Play football and forget the World Cup, warns Richard Dunne

Almost five years to the day since he was chiefly and heroically responsible for a backs to the wall performance away to Russia which became known as the ‘Miracle In Moscow’, the now retired Richard Dunne watched on television last Monday as Ireland escaped with another unlikely point away from home, this time in Belgrade.

And the former rock of the Irish defence couldn’t help concluding that, from Giovanni Trapattoni to Martin O’Neill, little has changed.

“It was typical of Ireland, exactly the sort of performance we’ve been putting in for years,” he says. “You look back a long time and there’s no match you watch where you think ‘yeah, we played great’. Listening to the manager afterwards, he was saying it’s all about the result. And that’s normal, because nobody will remember in two years, if we qualify, that we were crap wherever it was. It is all about the result.