Things looking up but Ireland still well adrift of Iceland
WHAT’S the difference between Ireland and Iceland?’ went the joke. ‘One letter and about six months,’ came t he punchline.
It was a scoff that had its 15 minutes of fame around 2008 as our banks began to slide downhill, ready to fall off the fiscal cliff into the same ocean that Iceland’s rickety houses of finance had plummeted into.
It was only a joke though and not a very funny one. It’s a good five years old now. And the only thing worse than a bad joke is an old bad joke. But that doesn’t mean Iceland drifted off of our national psyche.
No, the intervening years have been filled with comparisons and contrasts between ourselves and our fellow rocky Atlantic outpost with a money problem. And the consensus would be that they’ve done the whole recovery thing a lot better than us.
Not only are they back on a much more even keel than Enda and the boys but they’ve managed to put actual bankers behind actual bars for actual crimes while our pinstriped brigade swan around suburban America laughing at the simpletons back home.
There’s another key difference between the two nations right now too, though — one that matters more to those of us who spend our lives on these pages and not in the business or political realm. And that’s that Iceland can still qualify for the World Cup.
We’ve just had a week in which the Irish national football team had the country buzzing like it hasn’t for some time — maybe even more so
Lagerback has done great things
t han l ast year’s Euro 2012 (mis)adventure. And yet Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane won’t be taking charge of a match of substance for almost a full year.
That’s a lot of waiting around for two men who have forged vaunted careers on the back of not waiting around a lot. There’s a long way to go to that first competitive outing for our bromantic couple but then Irish football has a long way to go.
The first area of focus for the brain trust will be this Friday night. Not Dublin, where a meaningless friendly (have Latvia ever engendered so much excitement?) will signal the dawn of this new era. Instead our managerial masterminds will be on Athens where Greece and Romania do battle in the first leg of the World Cup play-offs.
The brain-bending maths behind such seeding formulae are beyond us so let’s just stick to the simple facts. If Romania fail to win both legs of the play-off, Ireland will be second seeds for the upcoming Euro 2016 campaign — one in which two teams will qualify from each group.
It’s all pretty important then. Come on you Greece! Do us a favour. Bailout buddies and all that. But if Giorgios Samaras can’t help us out (nicknamed ‘The Athenian Fenian’ he really should), then Keane and O’Neill should look elsewhere in the play-offs for inspiration. Reykjavik to be exact.
Iceland’s campaign has been one that hasn’t just confounded critics or convention. History has been no match for them either. Never has a team seeded so low got so far. Lars Lagerback began his first full campaign at the helm with his side sixth seeds in Group E. That’s what you get when you’re ranked 131st in the world as recently as April of last year.
They now sit 14 places above Ire- land in 46th in the global league table and welcome a Croatia team that still have a stench of chaos about them (they sacked Igor Stimac and replaced him with the Kovac brothers last month) on Friday before Tuesday’s return in Zagreb. Yet Iceland are still massive underdogs.
But then they’ve always been massive underdogs. And they should be, with a population of 320,000, just a few thousand more than the county of Galway. Were they to qualify for Brazil they would shatter the record for the smallest country ever to make it to the big show — Trinidad and Tobago (population 1.35 million) in 2006.
Giovanni Trapattoni’s lament that he didn’t have a league to work with could have been echoed by Lagerback, given that League of Ireland clubs have enjoyed coming out on top of their Icelandic counterparts in recent meetings.
But the veteran, who brought his native Sweden to five-straight major tournaments, instead embraced the domestic game. He also embraced effervescent youth in Spurs’ Gylfi Sigurdsson and Ajax l i vewire Kolbeinn Sigthorson and threw in a flick of experience by re-energising a s omehow- still - only- 3 5 Eidur Gudjohnsen.
It’s the kind of managerial masterstroke Denis O’Brien is expecting for his hefty outlay this week.
And Iceland, after all, should still hold a place in Roy Keane’s heart. It was there in 1997 that he put in arguably the most dogged of his I’llwin-it-on-my-own displays, dragging an awful Ireland to a 4-2 win. Now, as he and O’Neill get ready to pull and drag all over again, this new Iceland should hold a place in his mind.