Irish glass half-full and half-empty

In terms of how the results on Friday and Monday have altered the table in Ireland’s favour, Martin O’Neill couldn’t have written a better script for the September games. We now have a four-point advantage over Scotland going into the crunch month of October, a swing few would have dared to predict before the matches in Faro, Tbilisi, Glasgow and Dublin.

But if there’s much to be cheered by on that score, the same can’t honestly be said about the manner in which the team did its bit to hoist itself up into third spot. In truth, we toiled to get our six points, even while Scotland were doing us the huge favour of suffering back-to-back defeats. We always knew we were going to win against Gibraltar but I thought we really laboured to get that 1-0 victory over Georgia at the Aviva on Monday.

The other negative from the night was the loss of two players for next month’s game against Germany.