France 1-1 Ireland (AET; France wi: In which the author is unable to bring himself to complete that scoreline

Image by toksuede on Flickr; spotted at / robbed from You'll Never Win Anything With Kids.

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Firstly: fuck.

Secondly: the Thierry Henry thing. I'm going to steer clear of the tabs for the next few days, while judiciously picking my way through the broadsheets and having my finger poised by my radio's volume dial. (Can you imagine what Liveline will be like if they start on this topic? Kill me. Kill me now.) There is going to be such a lot of hysterical nonsense emitted about Henry's deed. We are firmly within the English football sphere of influence, for good and ill. It'll still be a shame if we replicate the worst, unbecoming, Fleet-Streety aspects of that culture, Henry's handball taking its place alongside Cristiano Ronaldo's wink.

Of course, Ronaldo's wink was utterly irrelevant to Wayne Rooney's red card (not that the message has got through to everybody). Henry's handball counted. Sweet Jesus, did it ever. But here's the dealio, campers, something you should have figured out a long time ago: this type of shit happens a lot — a lot — in sport. Sport disguises itself as life honed and concentrated, as a palace of justice in Lego, all instant judgements and inevitable punishments. It dissembles its true nature: that it's just like the rest of the universe. As a matter of course, players will skirt the fringes of legality, and will sometimes cross the line: our guys, their guys, everydamnone's eyes. You just have to hope that the arbiters can do their best. What Henry did was wrong. But to pick on this one incident as being somehow especially contemptible is to be wilfully blind to all the sport you've ever seen. And if we're to demand Henry's head on a spike, shouldn't we have done the same for, say, Damien Duff for his dive against Spain in 2002? (That Ian Harte missed the subsequent penalty is irrelevant, of course.) Remember Alan McLoughlin's guilty look towards the linesman in Cagliari in 1990?

While we're at it, a request: can we leave Platini and Blatter out of this? Blatter is everyone's favourite punchbag, usually with due cause. Platini also deserves some of the criticism he gets, though he has preposterously been turned into a Napoleonic bogeyman for our time by many in English football. The seeding issue stank somewhat, but bear in mind that the refereeing in both legs was consistently excellent and fair. From neither performance could a sane mind deduce interference from on high. Any fears of homerism in the second leg were unfounded. I did feel that more could have been done to curb the excessive physicality of Gallas' and, especially, Squillaci's aerial challenges. But a ref bent on nudging the big team towards victory would have given Anelka a penalty. (Not that I'm saying the ref was wrong, but did anyone else spot Given's right hand making contact with Anelka's shin?)

The anger is understandable. That doesn't mean it's right.

(And to those who are shocked that their favouritest player could have stooped so low: are we to think that his soul was pure just because his game was so enchanting at Arsenal? Give me a break.)

What should keep us awake at night are the chances. I struggle to recall them all right now without recourse to video; trauma has mushed the immediate memory of this game into two hours of terror, mixed with optimistic dread and that unclassifiable feeling you get when the other lot score. But there were chances, that much I do remember, and if you don't take your chances, blah blah fucking blah. If we need an emblem for the defeat part of this defeat, let it be that.

Because the defeat was not just a defeat. If we'd let ourselves admit it more often, we'd realise that the brutal frankness of the scoreline is rarely all there is to sport. Take Giovanni Trapattoni. I hesitate to say that the nature of the defeat — and the fact that he got us this close at all — are a vindication of his management; not because I think he has failed, but because it asks the question from a false basis. Far too often, we go in for the adversarial system in sport, with the incumbent as perpetual defendant. More often than not, a straight guilty or not guilty verdict is unsatisfactory. Some of the coverage of Trap since his arrival has been odd to say the least. Denis Walsh of the Sunday Times — a fine writer, mind you — lamented the absence of romance in Ireland's style a couple of weekends ago. A writer for another Sunday paper, who shall remain anonymous on the principle that it is wrong to kick a man while he's stupid, has wailed on that baby for what seems like forever. One wonders whether they remember the history of this team. When has it ever been about even tipping a wink towards the, *cough*, beautiful game?

One wonders whether some even remember two years ago, how godawful things were in the freefalling Staunton era. Memories can be short in sport, but some of the criticism of Trapattoni has foolishly neglected to bear in mind his greatest achievement: giving the players their belief back. I reckon that some of this renewal has come from within the players themselves; despite the sniping aimed in their direction amid the rubble of Nicosia and Serravalle, they've always come across as a proud lot. But Trapattoni's role in this should not be downplayed. The methods by which he chose to do this may have displeased many, but how was this supposed to be easy? What the team needed was someone to take control, to systematically give them new life.

Systematic need not always mean boring. Sometimes, though, it, um, does; Ireland have been that at times. Some of this has been exaggerated in the retelling. One feels that had Trapattoni not come from Italy, he might have been cut more slack. Some have tried to classify Ireland's system as catenaccio, which is patently false. Indeed, Trap has consistently fielded four attacking players: not exactly the epitome of derring-do, but not the most negative of mindsets. However, there have been times, especially when defending a lead, that timorousness has overtaken the team, the midfield retreating glacially until they are almost duplicating the roles of the backline. This backfired away to Bulgaria (though what mainly backfired was the concept of Kevin Kilbane, left-full).

I myself have been sucked into believing in Trap's innate suffocating negativity. I imagined that Ireland would try to lock the first leg down to prevent the concession of the away goal. Yet Ireland went for it, in a way. They didn't go about things with reckless abandon, exactly, but not was it as negative a display as characterised. It was honest if unsuccessful toil for two-thirds of the game, fatigued chasing for the rest

In the main, Trap's ways have worked. Again, remember how recently it was that we were talking of the worst performances in the team's history. To get so close, so soon, is remarkable. Maybe if, say, Andy Reid were in the team, it would have made the difference. I have my doubts, though I can't disprove it. Thing is, you can't prove it, either. It's certainly not the cut-and-dried situation many believe it to be.

But then, what is? Not this match, not this sport. I don't want to go too far down the road of declaring moral victory. I don't quite believe in the sainthood of Roy Keane, but he was pretty much spot on in Amsterdam in 2000, declaring himself mightily unsatisfied. But the emotion one feels in the wake of last night is not neat despair. Another consequence of being a subset of English football is that while technique is not prized as it ought to be, fight is. In England, they are going through a difficult phase in which they try to reconcile themselves with the notion that most of the rest of the footballing world has different priorities (how this goes is one of the most fascinating issues in the sport today). The old gung-ho attitude is becoming gauche. But it should be remembered that it is not an inherently undesirable quality; in fact, it is enviable, and this need not be a philistine position to adopt. Would that Ireland could even play like Croatia, a country with a similar population. But we can't, not right now. We've had to make the most of what we have, and with determination and organisation, that's what we've done.

Or have we? That's one of sport's eternal questions, I'm afraid. Sport's a fucker. That's what we take away from this game: a nagging sense of opportunity missed coupled with a great pride in how we've gone about things which, in this writer, has at least pushed against the squeamishness he feels about the idea of national-team-as-proxy-nation. We're proud, but it's not as simple as that. We lost, but it's not as simple as that.

There is so, so much more to say about last night, but I'll leave you with this thought: everyone who has ever mocked Richard Dunne can fuck off. Read more...

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Gio knows

Forgive me for the egregious use of the first person when talking about the national team — can't be helped, sometimes...Thoughts on Ireland worth checking out from the Okey Doke Football Blog and Jump the Fence, Baby. Here are mine.

I was going to begin by noting how odd the national relationship with the Ireland team is, but on reflection, it's probably not that exceptional at all. Two aspects of international football give it a quality distinct from that of the club game: nationalism (used here in a general, not-necessarily-pejorative sense) and the scarcity of fixtures. European qualifying tournaments usually give each team between eight and fourteen games, spread over a year and a bit. So much more, therefore, rides on an average qualifier than on a domestic league game. The particular intensity that this lends to such games may often be absent for larger countries whose qualification is more or less guaranteed, but it's there for most of us; and every aspect of the matches appears far more significant than it otherwise would. Ireland, having usually been there or thereabouts for a couple of generations, are a fine example of this.

There are a few other elements which go into the mix here, such as the strange sense of entitlement many people seem to feel about the team. Several things feed into this. The Charlton era left us first giddy, then grouchy when things didn't go our way as often as they did during that golden age. Most Irish fans experience their football as a Sky production; some, such as the small but heard group who booed the team at the final whistle of the Bulgaria game, seem unable to see what is in front of them as the imperfect reality it is. (As Jump the Fence noted, "it's not X-Factor you're watching".)

Perhaps there is some residue from the chimeric Celtic Tiger bluster which filled our sails not so long ago; more precisely, from the invocation of the national miracle in the aftermath of the Saipan affair* by the type of people who believe we would have won the World Cup if not for Mick McCarthy.

Furthermore — at the grave risk of appearing to enter into some gratuitous meeja-bashing — the coverage of the team's exploits has become ever more tabloidesque, and not just amongst our, ahem, beloved redtops. That is, it's bipolar: the highs are very high, the lows impossibly low. Every slight is a catastrophe that demands an immediate sacrifice. Impatience is the drug, whose dose was increased in 2002. Add to that a national broadcaster as dominant in determining the national sporting discourse as the rest of the news agenda, and who continue to employ a certain demagogic ex-Millwall player who many people actually take seriously, and you have a nice little mudpit for irrationality to wallow in.

Of course, this isn't all-pervasive; thankfully, there is enough reasonable talk to keep things sane (things haven't got as bad as the steaming pile of nonsense that gets written about England). But it's there, and it's inevitable.

The beauty part of Giovanni Trapattoni's tenure is that he bypasses all of this. So far, he has appeared not to care about the circus. However eager the media is to play up his supposed eccentricities, he has been the most normal of the lot of us. By assessing the available talent, devising a plan and sticking to it — in other words, by going about his managerial business as any good manager would — he's been damn near subversive. While some decisions have been questionable in isolation (PaulMcShanePaulMcShanePaulMcShane), Trapattoni isn't from the mould of the previous unfortunate holder of the office, who made us unsure as to whether he wasn't just making it up as he went along.

The truth is, despite the risible claims of some, Ireland are not a world-class team, or favourites to win the group. We have qualified for four finals tournaments in seventy-five years. More talented Ireland teams than this one have failed. This very team failed dismally in the last campaign. That four games remain and we're still in contention is itself a small victory. If we fail to qualify, it may well be because of a calamitous error by Trapattoni (it hasn't happened yet, though). More likely, it would be because sometimes these things happen. We're not owed a place at the World Cup. We've always had to fight for every goal and every point. It seems to me that's exactly what we're doing right now. Let's see where it gets us.


*Is anyone else depressed and a tad embarrassed that the word "Saipan" now calls to mind not one of the bloodiest battles of World War II but a spat between a footballer and his manager?

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Ireland 2-1 Georgia: Gump brace seals win

Tapping into the market for day-old recaps of games you couldn't care less about.

When Trapattoni faces Cúper, the game could probably do with something to liven it up, lest the tension -- the kind of tension that defines a perfectly silent room, until you fall asleep -- becomes too much. Thankfully, Stephen Kelly took less than a minute to display his fine appreciation for the nuances of dramatic theory; or, in footballese, to fail to get the ball the bloody hell out of the area. 0-1.

Thus was shape given to the match: Georgia defended and tactical-fouled; Ireland tried to attack, the way I would try to re-attach your renal artery to your kidney. The ennui was broken briefly when a Keith Andrews shot was deflected past Giorgi Lomaia and in. The Finnish referee, however, as befitting a man who speaks a language with an aversion to voiced consonants, had become attached to the growing melancholy. He invoked the little-known "Gravitational Pull" clause of the interfering-with-play bit of the offside rule, feeling that the powerful atomic processes that drive Kevin Doyle had had a tidal effect on Lomaia's brain juices.

Keith Andrews ran around, quite effectively. The half ended.

Ireland woke up in the second half and did anything -- had a bowl of cereal, watched a SpongeBob SquarePants quadruple bill, cleaned out their bedside locker for the first time in months, had another bowl of cereal (this time without milk), sent emails to themselves -- but study for their big history test the next day. When, with half an hour to go, panic set in (it was even marked on their study planner: 60' PANIC!!!), they opened their textbook on the World War I chapter, upon which inspiration struck. So, as Gavrilo Princip surely would have done had he played central mid, Glen Whelan started playing fifteen yards further forward. Aiden McGeady joined in, deciding to stop pretending he'd forgotten how to play football. Things started happening. Even the ref cheered up a bit, deciding to play the scamp by awarding a penalty to Ireland for that old favourite, the Dubious Handball.

In a sport like, say, basketball, there is a relatively efficient transition between consistent good play and a favourable outcome on the scoreboard. Football, on the other hand, is screwy. Robbie Keane exceeds his quota of screwiness. He had as much impact on the game as you did, yet had the biggest influence on the result. He converted the penalty, and scored the second with a magnificent shoulderer from six yards. He's Ireland's record goalscorer, dontcha know.

In Trap, Ireland have found someone whose ideas chime with our own. Once ahead, he replaced Damien Duff with Stephen Hunt and cranked up the power on the player magnet attached to Ireland's goal, dragging them deeper and deeper. This time, though, there wasn't enough time to throw it away. The table doesn't look right, but like I said, we have Robbie Keane. Ireland win, world saved, until March 28th.

DUNPHY UPDATE: Still a dickhead!

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Ireland 1-0 Cyprus: Keano collaboration

From Lost Worlds by Michael Bywater:

...we should pay our respects to the Daily Sport, which dispensed with the idea that 'news' should be true. (FOOTNOTE: A bit like the Daily Mail or Fox News, but more honest.) This innovation allowed it to come up with the most engaging pair of front pages in the history of journalism. In the first, it took a picture of the moon and superimposed a Second World War bomber on it, under the headline: 'WW2 Bomber Found On Moon'. Shortly afterwards, it simply published the picture of the moon, headlined 'WW2 Bomber Found On Moon Vanishes'.

The Irish media got a similar two-stories-for-the-price-of-none this week regarding Andy Reid. One day they were reporting on a supposed rift between Reid and Giovanni Trapattoni, the next they were reporting on its apparent non-existence. This speaks of two things. Firstly, the media here grows ever more keen to poke at a wound until it gets infected (of which more, I'm sure, at a later date). Secondly, it reflects the affection there is for Reid amongst many here and their longing to see him in the green jersey.

I'm mightily torn on this. I heart Andy Reid. He is my favourite current Irish player because he is so un-Irish. There has never been such a thing as a distinctly Irish style of football. We are firmly within the English sphere of influence and as such everyone grows up with the two straight lines of four and the big fella up front and all the other typically English facets, for good and for ill. Reid seems to have been born in the wrong place. The mere fact that he sees the game in three dimensions, beyond the linearity we are usually cursed with, makes him almost illicitly exciting. It's hardly bearable when the director cuts to the bench and we see Reid huddled up in his big FAI jacket. Letting his talent wither on the vine is something that we're going to end up regretting when we look back on this era.

Yet one can see why Trapattoni has not yet used him. He has a particular system in mind: a 4-4-2 with two tidy central midfielders, one a ball-winner, the other to be a reasonably accomplished ball-player (Steven Reid played in this role in the first two qualifiers); two wingers (versus Cyprus, Duff and McGeady) and two strikers. Steven Reid's absence from this game had many clamouring for Andy Reid to play in the centre. While this would add a spark of creativity to the position, Trapattoni's reasoning is that it is quite sufficient to have a pair of attacking wide men and just have the central duo go about their work quietly. The central midfielders are expected primarily to solemnly keep watch in front of the defence, and this is not Andy Reid's game. You could play Reid wide, but he is a poor defender.

He could be employed behind a lone striker in a 4-2-3-1, but then you'd have to drop Robbie Keane or Kevin Doyle.

It's a dilly of a pickle. For what it's worth, I'm erring - just - on the side of Trap's policy right now. This is despite the problems mentioned later on, and my Reid thang. It's a matter of the benefit of the doubt going to one of the most successful managers in history, and the desperation induced by successive inglorious failures since the last time we were at the big show. If I suddenly go missing around about November 2009, it'll be because I've embarked on a pilgrimage of repentance to some place dark and lonely.


More stuff about the game:


Damien Duff slinked his way through the Cypriot defence and dinked a sexually good chipped cross for Robbie Keane to head into an empty net, and went on to have a fine game. Welcome back, Duffer!

If I had a daughter I would insist she marry Kevin Doyle. He's as reliant and dependable as they come. His work ethic is a marvel - it doesn't matter how the game is going, how well or how badly he or the team are playing: he will never stop. And his efforts are not of the headless chicken variety, nor is it a case of someone throwing in a couple of wild slide-tackles to give the appearance of full commitment. It is more intelligent than that, and when allied to a mature mind and sold technical ability, it's no wonder there is more than one top-flight club angling for him.

If Doyle was already spoken for, I'd settle for being Richard Dunne's daddy-in-law. Christ, he's amazing when he's on top form. Whenever I see Dunne in an Ireland shirt, I think of an alternative universe in which Phil Babb decided that he wouldn't play Hutch to Mark Kennedy's Starsky and slide over the bonnet of a cop car in Dublin days before the World Cup qualifier against Holland in 2000, thus avoiding disciplinary action and keeping a young Richard Dunne on the bench. I think of Patrick Kluivert having a field day and of Kenny Cunningham's eyebrow furrowed in a mixture of anger and sadness. I shudder.

But - why is there always a but? - the fact that the best aspects of Ireland's game were the workrate of a centre-forward and a near-heroic centre-half's performance tell a story. Giovanni Trapattoni bowled the nation a googly by selecting Darron Gibson to replace Steven Reid in midfield, to play beside Glen Whelan. It, um, didn't really work. They neither provided the required cover for the defence nor gave anything when Ireland had possession. Trapattoni does not demand anything spectacular from the central two in the latter situation, but when the team would try to string some passes together, the lack of the ability - or will - of Gibson and Whelan to try anything vaguely positive forced the play deeeper and deeper until it ended up at the feet of Shay Given, with an aimless hoof the result. The second half was a hearty workout for the back line, punctuated by counter-attcks of varying degrees of success (luckily we had the attackers to make something decent of such scraps).

Frustration, thy name is Aiden McGeady. He possesses talent rare in an Irish player, but his footballing intelligence is questionable. One minute he is pulling a Garrincha, the next he is coughing up the ball after a mazy run because his head has been down the whole way and he has no idea of what's been happening around him. I'm going to sound like a patronising gobshite here, but he needs to get himself to the Premier League.

Cyprus were not at their best (they were scintillating against Italy last month) yet still deserved something from this one.

I love Paul McShane in a Philippe Senderos kind of way. His debut against the Czech Republic in 2006 was an example of the type of thing which gets me right in my dysfunctional heart: shutting down Jan Koller and not allowing him a single meaningful chance...except for the one which Koller turned into an equalising goal (it finished 1-1). Having McShane play, even at right-back, is a bit like Homer Simpson being in charge of safety at the nuclear plant. The enduring images from this game will include several of McShane on his arse, Ioannis Okkas having skedaddled past.

Éamon Dunphy is a bleating, know-nothing, blowhard, self-serving, egomaniacal, bufoonish hack. But then we knew that already.

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E=SH²

What is Stephen Hunt and where did it come from?

The answers to the latter question are, alas, cloaked in a fog of mystery, perhaps owing to a blunt force trauma to the head of history, incurred somehow. Such obfuscation has given rise to several myths purporting to explain Hunt's essence.

One has the young Stephen playing around the perimeter of Portlaoise Prison and discovering a piece of Semtex which he mistook for plasticine. He would carry it around with him wherever he went, and one day, as a curious child might, he put some in his mouth and swallowed it. (This tale is highly dubious, but it might explain his red card in the Czech Republic last year.)

Another says that he was discovered by a Crystal Palace scout while competing at Waterford Greyhound Track. It was not his speed or stride which impressed the scout so much as the ferocity with which he tore into the mechanical hare after the race. Some say he was the mechanical hare.

The most plausible explanation for Hunt is that he was, in fact, a budding professional cyclist from Colombia who became enchanted with Irish football, especially with the national team's left-flank combination of Ian Harte and Kevin Kilbane. So he forsook his destiny of polka-dot jerseys for a life of running around a lot on football pitches in England.

Whatever about his provenance, we know what Stephen Hunt is - energy. Rumour has it that in one drugs test, he passed pure battery acid. Apparently, Reading's decline last season was in part due to his being chased by several nefarious laboratories, all desperate to harvest his bone marrow for use by some of their more illustrious clients before the Olympics.


What he seems not to be is a footballer. The firing-up of the Large Hadron Collider appears to have had an unintended consequence on the left wing of a football pitch in Podgorica last night - the ball kept disappearing whenever it reached Hunt. His method when in possession - assuming he has managed to bring the ball under his control in the first place - is to run, and see what happens. It sometimes leaves him inside the penalty area, as if he's passed through a wormhole. Sometimes he is in a position to pass to a team-mate, often making the latter undergo hideous contortions in order to control it. Most frequently, there's a tangle of legs resulting in the ball ending up at the feet of an opponent.

This same uneducated instinctiveness is what makes him invaluable to Trapattoni's Ireland. He must be one of the most annoying, not to say frightening, players to face. Even if your not worried about the possibility of your ankle feeling the force of his studs (something which happens with alarming regularity, including to a Georgian player in the first minute of Saturday's game), you must contend with Hunt buzzing around you like a wasp on a bun. And he does it forever. If the match was still on right now (this is applicable whenever you're reading this) he would still be there, losing possession before hounding his opponent back, not allowing him a second's clear thought.

And this appears to be a microcosm of the national team's new era. One yearned to see Juan Rom...I mean Andy Reid, almost the inverse Stephen Hunt; someone who won't give the ball away easily, and would provide some incision going forward (this would have been especially welcome given another frustratingly misfiring game by Aiden McGeady). It would certainly have taken the edge off Robbie Keane's dose of the strops which afflict him every time he plays for Ireland, the poor chap.

What Reid lacks, despite his insistence to the contrary, is Hunt's ability and willingness to run and snap at ankles. Given that Trapattoni's priority is to keep things ticking over defensively rather than build around flair, his apparent antipathy towards Reid is understandable. One could even say it has been vindicated, partially at least, by the four points garnered so far, one of which was earned by blunting Montenegro's supposedly fierce attack. But for all that Hunt's tenacity benefits the team, the thought of Reid kicking his heels on the bench is a painful one. It's the thought of talent unfulfilled, of the kind of wizardry so rare in an Irish player going to waste. It appears Trapattoni would rather see the immediate, kinetic energy of Hunt and is happy for Reid's to remain potential.

Flickr photo by g r e e n g a g e.

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