The last waltz

Given that the obituaries have already been written, the essential challenge facing Giovanni Trapattoni and the Ireland team here in Vienna this evening might properly be said to belong to the realms of the paranormal: to somehow prove that, in football at least, there can be life after death.

By the time they take the pitch in the Ernst Happel Stadium, they will already know from the outcome of the Kazkahstan-Sweden game in Astana whether that goal has been rendered more or less imaginable. But, in one sense, what happens in the earlier group game is irrelevant: even if their World Cup destiny remains out of their hands as the game in Vienna kicks off, Ireland will still have 90 minutes in which, if they are to confound their critics and earn a shot at redemption, they will have to show not only substantial powers of recovery but also a performance rooted in the kind of pride, spirit and sense of self-respect which would at least offer hope for the longer term future of Irish football, irrespective of the identity of the manager who will be calling the shots.

The heaviest burden, you suspect, will fall on the representatives of the post-Euro 2012 generation, players like Shane Long, Seamus Coleman and James McCarthy, none of whom, it has to be said, exactly covered themselves in glory against Sweden in Dublin.