There was no hiding the sense of disappointment as the Irish players filed away towards their team bus and the start of the journey home but Robbie Keane was defiant too as he sought to shift the focus immediately towards next month and another championship play-off.

“Look, he said, “we’ve been successful in the play-offs before. Obviously having that hunger and desire will be important but we know that there’s a massive prize at the end of it. Playing at a European Championships . . . some players never get the opportunity to play in these competitions; we’ve been lucky enough that we have quite a few who know what it’s like, the atmosphere that gets created around it for everybody.

“To have a European Championship on your CV, that’s an opportunity that the lads certainly have to be mindful of. We all have to go on thinking that we have a great chance regardless of who we get because we’re a good team.”

Not quite good enough in Warsaw as it turned out although there was a general view amongst the players as they reflected on the events of the night there had not been too much between the sides over the 90 minutes.

Consolation

Keane, in any case, insisted what is required is to take some consolation from having achieved a third-place finish in what was a tough group and then prepare to press on. “I think what we have to do is to forget about this as much as we can. I know that’s difficult but we have to try. We said at the end there – we’ve got a play-off and if you looked at the group overall back at the start of the campaign, would you have accepted third spot at the time? People would probably have said ‘yeah’.

“When you’re in with a chance and you think you can take second spot then of course it’s a disappointment not to do that but I think we have to try to move on as quickly as possible; try to make sure the lads going back to their clubs, they’ll be fully focused on that, but that they have it in the backs of their minds we have big games now in a month’s time and that we still have the chance to go to the European Championships in France. There’s still something in it for us.”

Replacement

Having come on early in the second half as a replacement for the injured

Shane Long

, Keane expected that the team, by then chasing the game, would create more than they did over the remainder of the match but they were ably frustrated by a home side that made the most of their upper hand. “Of course,” acknowledged the Irish striker. “You always expect that when they’re 2-1 up they’re going to defend and they brought a lot of defenders on, defensively minded players anyway.

“We needed to be a bit clever at times but we didn’t create as many chances as we would have hoped. There was the one for Keogh, I can’t remember what happened but I heard he had a decent chance. Apart from that, though, we didn’t create too many chances but there you go.

“It’s disappointing because we got ourselves back into the game; we got the penalty but then you don’t want to concede just before half-time. It’s always a bad time to concede. They didn’t have too many chances in the second half but it was just one of those nights.”