Ireland still struggling with the lead role

ON Saturday night in Croke Park, Ireland were like the man whose numbers come up in the lotto only to discover that he’s lost the winning ticket.

Ecstasy and agony have been well-known bedfellows to followers of Irish football down the years but rarely have they snuggled up so closely together as in the space of the mere three minutes it took to separate Sean St Ledger’s diving header from Alberto Gilardino’s unruffled finish.

That scarcely believable exchange of late, late goals turned Croke Park from party central into a graveyard in an instant and made a draw against the world champions feel like a defeat.

The disappointment in the Irish camp was all the more acute with the realisation that the single point snatched from the jaws of victory was substantially down to self-inflicted wounds.

For this was yet another night when an old failing came back to haunt the Irish, only this time on the double, as they twice surrendered a lead.

Which is not to say that the draw wasn’t fully deserved for the Italians who, for long stretches of the game, virtually owned the ball and who, in their calm and assured retention of possession, always suggested that they could go up another gear if required.

Yet, while their vastly superior technical quality might have been personified in the beguiling performance of Andrea Pirlo, a stout-hearted Irish response ensured that, though the classic number 10 floated like a butterfly, he never got to sting like a bee.

On a night of some ferocious drama but limited goalmouth action and even fewer clear-cut chances, it was set-piece play which was responsible for three of the four goals, at once a vindication of the work Giovanni Trapattoni has put in on the offensive front in that regard and an indictment of slow learning by the Irish at the other end of the pitch.

As with the goals scored and conceded, Ireland’s performance overall was a mixture of the uplifting and the dispiriting. They began brightly, passing the ball more in the first five minutes than they had in virtually the whole of the 90 in Cyprus. And the reward for that purposeful opening was the free-kick, cleverly won by Robbie Keane, which saw Liam Lawrence’s lateral-thinking matched and bettered by a superb strike from Glen Whelan.

Even more encouragingly, Ireland continued to take the game to Italy for the next quarter of an hour before the shell-shocked visitors finally recovered their composure and began to exert some pressure. What was disappointing – and all the more so for not being entirely unexpected – was how quickly Ireland succumbed.

It was only in the 24th minute that Shay Given was obliged to make his first save of the night. A minute later, a great Sean St Ledger block on Vincenzo Iaquinta denied the visitors a real goal chance. And then, just 60 seconds after that, the Irish cracked wide open, as Mauro Camoranesi too easily evaded sloppy marking to head home Pirlo’s corner.

The concession of a goal from a set-piece would have especially irked Trapattoni, the blow made all the more painful by the fact that, for once, Given’s reflex shot-stopping was not up to the job of bailing out his breached defence.

Worse, the damage to Ireland was not confined to the scoreboard. From the restart, you could see that the setback had undermined their self-belief, as the composed and clever football of the opening 20 minutes now gave way to the old no-risk, no-gain hoofing up the field, an anti-tactic which only served to ensure the Italians an ever growing abundance of possession. At that point, a bit more urgency on their part and Ireland would surely have been in a much deeper hole at the break.

One of Trapattoni’s strengths, however, is his ability to use the half-time interval to rally his troops and, having survived the scare of an offside goal minutes after the restart, Ireland duly regained some positive momentum in the second period. Yet, there was still a crushingly familiar pattern to most of their play, with only the snaky runs of Aiden McGeady offering something unpredictable in the final third.

Unfortunately, the Celtic man’s decision-making still doesn’t always match his instinctive skill and, with the final ball frequently letting him down, the Irish threat tended to be more about random promise than consistent delivery.

Still, with Italy’s job already half-done, Shay Given was only obliged to dirty his gloves for the first time in the second half as late as the 70th minute, so that all the indicators now pointed to the night ending with a 1-1 share of the spoils.

But, again, credit Trapattoni with an astute intervention. His continued omission of an in-form Andy Reid might defy all logic bar his own but, if he got it absolutely right by starting the impressive Liam Lawrence on Saturday, he was also on the mark with the timely introduction of Stephen Hunt for McGeady as the game entered its final phase.

And, just as he had struck early in Sofia, and in almost precisely the same way, so Hunt did late in Croke Park, first by winning a free and then whipping in a fine ball which Sean St Ledger dived to head in.

And, with just three minutes to go, that should have been that. Except, of course, that this is Ireland, for whom no advantage ever seems to be enough. There was a grim inevitability about what happened next as, giddy with the prospect of turning over the world champions, they allowed themselves to get caught on the break by the world-masters of the lancing counter-attack, a stretched defence freeing up Gilardino to beat Given with the coolness of someone stroking the ball home from the spot.

It’s a truism that, notwithstanding Fifa’s seeding slight of hand, there can be no such thing as an easy game in the minefield of the play-offs. Ireland are certainly entitled to take encouragement from the positive aspects of Saturday night and, indeed, from their unbeaten record in the campaign as a whole, but before they start worrying about who they will have to face after next week’s draw, they first need to give urgent consideration to the damage they are still all too prone to doing to themselves.