By 4pm, there was a hopeless gap between the gallant optimism which abounded and despair that took over
‘IT DIDN’T MATTER THAT DISCORD WAS REPORTED TO BE A PROBLEM IN BELGIUM SQUAD’
NOTHING for it now but blind hope. The alternative is despair. Ireland supporters will wring what fun they can out of the next four days, but the players have a more forbidding job. They have to believe their European Championships can live beyond Wednesday.
The evidence for it is spare, and optimism will lean heavily on the hope that Italy put out a B team against us. It makes for thin consolation.
RTÉ began its coverage yesterday with a 90-second re-run of the best bits versus Sweden, accompanied by a woman’s voice reading lines from ‘A Disused Shed in Co Wexford’.
Derek Mahon’s work is one of the great poems of Ireland, but is in part a meditation on the Holocaust, and generally a consideration of places and people that have suffered neglect and sometimes disaster. Hope resides within it, too, and the defiant last line was evocatively used in RTÉ’s montage
‘Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
By 4pm, that curling tendril of optimism lay mulched and useless. There was a hopeless gap between the gallant optimism that prevailed before the match and the quiet devastation after it.
John Giles, Liam Brady and Eamon Dunphy had the expressions of hanging judges at half time. Before the match, Dunphy had already eyed up a couple of necks ready for the noose. Ciarán Clark and James McCarthy were scrutinised and their deficiencies backlit.
But during the interval, there was no gibbet, no ropes being slapped against impatient thighs. There was no patsy who could take all the blame, try as they might to find one.
Ireland were succumbing to one of the immutable laws of the universe: technically better players dominate lesser ones. It didn’t matter that discord was reported to be a problem in the Belgium squad, any more than Ireland’s game, honest resistance did. Good players mostly always beat their inferiors.
Giles called Romelu Lukaku a ‘disgrace’ during the break, claiming he was taking the day off. The Everton forward illustrated his magnificence with his goal in the 48th minute. Giles’ judgement was absurdly harsh, and less than three minutes after the resumption his pat judgement was exposed.
Creditably, there was a step up in Ireland’s endeavour after the goal, but the natural order would not be denied. The sound header from Axel Witsel that put Belgium out of reach was simple and ruthlessly effective, two attributes of high-quality play.
In response, Ireland tried to hit long balls to Shane Long, but he was as isolated as Inisbofin. James McClean came on, too. His effect is similar to opening a shaken can of Coke, but the Belgians were able to absorb his unfocussed energy.
With Lukaku’s second goal and his country’s third, Ireland slumped towards humiliation. The goal was most notable for the shrieking lunge by Clark at Eden Hazard, the Chelsea playmaker stepping around him as if he were a shrub.
Hope had succumbed to fear early on, in the face of Belgium’s dominant start. Now, embarrassment was predominating and Ireland’s week was refracted through an altogether less optimistic lens. The 1-1 draw with Sweden seemed to certain eyes to have been greeted with surprising enthusiasm, given the general poverty of the opposition performance.
That impression was reinforced by their display in defeat to Italy, but the Irish opener was also significant for the confirmation it brought of Jonathan Walters’ lack of fitness.
That deprived Ireland of an alternative target to Long, as well as a dutiful and effective first line of defence. To quote those historians of the economic collapse, Ireland lost the run of itself for no better reason than they hadn’t lost to the Swedes, whose play was safer and more accommodating than the country’s benefits system.
Irish players were being linked with some of the best Premier League clubs. The Belgian camp was supposed to be so riven with strife, it made some of those warring Dutch squads of the 1990s look like the Corrs.
Our optimism and their self-harm left pre-match predictions wavering somewhere between an Irish draw and a glorious victory.
Meanwhile, the Italians have their feet up, we are led to believe, and will field a second-string against us on Wednesday so pliable that Nancy Dell’Ollio and those puppets from the Dolmio ads will all get a game.
Italy may be vulnerable. They cannot call upon the quality of other years, but the nature of Ireland’s challenge must be taken into account, too. Ours is an honest, ambitious but severely limited group.
People need to be realistic in assessing the team’s chances now. Turkey’s humiliation against Spain is the only performance that ranks lower than Ireland’s yesterday. A side can putter along on heart and discipline for only so long.
The intrigue now surrounds the Irish reaction. They have no option but to go after a win against Italy in Lille, but outside of Long there is no convincing source of goals in the squad.
It will need a victory summoned from a truly remarkable place for Ireland to make the last 16 now.
Inevitably, there were scapegoats left tethered after this. Brady said McCarthy had ‘let the side down’ for the first two goals, and it was unsurprising to see him cast in the Lee Harvey Oswald role by the RTÉ panel.
But no way could the failings of one man explain this. Dunphy tried to argue otherwise, decrying a team ‘without belief’ and ‘without shape’, blaming McCarthy and Clark, and O’Neill for picking them.
His thesis was laughably flimsy, and it betrayed the entertainer rather than the serious pundit. There was the usual evocation of Joe Schmidt, Brian Cody and the country’s best jockeys as exemplars of the kind of concentration and application that millionaire soccer players do not possess.
But for reasons of sporting culture that extend back decades, Belgian players are more technically gifted than Irish ones. The result yesterday was mainly a consequence of that.
Ireland’s only alternative was to adopt the tactical equivalent of a foetal position and try to absorb as many Belgian blows as they could. They were braver than that, but they suffered nonetheless.
‘They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith’, wrote Mahon in his sublime poem. That is the job of Ireland’s players now. Their only choice is to believe, even as reality looms over them.