We’ll come again, we are still in this, insists O’Neill

At various times during the frenetic action, Martin O’Neill had been a bundle of animation on the touchline at Parkhead last night, but it was a body language which spoke mainly of frustration and, ultimately, of dejection.

Scotland’s win has put a real dampener on Irish expectation after their strong start to the qualifying group. With Poland clear on ten points and Ireland, Scotland and Germany now on seven, Glasgow turned out to be, of all things, a sobering comedown after the impossible high of Gelsenkirchen. But when the manager came in to face the media afterwards, he insisted this was not a trough from which his team would struggle to escape.

“We’ve got seven points on the board and we’ve completed three tough away games,” he said. “There’s everything to play for and I would have still believed that even if we’d come out of this game unscathed. I know we have a game against the US coming up in a couple of days but now we’ve got to go and get ourselves prepared for Poland in March and the other home games that I always believed would decide our fate.

“The result dictates what you say in situations like this. And, yes, we’ve been beaten. But we’ll come again. We are still in this, without a doubt. It’s going to be tough but we’re still there.”

O’Neill maintained that there hadn’t been much between the two teams last night, suggesting the game was “on a knife-edge” to the end.

“We’re disappointed,” he said. “I know they forced the corner but we conceded the goal at a stage when I thought we were reasonably comfortable in the game. I didn’t think we were in phenomenal danger when they scored.

“It was a frenetic match, stop-start, littered with fouls, just like derby game in many aspects. I thought the two sides cancelled each other out but I thought we’d get something out of it. It was one of those games that always looked like first goal wins.”

Explaining his milestone decision to drop Robbie Keane at the start, O’Neill said, “I make a decision for the good of the team and Robbie accepted it. We were playing away from home and we wanted to stretch them, and Shane can do that.The game was a tough contest. We knew it would be derby game with all of those derby ingredients. Neither of the two teams was able to get the ball down and keep possession long enough — whether because of the atmosphere or nervousness — but I think that applied to both teams.”

Before leaving the press conference, O’Neill once again reiterated that the Roy Keane incident before the team left Dublin had “genuinely not bothered me.”

There was no triumphalism from winning Scottish manager, Gordon Strachan, more relief that a game which had panned out much as he predicted had gone in favour of his team.

“That was like one of them big heavyweight matches,” he declared.

“I said beforehand that one goal has decided all the games, bar the ones involving Gibraltar, and it happened again. I said it would be decided by a set play and it was.

“Of course, you can put on a set play but you have to be able to finish like that. I was really pleased for Shaun Maloney and I thought Charlie Mulgrew was immense, the best player on the pitch.

“As for pure football, it wasn’t that great – there wasn’t much football.”