The days of reckoning arrive for Ireland's World Cup qualifying campaign

“We have to win the games and the equation is really simple,” was Martin O’Neill’s decisive summation yesterday, as he contemplated Ireland’s World Cup qualifying landscape with two group games to go.

Actually, strictly speaking, the manager is wrong on both counts.

A draw with Moldova and a win in Wales could, in certain highly favourable circumstances, be enough to keep Ireland on track, just one reflection of the fact that, far from being simple, the qualification equation in play all across Europe over the next few days is of such fiendish complexity as to addle the mind of a quantum physicist.