Lightning fails to spark send-off

Seven years ago, Damian Duff sat down for a chat with thi snewspaper and spoke about how you could feel Lansdowne Road’s creaky old bones shaking from the toilets in the dressing-room as the DART thundered through the West Stand.

“It might be a kip,” he said at the time, “but it’s our kip.”

Duffer must have yearned for the old Lansdowne last night in the Puskas Ferenc Stadion, a ground that looks every one of its 58 years and more and one that has hosted everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Steven Spielberg and the Mighty Magyars of the 1950s.

The Irish have contributed some to the same tapestry. Sonia O’Sullivan won two golds on the surrounding track in the 5,000m and 10,000m at the 1998 European Athletics Championship while Michael Flatley clicked his heels on stage here too.

Irish performances on the actual pitch have been less acclaimed with a record of three draws and a defeat claimed in the Hungarian capital before last night but those four meetings had the consolation of coughing up 14 goals between them.

Ireland even managed five of them.

No-one was demanding medal-winning performances or spectacular displays of footwork this time and expectations were doused further by the thunder, lightning and torrents of rain that delayed kick-off by 20 minutes.

Local fans, fed on stories of a glorious past but starved of any modern sustenance, stayed away in their droves and the turnout never came close to threatening the reduced capacity of 25,00 in a stadium that used to cater for three times that figure.

The 350 Irish supporters made up a healthy slice of the overall figure and they passed a good part of the evening singing ‘There’s only one Slaven Bilic’ in the direction of the Croatia manager who was sat just yards away in the main stand. Bilic has been up front about Ireland’s perceived limitations and the hunch was that he was hardly going to learn much of use in a friendly played just six days before the countries meet in Poznan.

At one point, it seemed as if he would learn nothing at all.

Talk of a cancellation swept through the ground after the announcement of a 15-minute delay and Bilic, when informed of such a possibility, exclaimed: “What? If that was the case, there would be no football played in Ireland or England at all.”

As it was, he was only ever to return to camp with a handful of titbits.

Back in 1988, Jack Charlton took his Irish side to an equally saturated Oslo for one last knockabout before the serious business started against England in Stuttgart 11 days later and the result was a bland 0-0 draw.

Charlton’s team absorbed a modicum of criticism for a performance that brought an eight-game winning run to a halt but Tord Grip, Norway manager at the time and better known as Sven Goran Ericsson’s right-hand man with England, had it just right.

“The closer you get to a major championships the more cautious you become and that showed in the Irish team,” he said.

Last night’s fare was far better. Hungary played like the demob-happy mob they were and Ireland entered into the spirit to such an extent that chances began to accumulate like the rain in the stadium’s crumbling drainpipes.

Ok, so it was candyfloss football and Giovanni Trapattoni won’t have appreciated the cracks that appeared in the Irish rearguard but this was a useful workout, especially for two of the players whose fitness had concerned him most in recent weeks.

John O’Shea had the misfortune of picking up Hungary’s chief threat, Balazs Dzudzsak, whose incursions down the wing were the chief source of the potshots that Shay Given had to parry away in the opening half.

Hungary began to gain the upper hand as the night wore on and the sight of Stephen Hunt clearing off the line in the 83rd minute may well become an all too familiar sight in Gdansk and Poznan.

Not long now before we find out.