McCarthy still has Georgia on his mind for clash with Danes

Ireland being paired once again with Denmark and Georgia in the Euro 2020 draw in Dublin in December might have induced an unwelcome sense of déjà vu but it also made Group D into something akin to a useful laboratory experiment, offering a convenient then-and-now contrast to help us better determine the state of the Irish game in 2019.

The result of the March test against the Georgians in Dublin produced a clear positive, the narrowness of the win on the scoreboard belying an often vibrant performance which, in the warmth of the appreciation it drew from the Aviva crowd — the tennis ball protest notwithstanding — suggested that the long-suffering faithful were much more taken with the cut of this Irish team’s jib than they were with what they had witnessed the last few times the boys in green came up against those perennial tricky customers.

But we will all know a lot more about the true extent of progress under Mick McCarthy after tonight’s much tougher test here in Copenhagen.

That Danish pasting in November 2017 in Dublin still casts its baleful shadow but even if that level of humiliation was given a wide berth one year later in what was the nations’ fourth meeting in just over a year and a half, the soulless scoreless draw in Aarhus last November only retains a place in the memory banks because, after a year of sliding fortunes, it turned out to be Martin O’Neill’s last game in charge.

Needless to say, after two wins on the bounce in this campaign, and with group favourites Switzerland and the Danes having already dropped points against each other, few would complain if the Irish came away from the Parken Stadium tonight with another draw, soulless, scoreless or otherwise.

But what will be fascinating to see is if, up against such familiar foes, McCarthy’s Ireland can, if not quite delivering the shock of the new, at least unsettle Age Hareide’s side with a touch of the unfamiliar. Certainly, it sounds like McCarthy’s team intend to be rather more ambitious than was the case in Aarhus on a night when the visitors didn’t manage a single shot on target.

“I guess the blueprint is to play as well as we did against Georgia,” the manager said at the Parken Stadium yesterday. “I thought the players were excellent in that game. Playing against a different side, arguably along with Switzerland one of two best teams in groups, that may be more difficult to replicate but that’s what we’ll try to do.”

It’s the old game of risk versus reward, the result of which will dictate the popular and media mood, as the seen-it-all-before McCarthy knows only too well. Asked if he thought the Danes might be in for a surprise, he replied:

“Not really because they’ll have watched us. You’re comparing two different regimes, I guess. We’re going to try to replicate what we did against Georgia – if we do and we play well and we get something from it, everything will be great. If we don’t, perhaps people will be saying, ‘You know, you maybe should have had a more defensive mindset coming to Denmark because they’re a good team’.

“I’ll look forward to seeing what you’re all saying. I know what we’re going to be doing, anyway.”

Whatever the outcome, McCarthy is going into this one as a man with a plan, the team’s preparations after a prolonged build-up having reached a point where they weren’t going to be giving anything away at their final training session in a stadium overlooked by office blocks — a possible vantage point for prying eyes which bothered Martin O’Neill when he brought his Irish team here for the first leg of the World Cup play-off in 2017.

To a query wondering if he was worried about being spied upon before he took his players onto the pitch yesterday, a beaming McCarthy replied: “I have something up my sleeve: I am going to do nothing that has anything to do with the game tomorrow.

I expect we will have 21 players running about trying to pass the ball to each other and score. It’s nuts. They all say they have cleared the stadium but I don’t think for one minute there is ever a game where they have cleared the stadium without someone watching. So why would you do it in this stadium?

If McCarthy is going to surprise the Danes, it’s unlikely to be with his choice of personnel. There was nothing he said at yesterday’s press conference to suggest he will depart from his previously indicated intention to play the same starting IX here tonight as he did against Georgia at the Aviva in March.

Among other things, that means it will be the first time the Danes have had to deal with David McGoldrick who, in offering Ireland a kind of combination between a number 9 and a number 10, was pivotal in the victory against the Georgians.

“Well, if he is playing…,” McCarthy parried, not very convincingly. “Everyone who is playing is important in terms of holding onto the ball. For us to be able to build from the back or pass it in midfield, having ball retention is going to be vital because if we keep giving it back to them the more chances they’ll have in the game.”

On the basis of the two wins out of two, McCarthy said he sees no reason why Ireland should not feel positive about themselves. On the other hand, he insisted he doesn’t take any extra encouragement from the fact that tonight’s opponents shipped three before salvaging a dramatic late, late draw in Basle against the Swiss in their only Group D game to date.

“Not really, because they didn’t deserve to be 3-0 down and one of the goals was a handball,” he said. “Seamus (Coleman) has spoken about them being well set-up, hard to break down but their mentality is also obvious, to be 3-0 down with six minutes to go and come back. Can I take heart from the first 84 minutes? No, I felt they played well, they attacked like they were the home team and to get three goals back with six minutes left and get a draw, they will be buzzing, flying.”

But hopefully not as hard and as high and as fast as the Danish side the manager had to face on his competitive debut as an Irish player back in 1984, a World Cup qualifier which saw Eoin Hand’s team lose 3-0 in Copenhagen.

“Preben Elkjaer got a couple didn’t he?” McCarthy recalled. “It was like playing against the Red Arrows in the second-half. They were an excellent team. We didn’t really scratch the surface in that game.”

And tonight?

“We’d certainly want a better performance and a better result than that.”