Watching Ireland these days is a bit like going to see your brother’s crappy band. They have all the right influences and you can see they mean well. But they really lack a frontman and until they find one, they’re going to have a lot of these nights. Everybody wants the best for them but all the wishing and hoping in the world isn’t going to make them Fontaines DC.
This is a result that fairly drains the life out of whatever political capital Stephen Kenny retained going in. The culture wars around the Irish team are all very well in the abstract but it’s very hard to gin up support for a long-term project when you lose to Luxembourg at home. Kenny has had no luck and has far more goodwill than good players – but there’s leeway and there’s leeway. It evaporates when you lose to Luxembourg at home.
“It’s a terrible result. There’s no getting away from that. You can’t hide from that. It’s a really, really disappointing result. It’s not good enough. It’s very disappointing overall. To go from the performance against Serbia to lose tonight against Luxembourg is completely unacceptable.
“Anything I say will sound like making excuses. It’s just not good enough. A lot of players aren’t playing with their clubs and it’s the second game in three days and we’ve struggled with it. We made substitutes and Matt Doherty got injured and had to come off at half-time. But it’s just not acceptable to lose at home like that.
“We didn’t underestimate Luxembourg, we knew they had pushed a lot of teams closely. I take responsibility for changing the system. We changed it against Serbia and it worked very well. None of our wingers are playing at the moment, they’re coming back from injury. We played 3-5-2 so I take responsibility for that. I take responsibility for everything. It’s not good enough. I think the players are a lot better than they showed in that match.
“I think we’ve just got to be better than we were there in the second half. Tonight was unacceptable, absolutely. I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to lose that game.”
Ireland did make occasional chances here. James Collins put in a grafter’s night leading the line, full of clever body-positioning and willing running. But when he was presented with Ireland’s best chance, he found the trailing leg of the Luxembourg goalkeeper from five yards out.
It came after 18 minutes, on the end of a move for which debutant Gavin Bazunu had been the starting point. Enda Stevens was pressured into a hurried backpass but Bazunu took it in his stride, shifted it to the right and chipped a 30-yard pass over the press to Doherty. From there, an eight-pass move spanned the length of the pitch and ended with Callum Robinson zipping a cross to Collins, who made a hero of out Anthony Moris in the Luxembourg goal.
It has become a bit of a trademark of this Irish team, sadly. It feels like once a game, they put together a passing move that gets them 99 per cent of the way to scoring The Greatest Irish Team Goal Ever, except that the only percentage point that counts is missing.
Later, Alan Browne got on the end of a Robbie Brady free-kick but seemed as surprised as anyone that the ball found him. Though the header was probably more straightforward that the one he scored in Belgrade, he missed the far post by a couple of yards.
All of it left them vulnerable to exactly what transpired. A snap-shot from Gerson Rodrigues as the ball fell kindly for him at the edge of the Ireland area. A brilliant daisy-cutter into the corner of Bazunu’s net. Disaster.
“It’s a shocking result,” said Séamus Coleman afterwards. “An embarrassing result. Let’s not hide behind anyone for that one. That’s on us as players. We should be embarrassed. As players we need to have a good hard look at ourselves. You need people demanding the ball out there and I don’t think we did that enough. If you’re building one side, you need people looking for it the other side. I don’t think we heard enough voices. There’s no words for that.
“As players we take that on the chin. It’s nowhere near what we wanted. There’s anger, embarrassment. It’s not good enough, there’s no words I can say to make the people at home feel any better. As players we should be disappointed to have Gavin’s debut tainted like that. Great young lad, a fantastic player and as senior players out there we should be taking that on the chin for the younger lads.
“The only thing we can do is keep your head down, keep going through the storm. You’ve got to be resilient in this game and you’ve got to take what’s coming as professionals. You’ve got to take what’s going and hope the younger lads aren’t tainted by that. As senior players, we have to take it on the chin and take the deserved criticism. But it will take a while to get over that one. It’s embarrassing, full-stop.”
