Foul Play

Humiliated in Poland, the question begs asking: would it have been better for Ireland not to have qualified for Euro 2012?

Craig Fitzsimons, 01 Aug 2012

To lose then to no less than three horribly soft goals, two of which would almost certainly have been stopped by Shay Given as we once knew him, shattered all those assumptions. The danger of an extended unbeaten run is that you start to think you’re unbeatable, and are more easily persuaded to overlook glaring evidence to the contrary.

Hindsight now suggests that the 180 minutes of our two qualifying jousts with Russia should have served as a serious wake-up call. As it turns out, we could have lost the Moscow game 10-0 and still reached the play-offs; and perhaps it would have been better if we had. The scoreboard never lies, but it can certainly deceive; the 0-0 draw on that occasion effectively camouflaged what was an evisceration of gruesome proportions.

Confronted by Croatia then, the first genuinely good team we’d locked horns with in nine months, all the luck we’d enjoyed in qualifying deserted us. We were rudely reminded very early on that it isn’t against the law for the opposition to score, and things swiftly went from bad to a whole lot worse, the false dawn of St. Ledger’s equaliser notwithstanding. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say they played us off the park; in truth, they didn’t need to. Our own inadequacies did the job for them more than amply.

Though I’d elected not to bang on about it in print, I had taken note of a worrying decline from Shay’s usual standards of reliability in the 12 months or so prior to the finals, with bloopers against Armenia and Estonia stirring fears that he might no longer be the immense force we’d come to trust so whole-heartedly.

Even so, it was a horrible shock to see his powers atrophy so dramatically, spending much of the tournament doing a convincing impression of one of those comedy Scottish goalkeepers you’d see on an ‘80s episode of The Saint & Greavsie. Not that it would be remotely fair to lay all the blame at his door, with the entire back four being shown up horribly, again and again, most notably the drastically limited Stephen Ward at full-back.

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