Watching Nigeria go full combine harvester on Australia on Thursday morning, you really had to start wondering how many black cats the Irish delegation had run over on the way to the World Cup draw last October. Did they break every mirror between here and Auckland? Was there a ladder convention happening next door to the Aotea Centre and did Vera Pauw and her crew go for a pre-draw walk underneath them?
Because if nothing else, the opening week and a bit of the tournament has confirmed what everyone feared at the time. Ireland got a pig of a draw. They didn’t just get the Group of Death. They got the Group of Death, War, Famine, Pestilence and Whatever Else Your Bleakest Imaginings Can Come Up With. Australia, Canada, Nigeria – two top-10 teams in the Fifa rankings and the most successful African nation in the history of women’s football.
In sport, we talk about luck with blithe abandon. We lump it with far more weight than it ought to be made carry. We ignore good luck, or overlook it at least. And we grimace and shake our heads when it comes to bad luck, convinced that it was the difference between winning and losing.
Truthfully though, that’s not usually the case. Colm Boyle, the former Mayo footballer, was on some podcast or other this summer when his misfortune in scoring an own goal in an All-Ireland final came up. In the long, gruesome history of Mayo finding ways not to win Sam Maguire, their two own goals in the first half of the 2016 decider is always high up the list of rank bad luck stories. Nobody else can remember one own goal in a final – Mayo had to go and score two in one half of a game they were otherwise dominating. How unlucky can you be?
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Except Boyle wasn’t having a bit of it. Yeah, sure, the act of deflecting the ball into the net was probably unlucky in the way it happened – Dean Rock fumbled a pass directly on to the point of his right boot and caught him mid-stride. Had the Dublin forward fumbled it a couple of inches to the right or to the left, the ball would have skewed off Boyle in a different direction.
But the goal wasn’t down to an unlucky bounce. The goal happened because as Diarmuid Connolly stood over a free in the middle of Croke Park, Rock had pulled a very basic spin move to get away from Boyle and the Mayo defender had got caught under a 40-yard pass. The ball went in because it unluckily hit the scrambling Boyle. But the goal was down to bad defending.
In the case of the Ireland women in the World Cup draw, however, this was one of the rare cases where bad luck can be blamed and blamed squarely. They were in the same pot as Switzerland, who came out two balls before them. Switzerland went on to Group A, where they’re currently sitting top of the table with New Zealand, the Philippines and the curiously underperforming Norwegians underneath them.
That could have been us. Easily could have been us. Switzerland are no world-beaters – they’re two spots ahead of Ireland in the world rankings. But through a combination of a plumb draw and Norway star Ada Hegerberg getting hurt in the warm-up before their match on Tuesday, they’re a point away from going through to the knock-out phase. And Ireland are going home, regardless of what happens on Monday against Nigeria.
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That was maybe the most maddening aspect of the Canada defeat. If you’ve watched this team at any length over the past five years, the first half was just about everything you could have dreamed for them. They were positive, forceful, clever in attack. They weren’t just sitting in and hoping to get Louise Quinn on the end of a corner. They were blooming, flourishing, finding the best of themselves.
And they were doing it at a World Cup against one of the tournament favourites. They were unrecognisable from the risk-free side that ran the legs off Heather Payne all the way through qualifying. Sinead Farrelly’s elfin touch on the ball was making such a difference, so was Kyra Carusa’s physical stature and ability to stand up to a tackle. It meant Ireland could get up the pitch, could get on the front foot. Wherever this team goes from here, they’ll always have those 44 minutes.
The goals that sent them out of the World Cup had that slight echo of Boyle and Mayo. Megan Connolly will throw out a leg like that on a wet night to a skiddy ball a hundred more times in her career and the ball won’t find the bottom corner. And for the Canadian winner, Katie McCabe almost got a toe in and Courtney Brosnan couldn’t get enough of a hand on it. A little better luck might have kept it out.
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But the original sin in both cases, as Pauw pointed out afterwards, was allowing the space for the cross to come in in the first place. You have good luck and you have bad luck. But you have good defending and bad defending too. The World Cup told Ireland the difference and it gave it to them right between the eyes.
Ireland had horrendous luck with the draw. But when they got to the tournament, it wasn’t luck that did for them. This would all be so much easier to take if that was the case. Instead, it was just the dull reality that for all the progress made, Ireland aren’t at a level yet where they can be drawn against the elite of the game and be a consistent threat to them.
But they’re getting there. That’s not nothing.
