Ireland's draw with Poland raises more questions than answers

Ireland’s 1-1 draw with Poland last Sunday provided definitive proof that, just as we’d always suspected, the celebrated glass is indeed both half-full and half-empty at one and the same time.

The optimistically-minded were entitled to take encouragement from that stirring second-half performance, when the throbbing Aviva finally felt like a proper home for Irish football and the up-and-at-’em momentum generated by both team and crowd was finally rewarded with that euphoric stoppage-time equaliser.

But it was in the strange nature of the game that pessimists could observe the very same thing and arrive at a very different conclusion, pointing to a dismayingly disjointed first-half showing by the men in green and noting too that their much improved second-half display could not be wholly extracted from the context of Poland’s clear and perfectly understandable decision to try to hold what they had after the break.