Irish lose out in lottery but will be richer for brave bid
Cruel penalty drama should not detract from performance of poise and promise in Slovakia
THERE’S a catchpenny air to penalties, but maybe winning imparts its own unshakable grace. Ireland didn’t deserve this. True, there was no abracadabra moment, no lightning bolting from the Bratislava sky. But they played football faithful to Stephen Kenny’s promise, football announcing his hopes for them as something more than a PR brochure.
They lost in a lottery, but gained something in the act.
The glib inference is that Kenny wants Ireland’s play to seduce the angels when ‘real football people’ believe that it never can.
To some, his revolutionary spirit becomes a little pious, self-serving then. An overstating of the players’ capacity for creative initiative. He’s selling moonshine, they say. Peddling a falsity.
For last night’s opening 45 minutes, the closest his team came to scoring was a scuffed James McClean shot that would have gone wide had it not been blocked by a Slovak defender. Social media duly fizzled with agitation.
So in looking to puncture the received notion that – at this level at least – we cannot play, the new manager already fights a rearguard action. But he also, maybe, unwittingly, over-simplifies the past. Can he honestly say that every one of his modern predecessors worked off such painfully narrow ambition that Ireland has no history worth the name? Hope, after all, has been known to spring up sporadically in the most unexpected places.
Like from Giovanni Trapattoni’s team against France in Paris in ’09. Or Martin O’Neill’s against Italy in Lille seven years later. But that hope has seldom felt like the product of clear philosophy. In this, Kenny burns to be different. To most people football is a simple, transactional exercise. A game of maths that will never represent any great conflict in the soul. But, for him, it carries the air of dignified struggle. He is less interested, he says, in the employment status of his players than in their capacity to learn. But then how much can an international manager logically teach?
He can expect such little time with his players, a coaching dogma seems no more rooted than pollen on the wind. And much of Kenny’s preparatory work for last night was, by necessity, done remotely from his home outside Dundalk. Working through Zoom calls. Selling something almost abstract.
Hardly ideal when the theory holds that you’re trying to storm the walls of prejudice. But then is he really? Can a case not be made that arguments about style are themselves just mostly clichés? No manager has ever been revered for beautiful failure and, last night, Kenny always needed a result far more urgently than he needed wolf whistles for his team.
Just three games into his tenure but, already operating, it seemed, in a force field of anxiety then. One predicated on the obvious danger that, in wanting to get the ball down and play, Ireland might actually facilitate opponents for whom our physical, combative stereotype was more worrying. Call it the law of unintended consequences.
This, after all, was a Slovak team with one arm pinned behind its back.
A team deprived three of its best players and anchored by a central midfield of two 33-year-olds. A team for whom the benefits of playing at home had been rinsed thoroughly away by Covid. The challenge for Ireland was plainly non-profound here.
James McClean’s selection, of course, did speak of Ireland encountering their own, unwanted off-field drama, Aaron
Last night, Kenny always needed a result far more urgently than he needed wolf whistles for his team
Connolly absent even from the bench. And yet eight of the starting 11 are Premier League players. One of them, Callum Robinson, fashioned an opportunity inside 30 seconds, yet any promise of an open game fell silent.
Both teams were earnest, but predictably cagey. As expected, Marek Hamsik played Slovak puppeteer, but seldom without James McCarthy snapping at the wires.
The first half passed by uneventfully until Darren Randolph’s terrific save from Duda on the stroke of half-time before the same player was close with an overhead kick from the resulting corner. Artistically? Slim pickings in Bratislava. Ireland were, it should be said, patient in possession though. Maybe that, in itself, was a departure.
And Hamsik did almost concede a 50th-minute own goal from Conor Hourihane’s delivery, but it was the home team, palpably, growing in conviction as the minutes ticked by.
That said, the stitching of the game was loosening at both ends now, Enda Stevens working substitute, Alan Browne, in with 20 minutes of normal time remaining, the Slovak goalkeeper making a good save.
Block
Four minutes later, Shane Duffy was making that brilliant 74th-minute goalline block at the other end, Randolph finally beaten.
That was the tenor of it now. End to end. Desperation sucking the nutrients from any discernible philosophy.
And there, always flickering in the background, the terror of a costly mistake. A contrary weather system rolling up in the mind.
With extra-time looming, risk-aversion took over. And yet and yet, that 85th minute opportunity that fell, regrettably, on Hourihane’s wrong foot found its genesis in precisely the kind of heads-up, intelligent football that Kenny so openly covets.
Was that, maybe, the first real glimpse of a new faith? The second? That 105th-minute move leading to Alan Browne flicking against a post. Glorious, creative, ambitious.
No matter, wrong foot, wrong side of the post, and – in both cases – wrong outcomes. But a football game broke out in extra-time, both teams finding coherence now if not exactly soaring fluency. It started with a David McGoldrick effort being tipped over and, from there, the battle just gusting one way, then the other.
And in time, inevitably, the spectre of penalties loomed. Rolls of a cold dice. They fell the Slovaks’ way, Browne and Matt Doherty failing to score. But hope gained undeniably for the future.