Givens: We shot ourselves in the foot

DON GIVENS might only have been in the hot seat for 90 minutes on Saturday but, like Mick McCarthy, Brian Kerr and Steve Staunton before him, Ireland’s caretaker manager got to experience that sinking feeling just as his team were in sight of dry land.

“I was actually very confident we would win that game,” he says of the 2-2 draw with Wales. “I really was, from what I had seen around the place in the build-up and the preparation we had. I thought we would perform well, which I think we did. We just seemed to shoot ourselves in the foot a little bit. We had a corner with three minutes to go and suddenly we concede. It’s naive. There’s no two ways about it. We should have killed that a little bit better.”

Givens believes the recurring problem of conceding leads is less psychological than a straightforward matter of relative inexperience.