Until somebody else scores a goal to send the Republic of Ireland to a World Cup, Amber Barrett stands alone.
The Donegal native’s low finish to beat Scotland at Hampden Park in October 2022 was supposed to be matched by another Irish player last December.
Ruesha Littlejohn embraced the magnitude of the Euro playoffs in Cardiff, forcing an own goal out of Wales goalkeeper Olivia Clark, and Niamh Fahey almost burst the Aviva Stadium net in the second leg but, when it mattered most, Ireland came up short.
“I said after the Scotland game that I didn’t want this to be the only thing people talked about,” said Barrett this week. “Because you might never qualify for a World Cup or Euros again, these are all possibilities. This is football. There is no guarantee.
“I want to give the best account of myself for as long as I can.”
Barrett has 14 goals for Standard Liege this season and she is due to win her 50th cap against Greece on Friday in Heraklion on the island of Crete.
“I still have no idea how I played in that game [against Scotland],” she admitted. “It never looked like I was going to play. All these things went a certain way, it obviously paid off and it was great.
“It doesn’t have to be, ‘we have the Scotland win and that is great’. Of course I am proud about it, and I love hearing about it, but I don’t want it to be the only thing. I have more to give.”
Even by FAI standards, the fallout from not qualifying for Euro 2025 has led to sustained criticism, particularly of the association’s chief football officer Marc Canham for the way he replaced Ireland head coach Eileen Gleeson and her assistant Colin Healy with Carla Ward and Alan Mahon.
Ward and Mahon arrived with a wealth of coaching knowledge from previous roles at Aston Villa and Manchester City respectively only to, admittedly, make a tactical mess of their first camp in February when an underwhelming 1-0 win over Turkey in Tallaght was followed by a 4-0 defeat in Slovenia.
Ward has said that Irish players are suffering from a Euros “hangover”, a point Barrett picked up on. .
“It’s kind of funny,” said Barrett. “After we qualified for the World Cup, we played Morocco in Marbella and we won the game but we were very poor as well. You could say the hangover of the high had still been lingering.
“You look at the performances in the last camp, the two games, we probably were not at our best. It’s probably natural in the first game after a disappointing result against Wales and then the transition of a new coach, a new manager, a new staff, and I think these things take time.
“But I don’t want to solely put that on the fact that we didn’t beat Wales. At the end of day, we still have to manage the game that we have in front of us. Losing to Slovenia 4-0, you can’t blame anything but we underperformed.”
The unavailability of Ward’s other assistant coach, Liverpool’s interim manager Amber Whiteley, due to a lost UK passport according to the FAI, has led to a scenario where Healy’s potential return is continually put to the new coaching ticket.
All these issues increase the importance of victory over Greece, in Crete on Friday and Tallaght next Tuesday, for everyone involved.
“I think we have to look at ourselves now,” said Barrett. “What is now given to us and provided by the FAI and staff, it is miles ahead of what it was at the very very start [in 2017] when I came in.
“I think we want to have this role in society, that we’re getting better, but then that puts us up for criticism and we have to be able to deal with that. We also have to be able to accept it and also know ourselves – ‘well, this wasn’t good enough’ – and I think you can hear from the interviews post-game that everybody had said the standards were way off.”
