It all points to penalties in Paris

IF I’d known that Roberto Beccantini was in the Croke Park press box for Ireland’s 2-2 draw with Italy, I’d have asked him to help me fill in my Lotto numbers.

La Stampa’s Beccantini, described in ‘Calcio’, John Foot’s illuminating history of Italian football, as the country’s most sophisticated football journalist, is the man who produced what must surely stand as the most forensically accurate match forecast ever, ahead of the World Cup final between Italy and France in Berlin in 2006.

According to Foot, Beccantini predicted that the game would be 1-1 in normal time (it was); that Italy’s goal would come from a corner (it did) and, that France’s David Trezeguet would miss the decisive spot kick in a penalty shoot-out which would end with the Azzurri crowned world champions (he did and they were).

This, I think you’ll agree, is pretty impressive stuff – although the begrudger in me hastens to add that, for all Beccantini’s apparent psychic powers, he somehow failed to give advance warning of the game’s most sensational moment: Zinedine Zidane’s raging bull head-butt on Marco Materazzi. But then I suppose Mr Beccantini would be entitled to respond that Marco Materazzi didn’t see that one coming either.

Indeed, the referee on the night saw it neither coming nor going, with the result that, despite limp official denials to the contrary, it’s pretty much widely accepted now that Zidane’s red card was actually based on the incontrovertible television evidence which became available within seconds of the off the ball incident taking place. Either way, it was the game’s defining moment, the sending off rolling back growing French dominance at the time and ensuring that Italy would survive until the shoot-out where Beccantini’s powers of foresight were fully vindicated as Trezeguet stepped up and hit the bar.

The closest your present correspondent ever came to channelling the boy Nostradamus was out at the World Cup finals four years before in Japan and Korea when, to everyone’s astonishment and not least my own, I repeatedly scooped the reporters’ pool by embarking on an uncanny, not to say unprecedented, run of spot-on predictions, including Ireland’s 1-1 draw with Germany, the 3-0 win over Saudi Arabia and, finally, the penalty shoot-out defeat to Spain.

Of the latter, deeply unpatriotic prediction, all I can say is that it was based on some vague but nagging awareness of the cyclical nature of football. Down all the years, Irish teams had experienced pretty much everything the game can throw at you: false dawns, dodgy refereeing decisions, last-minute kicks-in-the-teeth and, after a long, long wait, cherished moments of sheer lung-bursting ecstasy, not least of which were Packie Bonner’s save and Dave O’Leary’s decisive spot-kick in Genoa in 1990.

By 2002, the one thing we had yet to experience, I figured, was the agony of ending up on the wrong end of a penalty shoot-out: and so, with heavy heart, I made my prediction and then, with even heavier heart, watched from the press box as it come to pass. (Of course, I immediately felt better upon divesting my beloved colleagues on the media bus of all their hard-earned Korean won).

All of which is way of warming you all up for my latest bold prediction. (A nation holds its breath). And here it is: Ireland’s forthcoming play-off with France will be decided on a penalty shoot-out in the Stade de France after two score draws.

This time, I’d like to think I’m basing the forecast on sound reasoning rather than mere hunch.

For sure, man for man — and even without Franck Ribery — France are the superior force but we have already seen in their underwhelming qualifying campaign, and before that in their dismal showing at last year’s Euro finals, that this French team doesn’t always add up to the sum of its parts. Manager for manager, meanwhile, there’s simply no contest. So add a wonky gaffer and the pressure of being hot favourites – especially in the second leg – into the mix, and Les Bleus seem rather less formidable on grass than they appear on paper.

With the caveat that Ireland can’t afford a Ribery-like injury blow in the run-up, we have already seen twice against Italy and once away to Bulgaria, that Les Verts can actually exceed the sum of their parts. It’s a cliché, but only because it’s demonstrably true, that the Irish are also much happier with the role of underdogs, something which should have made us all a bit wary of the draw handing us a gift-bearing Greeks. I think it also helps that, with France, the Irish pretty much know who and what they’re up against. To that extent, it’s better the devil we know in Paris than the devil we wouldn’t know in Moscow.

And why score draws in both games? Because, even though they’ve shown in this campaign that they’re always likely to nick a goal, I can’t really see this Irish side suddenly breaking with the habits of a life-time by keeping clean sheets against the French, either in Dublin or in Paris. Against the bigger guns, we still wait for Ireland’s drawing habit to become a winning one. Or to put it in the vernacular: you’ll never beat the Irish but the Irish will never beat you. And that way, my friends, lies the penalty shoot-out.

A couple of health warnings before you rush down to the bookies. (1) The only time I ever placed a bet at a racecourse, the horse carrying my wodge died when it fell at the final hurdle. (2) At the start of the current Premier League season, I loudly proclaimed in these pages that this would be Liverpool’s year.

And one other point: eagle-eyed readers will have noted that I neglected to say who will actually come out on top in the penalty shoot-out in Paris on November 18.

To which I reply: aw c’mon, who do you think I am, Roberto Beccantini?