Pot luck could have been worse

AS FOURTH seeds going into the European Championship draw, Ireland can have few complaints about their pot luck in Montreux.

For rock fans, the Swiss town has been famously immortalised in song by Deep Purple, whose ‘Smoke On The Water’ from 1971 describes how the band looked on from their recording studio alongside Lake Geneva, as a Montreux venue where Frank Zappa was playing a gig caught fire and subsequently burned to the ground. “Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky,” they wailed over one of the most familiar guitar riffs in rock history.

But there were no pyrotechnics in the town’s convention centre yesterday, just a fairly routine draw which saw only two of the European game’s traditional big powers - Italy and France - paired in one group although, as intense rivalries go, Greece and Turkey are bound to make for lively bedfellows atop Group B.