Trap: It’s not time for change

Worst ever.

Not the sort of phrase that should be bandied about lightly and yet the statistics are irrefutable. Never before has a Republic of Ireland team suffered such a loss on home soil, and you have to scroll all the way back to Linz in 1971 to when Austria hammered the Irish 6-0 to find a comparable disaster in a competitive fixture.

As competitive embarrassments go, it wasn’t quite the nadir. Back in 1961, another Irish team conceded seven and scored just the one against Czechoslovakia in Prague in another World Cup qualifier — but how depressing that such days are even being revisited.