Precisely four minutes after last night’s game was mercifully concluded, the button was pressed on a light show at the Cruyff Arena choreographed to celebrate the Netherlands reaching the Euros next summer with a game to spare. By then Ireland were enduring the familiar desolation of a losing dressing room, plug finally pulled on another campaign.
It was a night when the two alpha males of the group produced two effortless shows of strength against the omegas labouring below them. While the French were sticking 14 goals on Gibraltar, the Netherlands were delivering a mundane performance while missing an entire team through injury, only mustering a single goal from 18 attempts but still easily good enough to win the game by a street.
A few months of Pythagorean efforts to keep Ireland’s qualification hopes mathematically alive through the Nations’ League had finally been ended on Friday night when Slovakia defeated Iceland, a suitably obscure ending to an extremely remote possibility.
In contrast to the colourful and frequently era-defining history shared between Ireland and the Netherlands, last night’s game was a monochrome facsimile of a competitive match. The atmosphere was weirdly flat, despite the prize the Dutch were chasing, and while Ireland had nothing to play for, that scenario might have freed them up to reverse the frustrations of the last few years and do something wild.
Instead, the Dutch goal was straight out of an old movie Ireland have seen way too many times before: a promising start ruined by a couple of careless mistakes and a high-class finish Ireland can’t call on just now. Nathan Collins got turned too easily by Wout Weghorst, then collided with Ryan Manning. Weghorst drove on, spotted a potential weakness between Gavin Bazunu and his near post and found the roof of the net.
It was another bad goal for Ireland to concede, from the poor defensive decision-making across the line to Collins allowing Weghorst to exploit all the strengths that make him menacing. In some ways Collins epitomises the current Irish condition: apparently possessing the necessary ability to compete with his notional betters, equally capable of losing his way under the most intense pressure.
But the game had the strange feel of an end-of-season match where everyone wanted to be somewhere else, even the Dutch. They were weakened by injury and anaesthetised by the sleepy atmosphere. Ireland didn’t have the fire to exploit that.
Instead, the volume of errors catalogued by Ireland handed the Netherlands a decent shout at being two up by half time. When it came to Ireland in attack, Evan Ferguson’s only serious header was clearing a corner from his own box before half time. He was gone before the hour, having suffered a fresh hamstring injury without Ireland giving him the chance to lay a single serious glove on the Dutch.
By then the Dutch were crowding the Irish box like fielders in a cricket match trying to get the last tail-ender out, but eventually realised that winning wouldn’t require that type of urgency. Gavin Bazunu was making saves and the Irish further upfield were making decent runs at times apparently unseen by anyone. Once again both ends of the pitch were short-changed by the midfield wasteland between them.
Once the match petered out, Ireland were left with two wins against Gibraltar from their group games and a precise measure of their current standing in global football. It’s almost certain that Stephen Kenny’s final shot will come on Tuesday night against New Zealand having placed his faith in the football he believed in and a conviction that Irish football could hold itself to a higher standard than successive managers and administrators had previously imagined.
He gave opportunities to a host of players whose careers are now trending upwards. That was an outlook and an approach Ireland needed at the time. Even looking back now, was he wrong on all of that?
But results failed him. Performances failed the team. Ireland’s world ranking over the past three years has dropped like a stone and their reputation has taken a battering. Whatever happens next, the climb only gets harder from here.
