Colm O'Regan: Why I'm linking the Luxembourg match to my central heating

To install it was too expensive and disruptive and might actually damage 100-year-old structures that would need to be rebuilt. A bit like reforming the FAI.

I know it was only Luxembourg. Who somehow had become the auld enemy. We had a beef with Luxembourg! We shouldn’t be beefing with them. We should be having high-level meetings about innovative tax-planning. Or about tin foil apparently. (Luxembourg is home to one of the largest tin foil manufacturers in the world. I bet they NEVER save their tin foil in a hardback book in Luxembourg.) And yes I KNOW this was a dead rubber as a match while, elsewhere, bigger countries like em…Wales and Scotland- fried their bigger fish.

But still, there was a moment towards the end of the match where I thought “This is what it must be like to be other countries”. It was when Ireland got the third goal. It was the way it was scored. James McClean in full gallop, hitting a booming cross perfectly onto the instep of Jason Knight who stunned it back inside to Calum Robinson who swept it home, smiling, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
It’s the kind of goal that gets scored against us so often when we’re desperately chasing the game. And afterwards, there’s a debate about the state of football in the country and Johnny Giles or someone trying to be him, says something about street football and we have a post-mortem about why we can’t produce the players. I remember we once played Turkey and the commentators were going on about Turkish triangles. Where were OUR triangles? The situation was acute.