Irish team still caught in a Trap

Gibraltar versus Ireland in Faro last weekend was the first international I’ve attended where the pre-match traffic actually thinned out the closer you got to the ground.

With the hours preceding kick-off coinciding with what passes for rush hour in the laid-back capital of the Algarve, it meant our taxi from the centre of town had to negotiate a fairly busy motorway until we hit the turn-off for the Estadio Algarve — at which point we pretty much had the road to ourselves for the remainder of the journey.

Though a couple of thousand Irish fans and a couple of hundred Rockies did their best to create some sort of atmosphere, a total attendance of just over 5,000 inside the 30,000 capacity stadium told you all you needed to know about the limited extent to which this Euro 2016 qualifier had captured the imagination of the locals.