Armchair verdict: Ireland set to zombie their way through barely meaningful games

An evening of holes, from beginning to end. 

There’s a hole in the RTÉ panel where John Giles used to be, a development that has moved none other than the Minister for Sport, Paschal Donohoe – clearly a man with nothing better to be doing - to ask Montrose to reconsider. (Why do politicians always feel it incumbent on themselves to throw in their tuppenceworth on such trivial matters?)

There’s a hole in the match programme where John Delaney’s thoughts on funny business in international football in general, and the machinations of those shameless egotists in Fifa in particular, had been. (Pity. The article would surely have been placed on the English Lit course at Harvard forever, more as a classic example of unconscious irony.)