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Oh, woe. This Republic of Ireland side will never be back at square one after their adventures over the last year and a bit, but it probably felt that way come full-time on Tuesday night. The most golden of opportunities missed. It’s Wales, richly deservedly, who are off to Switzerland next summer for Euro 2025. Ireland will just be watching it all on the telly.
There’ll be no end of recriminations, need it be said, the FAI and Eileen Gleeson will be in for it. But the plain enough truth is that this Irish team simply didn’t produce the goods over two legs against an arguably less talented side, but one that was ravenously hungry for its first ever qualification for a major tournament. They were, in that sense, much like the Ireland that turned up at Hampden Park 26 months ago, rather than the one that frittered it all away at the Aviva.
Tony O’Donoghue was finding his inner ABBA when he previewed the match on the Six One news. “The winner takes it all,” he said, and when you think about it, “I don’t wanna talk about things we’ve gone through, though it’s hurting me, now it’s history” could well have been a reference to Ireland’s playoff past – until that night in Glasgow. So there was no reason not to bound into this game with a heap of optimism.
But come the start of their coverage of the game, RTÉ2 chose a Sigur Rós tune to soundtrack clips from Cardiff on Friday night and set up the second leg, and whenever a Sigur Rós tune is chosen to soundtrack a sporting tussle, you get an overwhelming feeling of melancholia, with a dollop of ominous thrown in.
But while Karen Duggan and Stephanie Zambra did have a slight ominously melancholic air about them when they chatted about the game with Marie Crowe, their nerves evidently shredded, they were confident-ish too that Ireland could up their game from Friday and get the job done. Mind you, Marie didn’t exactly soothe them with her reminder that there could be extra-time and penalties.
Tony tracked down the two managers for a quick natter, Wales’ Rhian Wilkinson having been a little bit rude about our bunch in the build-up, suggesting, as Karen described it, that they were a touch “agricultural” in their approach to the game of association football.
When she saw the markings on the pitch, perhaps unaware that our rugby lads had played Australia on Saturday, she might have anticipated lineouts and scrums instead of total football, but for those first 20 minutes there was no end of rucking and mauling from both sides. It was, to put it mildly, dire, Ireland and Wales largely unable to pass to players wearing the same colour shirts.
But then the game upped itself several levels. Denise O’Sullivan hit the crossbar with a gem of a hit, Katie McCabe’s shot sailed just wide of the right post, and Julie Ann Russell’s curler was just about tipped away by Olivia Clark. Now we were whistling. Mind you, Courtney Brosnan twice had to be her excellent self, so you wouldn’t have been booking flights to Zurich or Geneva just yet.
“So far, so good,” said Marie at the break, but Karen and Stephanie were more ‘so far, so okay-ish’, their chief concern at that point captain McCabe’s decidedly proximity to a second yellow card. “She’s playing on the edge,” said Karen, “but unfortunately she’s not controlling that edge.”
Second half. We probably don’t wanna talk about things we’ve gone through, and few ordeals were more painful than those 45 (plus eight) minutes.
It wasn’t just Ireland that were malfunctioning, the referee’s VAR screen failed too when she was trying to spot if Anna Patten handled the ball in the box. But, penalty, 0-1. And by the 67th minute it was 0-2, the whole occasion turning in to the shape of a pear.
“Fasten your seat belts,” said Des Curran when Patten pulled one back near the death, the closing moments excruciating. But all over.
Sensible folk always advise that you should never use the word ‘disaster’ in the context of sport. They’re right too. But damn it, it felt like one of Tuesday night.
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