King’s reign endures the Dunphy treatment

Entente Cordiale, surely? King for a day, or two. No need to pepper the makeshift throne.

Not on your life. Kinger would not be leaving his post without a souvenir shellacking.

“A strange team and a strange system,” pondered Eamon Dunphy. “If I had a thousand goes, I wouldn’t have picked it. Whelan has survived, to play wide on the right. Off the charts mad. Kevin Doyle on the left? Nonsense. If you put the names in a hat, this is what might come out.”

“I think it’s the worst Irish back four ever. He’s talked a good game all week, but boy has he fooled me. He’s picked a bum team…”

On the radio, Tony Cascarino called it a ‘big massive ask”; officially the level of ask posed by a ‘top, top, top’ team.

Still, Stokesy was bullish. “There’s no point worrying about them. It’s us going out onto the pitch,” he told Tony O’Donoghue. Unfortunately, after a stubborn 11 minutes, Stokesy only realised the Germans had come out too when he gave it to one of them. 1-0.

“That’ll settle the Germans down,” worried Ronnie. “They’ll have been nervous too.” In truth, you might have to go back to Elvis doing Hound Dog on the Ed Sullivan Show to find anybody who looked less nervous.

“Anyone counting how many passes this is?” wondered George Hamilton at one stage, as they gyrated and shimmied around us provocatively. “God knows how many,” said tallyman Ronnie.

“At least they hit the bar,” said George Hamilton after a rare flurry at the close of the half. At half-eight on a Friday evening, many will have been tempted to join them.

The King is dead, crucify King. At the interval, Gilesy saddled Kinger for another rough ride. “A bit like Trapattoni, only Trapattoni’s teams were better at it.”

Dunphy: “They’ve killed us. The team is a mess. It’s a shambles, Bill. He makes Trapattoni seem like Pep Guardiola... If you were running one of the competitions for a member of the public to pick a football team, that’s the kind of team they might pick.”

You might recall Eamo once reckoned Thomas Muller looked like a kid who’d won a competition to play in the Champions League.

For a few minutes, another metamorphosis looked on the cards, as we briefly came out to play. Briefly. Reading the game, Eamo didn’t enjoy the second half any more.

“It was illiterate tactically. I don’t think our players should have been subjected to that. It didn’t make sense. It was like bad grammar.”

Brady: “The game’s left me not knowing anything more about the Irish team. This was the match to learn if Reid could do it, or Hoolahan could do it.”

The last word for Dunphy. “Worse than the Aviva.”