It’s not all about the destination, the journey matters too

People want to see another way of playing because they’ve seen it already.

TO give an idea of just how fortuitous a passage Ireland have been presented with to qualify for next summer’s European Championships, it’s worth recalling probably the most impressive yet unheralded away victory in Irish football history.

On Wednesday, November 16, 1983, virtually 28 years to the day before the Republic of Ireland’s home play-off game against Estonia, Northern Ireland surprised West Germany 1-0 in front of 61,000 people in Hamburg, courtesy of a goal from Norman Whiteside.

We say ‘surprised’ because it was the first time ever Germany had been beaten at home in either a European Championship or World Cup qualifier, but not shocked because it wasn’t exactly freakish either; exactly a year earlier Billy Bingham’s side had beaten the Germans by the same scoreline in Windsor Park.

Unfortunately the North didn’t make it to the tournament itself the following summer in France. While in that qualifying campaign they had finished on the same number of points as the Germans and ahead of a highly-regarded Austrian team which had European Golden Boot winner Hans Krankl in his prime, the North missed out on goal difference.

In those days only one team qualified from each group. There were no play-offs for group runners-up. While 16 teams will make it to Poland and the Ukraine next summer and from 2016 on, 24 teams will feature in the tournament, back then it was just the eight that made it to the continent’s big dance.

We mention this because to reduce all analysis of an Irish international manager’s qualification campaign to whether he qualified or not is too simplistic and crude. There are all kinds of other variables at work, like the calibre of opposition. For all the indifference there is now down south to the fortunes of the North, back then many of us — and this columnist in particular — were more engaged during and impressed by the North’s journey through that Euro qualifying campaign than they would have been by the Republic’s through this one.

It was something similar with the Republic’s Euro 2000 campaign. For sure, at times the journey was frustrating, some of Mick McCarthy’s decisions baffling, and the campaign’s ultimate ending, disappointing, but we also had the high of beating Croatia 2-0 only a month after the Croats had finished third in the World Cup. We had Mark Kennedy’s wonder goal against a highly-rated Yugoslavia team. We prevented that Yugoslavia team even making the play-offs. In this campaign we didn’t finish ahead of any other heavyweight. We’ve yet to experience anything like the high of that goal or that team display against Yugoslavia.

As much as there is to admire about Trapattoni, one of the most infuriating things about the man is that just when it seemed after Paris as if the national team finally belonged to the nation, he duly took it away from us again by making the team so hard to watch.

Now a whole two years on, the country looks ready to embrace the team again, but the love should never have been so tough these past two years.

One of the unfortunate tendencies in Irish football discourse and commentary on Trapattoni’s reign and style is the constant comparisons and references to Jack Charlton. “Sure Jack had them playing awful looking football and all we did was sing Ole, Ole, Ole.” “Sure didn’t Jack get his luck with Gary Mackay and all that.”

You miss out on a lot of nuances when you resort to that.

Regarding Mackay’s goal; that was back in the days when only one team went through. We topped that group. Even if Bulgaria had topped it, we’d still finished ahead of a Belgian team that had reached the semi-finals of the previous World Cup and a Scottish team boasting many of the biggest names in British football.

As for the aesthetics of Jack’s football; at the time, the Republic needed something radical to make a radical progression and the public were largely innocent then. The public is far more sophisticated now, though the national team’s style of football isn’t. People want to see another way of playing because they’ve seen it already.

If any good has come out of how conflicted we are about Trap and his style, it’s that Mick McCarthy’s reign deserves some revisionism and greater recognition rather than being reduced to just Macedonia and Saipan. It’s a sentiment that’s never been expressed as such but essentially what people feel is this: they don’t want a return to how we played under Jack, and they certainly don’t want us resembling the shambles we were under Stan, but the medium they to want is something closer to what we had for about four years with Mick.

After Paris, Trap and his team deserved some luck. But people deserve to enjoy the journey to the destination that bit more.