Tommy Martin: We haven't yet reached the limits of Heimirball

Ireland boss Heimir Hallgrímsson dejected after the match. Pic: Ben Brady/Inpho

Anyone for a debate about the Israel match? Yes, Tuesday night’s meaningless friendly against North Macedonia, brought to you by the good people at the Ticketmaster resale option, is not the only grim prospect on the horizon after Thursday night’s devastation in Prague.

One of the great things about the past week or so has been the absolute absence of any discussion whatsoever on Irish football’s variety of hot button topics. 

No FAI finances, nothing about investment in youth academies, no giving out about decrepit facilities and the loudhailer of football-adjacent political protest briefly silenced too.

Instead, it was how things should be. Flights booked via Warsaw and Amsterdam and Istanbul and Berlin and Manchester and five-hour treks in camper vans from Wroclaw where necessary. The ticket hunt and the economic laws of supply and demand. 

Guys milling about Prague with parrots on their heads.

The fella from Melbourne doing a Stephen Ireland to get out of work. The queue at the Dubliner Pub in the old town at opening time. Parrott’s on fire, your defence is terrified. Liveline on tour. Pink Pony Club. The tricolour in its rightful place, draped over happy, drunken shoulders rather than hanging threateningly from a lamppost.

For all the limits of Heimirball, it gave us this at least. It gave us our team back and, for a generation who were scabby-kneed youngsters as recently as Euro 2016, the chance to live out the Republic of Ireland soccer fan’s sacred birthright, if only for a few days.

Sure, there were plenty of grey-haired veterans among the thousands who descended on the Czech capital this week. But make no mistake, the magical journey that started last November belonged to those too young to remember when these days where normal.

And that’s what it has been – a journey. 

In the grand scheme of things, quite a short journey, you have to say: one only a few short months in duration and which has merely taken Ireland from international laughing stock to respectable, middle-ranking Euro-scuffler; from a team that seemed doomed to regular episodes of calamity among the lower orders of the UEFA seeding table, to one that can take on the Czechs – your classic solid, unspectacular, there or thereabouts Average Joe European side – and feel aggrieved at not having beaten them on their own patch.

And this, as they say, is not nothing. Sure, we started from a low base. 

Republic of Ireland's Nathan Collins (left) and head coach Heimir Hallgrimsson dejected following defeat in the penalty shootout. Pic: Adam Davy/PA Wire.

But Ireland being in the general jumble of teams who are usually knocking around the playoffs and sometimes qualify and sometimes don’t feels like worlds away from the crushing hopelessness of losing to Armenia and Luxembourg.

Always a barrel of laughs, after Budapest, we asked in these pages what the meaning of those four days in November would be if things didn’t go our way in Prague. 

Would it have been a merely brief guzzle at the oasis of international football joy before resuming our endless trudge through the desert of mediocrity? Or the start of something special?

And what are the limits of Heimirball? 

Our modest recent journey as a football nation started when the manager decided to stop fannying around with funny shapes and systems and knuckle down to making the team hard to beat. 

That’s what gave us October’s hard luck story in Lisbon and the abomination of the home victory over Armenia. They were the unprepossessing foundations for November’s fundamental shift.

Before the start of this campaign, the manager talked about understanding the difference between what you can and can’t do, something informed by his time in charge of his native Iceland.

You might never be the best technically or in possession or have the best individual talents, he mused. 

But that doesn't mean you can’t be the best-organised team, the best structured, the best at set pieces, the hardest-working and fittest, the most focused and disciplined and with the best characters and leaders, one that is aggressive and looks to attack fast.

Many of these things gave us the good bits in November and on Thursday night. The structure to repel Portugal and keep the Czechs from almost entirely from creating a proper chance throughout the 120 minutes on Thursday. 

The mentality in Budapest to pull the game from the fire. The set piece goals against Portugal and Czechia.

How men like Collins, O’Shea, Ogbene, Parrott and Kelleher have grown into proper international football henchmen, under Seamus Coleman’s watchful gaze. 

The fact that Ireland scored seven goals in three games against proper opposition through a variety of means without agonising too much about building through the thirds and racking up pass completion stats.

Now, you could see the limits of Heimirball, alright. At no point on Thursday night did Ireland have control, at least in the old fashioned, Johnny Giles sense of things. Sure, they were comfortable in their shape and in the first half were able to press and disrupt the Czechs.

But when energy levels dipped in the second half and the team began to drop deep, they were subjected to prolonged spells of aerial bombardment, a sort of blunt force trauma that eventually yielded the late equaliser.

In a way, it was like watching typical England exits from major tournaments gone by: a winning position is given up because of the failure to get on the ball in midfield and see the game out, until eventually the grim inevitability of penalty shoot-out heartbreak looms.

By the same token, going by the manager’s criteria you couldn’t say we have reached the limits of Heimirball just yet. 

The most disciplined and focused team around wouldn’t have given Czechia such a generous hand up when they were on the floor at 2-0 down as Ireland did with the award of the penalty against Ryan Manning. 

Nor the silly foul by Alan Browne that led to the free-kick which resulted in Ladislav Krejci’s equaliser. The best organised at set pieces wouldn’t have conceded it either.

The fast-tracking of Harvey Vale suggests the manager has identified a need for a little more guile in attacking areas. 

And the eventual return of Evan Ferguson and Josh Cullen will make Ireland better in scenarios like Thursday night’s second half when the team needs punch in attack and poise in midfield.

So even as North Macedonian booby prize looms and the serious talk resumes, more parrot mask-wearing, Pink Pony Club-singing, morning pint-queueing days are surely on the way.