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.