RIGHT, so, we must try to rebuild our lives as best we can. It appears that for all our outrage at the time, the great Thierry Henry may have done Ireland a colossal favour last November, sparing the Boys In Green from the unthinkably degrading humiliation of making absolute tits of themselves in front of a global audience. Perhaps his handball was motivated not by base self-interest, but by an altruistic desire to spare us the gallows.

Maybe he thought to himself, “I can’t possibly let these leaden-footed cloggers expose themselves to the risk of getting torn limb from limb by Brazil, Spain, or for that matter Algeria and North Korea, while the entire planet watches and laughs.”
And just maybe, instead of excoriating the dazzling Parisian and demonising him as basically the most evil European since Adolf Hitler, we should have erected a statue to the magnificent Thierry in O’Connell Street and given him the freedom of Dublin, his name enshrined alongside the hallowed likes of Connolly, Pearse and Larkin as one of the saviours of the nation. We will, of course, never know how Ireland would have fared at the global party, but on the evidence of the past fortnight, it would not have been a pretty sight.
Trap’s halo has vanished overnight; while the footballing public’s general verdict this time two weeks ago was ambiguously in favour of the 71-year-old Italian, he is now widely dismissed as a scandalously overpaid geriatric chancer two decades past his sell-by date. In his defence, it must be pointed out that he is working with arguably the most limited panel of Irish international players in living memory (Eoin Hand had an embarrassment of riches to choose from by comparison). Part of the beauty of international football – and the reason why it will always be more genuine, honest and meaningful than its club equivalent, where the league table has long since become little more than a Rich List – is that you can’t just go out and spend €10 million on a playmaker if you haven’t got one. It’s a question of making the most of what you have, and right now, not to put too fine a point of it, we are not exactly overflowing with quality.
The point has been made many times that Jack Charlton had an almighty array of talent at his disposal, and there’s a school of thought that he actually under-achieved. Even Mick McCarthy could call upon one of the world’s finest box-to-box midfielders, and a supporting cast drawn almost entirely from the starting line-ups of English Premiership clubs.
By contrast, our only genuinely world-class operator is a 34-year-old goalkeeper who is currently consigned to sit on the bench every week. Our left-back isn’t getting picked for second-tier side Hull City. Our excuse for a central midfield, at present, consists of a Stoke City reserve and a Derby County journeyman (Paul Green) who, without wishing him any harm, appears to be the least naturally gifted footballer to represent his country since... well, maybe Paul Butler or Glen Crowe, or the legendary Ken de Mange.
Up front, Robbie Keane is enduring easily the worst spell of his career; Shane Long did pretty well against Russia and Slovakia, but there isn’t exactly a queue of European superpowers beating the door down to secure his signature. Liam Lawrence was forced to drop down a division when it became apparent that he was surplus to requirements at Stoke, and it may not be too long before the same can be said of Glenn Whelan.
And yet – a glance at the Group B table confirms that all is not lost, and despite the wreckage of the last two weeks, we still have every chance of securing second place in the Group and worming our way into the play-offs.
Okay, we all know what usually happens when we reach the play-offs, but a year is a long, long time in football, and if the likes of Seamus Coleman, James McCarthy, David Meyler and Marc Wilson progress significantly over the next twelve months, we may well be in a much healthier state this time next year.
We need to bear in mind that, while Russia are clearly operating on a different planet to everyone else in the Group, there is no compelling reason to fear any of the others.
I was desperately disappointed to emerge from the Slovakia encounter with only one point – they were visibly there for the taking – but, if we want to look on the bright side, we should note that we were clearly the better side for vast stretches of the game, which augurs quite well for our prospects of accumulating more points than them over the course of a 10-match campaign. They got on top in the last 20 minutes or so, and the final whistle probably arrived at the right time from our point of view, but we really should have been out of sight by at least two goals long before then. The overriding impression of the night was that they’re a pretty flimsy proposition, as was borne out by their implosion in Armenia where they succumbed 3-1. We may have been reading way too much into their 1-0 win in Moscow last month: I didn’t see the game in question, but most eyewitness accounts confirm that the Russians repeatedly ripped them to shreds and the final scoreline was something of a travesty.
In truth, the Slovakia-Ireland game was so shockingly low on overall quality that we might need to take on board the very real possibility that Armenia and Macedonia, dismissed as makeweights before the Group got underway, may have every prospect of playing a full part in a four-way slugfest for the play-off place.
Recent performances certainly suggest that the Armenians are on the cusp of becoming a pretty decent outfit, and those three points we secured in Yerevan on opening day are beginning to look very, very valuable.
We’re currently staring at the prospect of five months in limbo before the next assignment rolls around (Macedonia in Dublin) – it’s to be hoped that both Shay Given and Robbie Keane will be reborn at new clubs by then, and that Trap uses the forthcoming Norway and Wales friendlies to test out some of the new breed.
At the very least, Seamus Coleman is clearly ready to step in at right-back, which would involve John O’Shea shifting over to the other flank and Kevin Kilbane being gracefully stood down after thirteen years of wonderfully whole-hearted service. Midfield is also in dire need of an overhaul: the Paul Green experiment should surely be consigned to history and never spoken of again, but with Keith Andrews, Steven Reid (if he can be persuaded), Meyler, McCarthy and Wilson in the picture, it shouldn’t be beyond Trap’s capabilities to stumble upon a partnership that works. Executed properly, with a fully-recharged Robbie dropping deeper, the manager’s favoured formation is not a million miles away from the 4-2-3-1 that all the best teams favoured at the World Cup: with Duff, McGeady and Keane spraying it around behind Kevin Doyle (and Shane Long an increasingly valuable resource off the bench) it hopefully isn’t entirely insane to dream of brighter days ahead. We have to.