En route to an audience with Robbie Keane in Crumlin the other day, the journey down the Long Mile Road and past the Half-Way House offered a handy metaphor for where Ireland are at in their Euro 2020 campaign.

And then there was one. Well, two actually, but the World Cup third-place play-off is definitely one of those nominally competitive fixtures which presents a fairly robust challenge to my old friend Declan Lynch’s wise maxim that there’s never a good reason not to watch a football match.

At yesterday’s launch of RTÉ’s Euro 2012 coverage, Eamon Dunphy looked out from the top table at a packed room of journalists, photographers and camera crews, and couldn’t help remarking with a grin: “I reckon that there are more people in this room than were watching when John Giles and myself first worked together on RTÉ in 1978.”