Danes taken aback as football breaks out at Aviva

Blown about by erratic and deceptive winds of change in Abbotstown and a no-nonsense full force gale in Gibraltar, Irish football was in urgent need of some shelter from the storm at the Aviva on Tuesday night.

So a doff of the hat to Mick McCarthy and his team for providing not just that but also grounds for believing that there might be sunnier days to come — at least on the pitch — with a win over Georgia which, in contrast to the scrambled victory by the same score last Saturday, came with the hugely welcome bonus of a performance that was frequently and refreshingly easy on the eye.

To be fair to the players who had to contend with the madcap conditions in Gibraltar, those of us who were there can attest that television couldn’t possibly convey just how challenging it must have been to get even some of the most basic things right in the teeth of a howling wind which did nothing to ameliorate the unforgiving bounce of the plastic pitch.

The best that could be said of it all was that the Irish avoided a shock on the Rock and came away with three points secured by a goal which resulted from one of the few times in the game when the visitors were able to create and complete a passage of quality play.

But while night appeared to be gathering for John Delaney in Gibraltar, there was really nothing in the ugliest of wins over a team ranked 194th in the world, to suggest that, with Martin McCarthy replacing Martin O’Neill at the helm, a new dawn was breaking for the Irish team.

We had to wait until the following Tuesday for evidence of that, with a vibrant Irish performance against Georgia not only delighting the Aviva but surprising outside observers who had come expecting, with good reason, something rather different.

That much was made clear in a conversation I had after the game with a Danish journalist who, prior to kick off, must have believed he’d drawn the short straw in having to travel to Dublin instead of Basel, where his country would stage a remarkable late, late comeback to share the points in a 3-3 thriller with Switzerland.

But if my Danish friend had been fully expecting a dour, damage-limitation Irish approach, such as he had witnessed on the last two occasions his country and ours had met in the Nations League, he seemed pleasantly surprised — or maybe that should be worried — by what he saw from Mick McCarthy’s team.

“The biggest difference was that Ireland were all the time moving forward,” he observed. “They were playing…”

And here he found himself struggling for the right words in English.

“Er, football?” I suggested.

“Yes, football,” he grinned.

He went on to pick out Ireland’s best performers as “your number 9 and your number 6”, a reminder that two players — David McGoldrick and Glenn Whelan — whose international races seemed, for very different reasons, to have been well and truly run by the end of the O’Neill era, were experiencing a second coming of their own under McCarthy. Whelan, my new friend reckoned, was the “glue” holding the side together, not a bad description of the veteran’s contribution to the cohesion at the heart of the team’s display.

There were also plenty of other impressive individual showings on the night — Conor Hourihane and Jeff Hendrick chief amongst them — as well as a reminder of how important it is to have Darren Randolph in top form, even in a game where his side are largely dominant.

And there’s the rub. For all the positives of the Irish performance, especially in contrast to the poverty of ambition evident throughout the previous year and on the last two occasions we had faced Georgia, the victory at the end was still only by the narrowest possible margin, even with home advantage, and against one of Group D’s two lowest seeds. True, we know that the Georgians are capable of better than their ranking suggests, but as indicated by Switzerland’s 2-0 win in Tbilisi, McCarthy’s resurgent side can expect to face much tougher tests, both home and away, against the Swiss and the Danes.

Another concern is that, while David McGoldrick’s all-round performance on Tuesday was sufficiently impressive to earn him a man of the match award, it still took a brilliant free-kick from a midfielder to make all the difference on the scoreboard, as another 90 minutes elapsed without an Irish striker getting to put the ball in the net. And perhaps that was what was on McCarthy’s mind when he later observed that an extra boost arising out of two wins out of two might be that “one or two we have been trying to get might go ‘hold on a minute’ and sit up and take a look at us at the top of the group”.

Are you listening, Patrick Bamford?

In the meantime, it’s enough to recognise the fact that McCarthy got as much as he did on Tuesday out of the players he does have available. Encouragingly too — and regardless of whether or not any new faces enter the picture over the course of the campaign — he knows that the likes of Shane Long, Callum O’Dowda, and Callum Robinson, all unavailable for selection for the first two games, will be among those already in the frame who will definitely want to stake a claim. Not forgetting the almost forgotten man, James McCarthy if, as one can only hope, he finally gets to put his injury nightmare behind him.

After just two wins, and one uplifting performance, it’s far too early to be talking of an Irish side utterly transformed under new management. But the signs are encouraging and, at a time when such matters as loans and repayments are disturbingly front and centre, it feels good to be able to say that a debt of gratitude is owed to McCarthy and his players for putting the smile back on the face of Irish football. That’ll do nicely, for now.