Kieran Shannon: Pride can swiftly turn into embarrassment with this Ireland team
Should Ireland manage to beat Armenia on Tuesday, it would send them into the final window of the campaign still having a chance of qualifying for the World Cup. Pic: Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
On Saturday night, even as clinical and objective an eye as Didi Hamann’s seemed to have a tear in it.
Although Ireland had lost in Lisbon, “everyone”, he claimed, would be “proud of the lads”.
When was the last time, he asked, did this team “perform to a level where the whole nation was proud of them?”
To which we could reply, more recently and often than you and your rhetorical question may think, Didi – and explains why our pride and hope last Saturday night was so contained.
We’ve seen this tearjerker of a movie before and then its sequel turn into either a horror or a farce.
Take four years against the same opposition in the same country, only back then it was in Faro.
Just like last Saturday, Ireland’s goalkeeper on that occasion brilliantly denied Cristiano Ronaldo from a penalty, the home side were shut out for 90 minutes, only for in injury-time a Portuguese to head in a cross to leave Ireland empty-handed.
We all felt for Stephen Kenny and his team that night. Even proud of them.
Three days later they played Azerbaijan in the Aviva. It took an 87th minute Shane Duffy goal to force a draw against a side 112th in the world.
That’s how quickly it took for pride to turn into embarrassment, for Ireland to go from gallant to abject, heroic to horrendous.
It was the most common and defining feature of Kenny’s entire tenure.
Ireland were all of those more positive qualities – to which you could also add defiant and unlucky – in the fateful Euro 2020 playoff qualifier against Slovakia, losing only on penalties.
Within a week, Ireland had lost 1-0 to Finland in the Nations League, establishing the tone and trend for the rest of his reign.
Before Faro and Azerbaijan there was Serbia (a highly respectable 3-2 loss away) and Luxembourg (a dismal 1-0 defeat at home just three days later) in that same World Cup qualifying campaign.
In the Euro 2024 qualifiers there was the encouraging 1-0 home defeat to France in March 2023 which even as constant a critic of Kenny’s as Kevin Kilbane would hail as “brilliant”. The next day out all that promise evaporated with a 2-1 loss in Athens.
It was the same story when we hosted the other heavyweight in that group. After pushing – and even – leading the Dutch only to lose 2-1 in the Aviva, in our next game we were again out-classed and outthought by the Greeks.
Heimir was hired to be the opposite of Kenny. A lucky general, not another unfortunate one. A pragmatist rather than a romantic, concerned only with the short-term and the results business rather than being consumed by a never-ending project and process. Forget the cultural war; just win – or at least draw – the next battle.
Yet here we are just a month into his first – and possibly last – qualifying campaign and the Kenny sequence continues. A stirring finish – though hardly start – against Hungary, followed by the nadir of Yereven.
For five years now we have been the Gattusos of international football – sometimes maybe good, sometimes – indeed very often in the next game – eh, not so good.
With that formline there is no cause to be certain or even optimistic that Lisbon and Armenia at home in the autumn of 2025 won’t go the same way as Faro and Azerbaijan in the autumn of 2021.
You would hope that Hallgrimsson has delved and dug deep into that sequence of results, including those that predated him. To not just attribute that recurring failure to put back-to-back performances and results together to the weight of the shirt but also tiredness in the legs and a failure to be tactically adept and agile.
Last month in Armenia he only made two changes to the side who started three days earlier in the Aviva. At least one more than that is advisable this time.
Should Ireland and their manager break that duck and trend, so much opens up.
For one it would mean the team going into the last window of the campaign with still a chance of qualifying. Ireland hasn’t known that since that penalty shootout loss to Slovakia back in the covid-afflicted spring of 2020.
Do that and some hope and optimism returns.
Until then any public pride should be withheld.
The team’s has to become more tangible and frequent first.
