently failed to beat the two defenders in front of her, she raced back in a snot and scythed down Josie Green from behind.
Not only was it a straightforward yellow card but McCabe was now on the wrong side of the referee. She just about got away with a second yellow card tackle soon after but spent the rest of the night failing to win free kicks for her side. She played angry too – berating officials and team-mates, walking away from a team huddle at one stage in the second half.
The worst of it was that Wales were there to be beaten. They sat back and let Ireland do all the work in the first half, eventually winkling a couple of saves out of Courtney Brosnan from set-pieces. The penalty that brought their first goal was a VAR award, one that none of their players went looking for.
The second was a terrible goal for Ireland to give away, Wales playing through them effortlessly in three kicks of the ball. If you only looked up at the end of the move, you’d imagine it was a breakout goal against a team that had pushed up too far forward. But actually, it came from a Wales kick-out and still Carrie Jones was through one-on-one with only Brosnan to beat.
It was careless stuff and it means Ireland won’t be going to the Euros. They can’t really have any complaints.
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