As the euphoria generated by the team having come from behind in dramatic fashion to earn a draw against Switzerland began to recede, Mick McCarthy acknowledged that Ireland have a lot left to do if they are to secure the top two finish required to guarantee themselves a place at the first major tournament the country has even had a hand in staging.
His side, who are all but certain to have the fallback of a Nations League play-off if things do not go well over the remaining three group games, continue to top group D but their actual advantage over rivals Switzerland and Denmark is now largely illusory with each of the other rivals effectively only having to win matches in hand against Gibraltar to level things up.
Ireland, like Denmark ( who go there on Sunday) must still face up to the trickiest tie of the four games against the group’s lesser sides – Georgia away – a trip they will undertake at the start of next month. After that they head straight to Geneva with the Danes then coming to Dublin in November to round the campaign off.
McCarthy declines to say whether he feels five points – a figure based on the presumption of winning in Tbilisi then securing two more draws against the bigger guns – would be enough to get Ireland through but, assuming there are no real surprises, it would translate into a second-place finish in the event that one or other of the Danes and Swiss actually wins the encounter between those two sides in Copenhagen.
That game takes place on October 12th, the night Ireland play in Georgia and so the group D landscape will be a good deal clearer as the Irish touchdown in Geneva the following day.
With the top three sides having each dropped points at home to the one of the other two, the prospect of the tournament rules on the separation of sides tied at the end of the campaign coming into play to decide the final placings has also become less remote.
These are more favourable to Ireland than used to be the case.
Traditionally, sides level on points were separated on the basis of elements of their performance in the campaign as a whole with goal difference generally first amongst the factors to be considered.
In the event that an order could not be established on that basis, the results between the teams directly concerned were then considered with all others excluded and much the same checklist of factors, starting with points earned and including goals scored and goals scored away from goal was then considered.
Three-way tie
That order has effectively been inverted these days and it is the results between the contenders that will be considered before those in the wider group.
This helps Mick McCarthy’s cause because Ireland almost never beat weaker teams by as many goals over two games as their key rivals and so very rarely have a better goal difference at the conclusion of the campaign.
Just twice in the last 10 qualification campaigns, indeed, has an Irish team emerged with a better goal difference than any of their opponents finishing in the top three of their group. The two exceptions were 2000 and 2006 and, as luck would have it, they did not qualify on either occasion.
If there was to be a three-way tie and Article 15 of the regulations had to be rolled out on this occasion, however, the Irish would currently be the ones to miss out on the basis they have scored the fewest goals in the games to be considered.
That 3-3 draw between the Swiss and Danes in Basel would, and quite possibly will still, count in both their favours as goals scored in the relevant matches is the factor considered after points obtained then goal difference. But it will, of course, take just one result to make all of that instantly academic.
In the meantime, McCarthy acknowledges: “I guess that the simple answer is to score goals, isn’t it? But that’s the hardest bloody thing on the pitch unfortunately.”
The order of the remaining games, of course, means that they may find themselves simply having to do it when Denmark come to Dublin in mid-November and that is not a scenario that worked out well a couple of years back.
The more immediate problem is who will start at left back in Tbilisi as Enda Stevens will be suspended. McCarthy suggested through the week that James McClean is effectively his number two for the position and he may well drop back into the role against Bulgaria.
Starting him there in a game that Ireland will almost certainly need to win, clearly comes with risks, however, and so Matt Doherty or perhaps Greg Cunningham seem sure to at least come into consideration assuming they are fit.
“ I’ll enjoy this one first before I get my head around Georgia and Switzerland,” says McCarthy. “But I’ll just go to Georgia and try to win the game, to get us to play as well as we did [on Thursday] and pick up the points. And if we do that, then there’s two games to go.”
