Poor performance for Ireland in Athens is a massive step backwards

BACKWARDS STEP: Ireland’s hopes of qualifying automatically for next summer’s European Championship were left hanging by a thread, Stephen Kenny’s team took another massive step backwards.  Pic: ©INPHO/Nikola Kristic

Let there be no talk of Greek tragedies because this was an act of self-sabotage. Deus ex machina? If only. On a night when Ireland’s hopes of qualifying automatically for next summer’s European Championship were left hanging by a thread, Stephen Kenny’s team took another massive step backwards.

The manager cast a bereft figure at full time in Athens as another referendum opens on his fit for this job. But beneath the polemics over style versus substance, the transparent reality this morning is that Ireland’s hopes of reaching another tournament are potentially over before they began. Again.

They were outplayed, outran and outthought against a Greece team that succeeded not because they were outstanding but for merely performing with competence. That there was not even a rollicking push for a late equaliser, with the exception of Matt Doherty’s first-time scuff two minutes into added time a moment before he was sent off for losing his head, summed up how flaccid the Irish performance was.

Several of the bad results over the past two and a half years have at least come with moments of promising play, evidence of a new style that could eventually also bring wins. Yet there can be no legislating for just how bad the collective performed for long spells last night.

Kenny had invited pressure on his players beforehand: through the latest motivational video, focusing on famous away days of old, and a two-week preparation camp that was a not inexpensive investment for an association not exactly flush with cash. They buckled under the weight of expectation.

There are no obvious excuses. The environmental conditions were relatively kind. Greece fans, filling little more than half of this 32,000-seater stadium, were too few in number to create a truly terrifying atmosphere. A temperature of 22c at kick off was not sufficient enough to prove as energy-sapping as feared when these teams were drawn together last year. And those camps in Bristol and Antalya were intended to remove risk of deconditioning for those whose club seasons ended in early May while ensuring they knew everything worth knowing about their opponents.

It made for a pre-match level of optimism that was higher than what it should have been. Nevermind that the bookmakers, often no finer gauge of a team’s chances in their world of cold, hard data, made Ireland 3/1 outsiders pre-match – a point more than Manchester United in an FA Cup final where the pundits gave them no chance a fortnight ago - and Greece had lost just once in the past four years, versus a fortunate Spain.

Bigger underdogs than we may have been willing to accept, the opening 10 minutes was perhaps the most overwhelming spell of the Kenny era. By the time Anastasios Bakasetas converted from the penalty spot, following an interminable VAR check for Callum O’Dowda’s handball, Gavin Bazunu and his dizzy defence had faced five attempts and eight corners.

It was a relentless bombardment from the home team; an attempt to decide the result early. And in the immediate aftermath of Bakasetas’s penalty there was a moment to fear what was to come. The chances of a battering seemed high.

That Ireland found a way back into the game through Nathan Collins' back post finish was very much an outlier. Still, a paragraph for the goal. For all the talk, and evidence, of passing it along the deck nicely, the greatest source of threat for Ireland remains the old reliable: a corner kick. Will Smallbone’s delivery was straight to Ferguson, who rose strongly to get his head to the delivery before George Baldock. It was meant to be an attempt on goal but the teenager will take his assist and Collins’ reading of the move to be in the right place was worthy of credit.

At the end of a week where he was chapeaued by L’Equipe and named as their sixth most exciting player in the world born since 2004, Ferguson endured another difficult night in international football. (Though you may rightly ask who in an Ireland shirt did not.) Of course to overanalyse an 18-year-old’s embryonic steps in international football is folly. But it is already abundantly obvious that he cannot thrive to the same extent as at Brighton when those servicing him are of a far lesser standard. It is no slight on Will Smallbone to say that he is not at the level of Alexis Mac Allister, the same of Josh Cullen and Moises Caicedo. There is nothing Ferguson, his team-mates nor Kenny can do to change that so instead they must find a way - quickly - to maximise what they have.

Which brings Monday’s visit of Gibraltar to Lansdowne Road immediately into view. That one should be straightforward. Ireland should control the game. They should score goals. And the players should go into the brief summer break with a belief that they can still salvage third place and reach a play-off.

But how often has the word should not translated into a tangible result for a team that continues to baffle and bemuse, produce a performance worthy of praise when least expected and deliver a stinker when hopes are high?