Old frailties mar gallant display

WORLD CUP 2010 QUALIFYING GROUP EIGHT Rep of Ireland 2 Italy 2: IT WAS, to paraphrase Dickens, the best of nights and the worst of nights on Saturday at Croke Park where an Irish performance of tremendous industry and application enabled the home side to match the world champions for the second time in seven months.

For three exhilarating minutes near the end it seemed they might go one better and actually beat the Italians, providing, in the process, the 70,640 strong crowd with a victory to equal that famous one over the Dutch eight years ago.

Almost inevitably, however, they proved incapable of holding the lead they held courtesy of Sean St Ledger’s late goal.

His close-range header generated noise levels to rival the Lansdowne roar that Saturday afternoon in September 2001. But the excitement that then built inside the vast stadium quickly evaporated, replaced with a stunned silence and a sense of dismay as the visitors grabbed their second equaliser of the game through Alberto Gilardino.

With the exception of the first 15 minutes or so, to be fair, Marcello Lippi’s side had looked the more authoritative with Andrea Pirlo, whose passing and movement was central to their superiority, the game’s outstanding figure.

As they clearly needed to be, however, the home side looked the more committed throughout and even at the end it was their enthusiasm as much as their naivety that proved to be their undoing.

The fact two of the Irish back four had pressed forward with their side in front 30 seconds or so from the end of normal time, provided the opportunity for their opponents to grab their late goal and, with it, guaranteed qualification at next summer’s World Cup.

There were a handful of positives to be taken from the game with the quality of Ireland’s two goals, both from set-pieces, and the resilience of the back four through most of the game, amongst the most obvious.

Liam Lawrence made a positive competitive debut at this level – although his decision-making when defending must have caused some alarm at times amongst the Irish management team – while Glenn Whelan and Keith Andrews worked as well together on this occasion as they ever have.

Neither of the Irish strikers who started managed to seriously trouble Gianluigi Buffon over the course of the game – in fact, the goalkeeper did not make a single real save – but the pair worked tirelessly for the cause with Kevin Doyle endlessly harassing opponents in their own half while Robbie Keane held the ball up well and also regularly dropped deep in order to pitch in on the marking front.

The major negatives from an Irish point of view, meanwhile, were all too familiar. The side’s passing and ball retention was again poor for long stretches while their inability to defend a lead once again proved fatal.

Afterwards, Giovanni Trapattoni still seemed to find it all a little bit hard to comprehend. “It wouldn’t have happened in Italy,” he observed mournfully

The upside was that the Irish twice managed to earn a lead to blow, thereby joining France, Holland and Brazil, in a rather elite group of teams to have scored more than once against the Italians in a competitive fixture since they won the World Cup in the summer of 2006.

Whelan’s opening goal, just eight minutes in, was outstanding with Lawrence playing a free from the edge of the area’s right-hand side square for the midfielder to launch towards the top left corner. Few would have had any confidence that Trapattoni’s men would hold out from there but after Mauro Camoranesi had been allowed to score a soft headed equaliser from Pirlo’s corner, there was little to suggest that the Italians would push on to win the game either.

The suspicion, of course, was that it was because they didn’t need to, with supporting evidence coming late on with their swift reply to Ireland’s second goal.

Before that, the visitors edged the contest in terms of possession and ran away with it a bit in terms of fluency on the ball. There was little end product, though, and their only two shots on target aside from the goals came from the full-backs with Fabio Grosso firing a volley straight at Shay Given and Gianluca Zambrotta forcing the goalkeeper into a fairly smart save low to his left.

Given, though, did not look to be at his best here and he was certainly a good deal less commanding under high balls than his opposite number with Buffon plucking a succession of crosses masterfully from the air while the Donegalman will prefer to forget his lunging effort to intercept Pirlo’s ball from the right five minutes before the end.

In front of him, though, the Irish defence performed valiantly for the bulk of the night. St Ledger again looked to thrive on the challenge handed to him while John O’Shea came close to turning in a flawless display.

Having mesmerised his markers with pretty much the entire contents of his bag of tricks but managed to generate little or no actual threat to the Italian goal, Aiden McGeady was replaced by Stephen Hunt whose curling free four minutes from time was headed home from beyond the far post by St Ledger.

The Trapattoni manual is pretty clear on what should have happened next: his players should have shut up shop. But, throughout this campaign, the Irish have shown themselves to prefer an open-all-hours approach to such matters and when a throw-in was won deep inside the Italian half with less than a minute remaining half of the defence ventured forward, a mistake that was ruthlessly punished when the Italians broke into the space down their left that should been occupied by O’Shea.

Vincenzo Iaquinta, after a night of hard running alone up front for no return, cut back inside Andrews and crossed low for Gilardino who, having lost St Ledger for the Irish goal minutes earlier, now wriggled a couple of yards clear of the centre half while Richard Dunne was still scrambling back into position. The first-time shot lacked power but it completely wrong-footed Given who slumped to his left but still probably managed to turn and see the ball bobble over the line.

It was a harsh lesson for an Irish team that had battled bravely but one they had better take on board if they hope to prosper in the play-offs.

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND: Given (Manchester City); O'Shea (Manchester United), Dunne (Aston Villa), St Ledger (Middlesbrough), Kilbane (Hull City); Lawrence (Stoke City), Andrews (Blackburn Rovers), Whelan (Stoke City), McGeady (Celtic); Doyle (Wolverhampton Wanderers), Keane (Tottenham Hotspur). Subs: Best for Doyle (66 mins), Rowlands (QPR) for Whelan (76 mins), Hunt (Hull City) for McGeady (78 mins).

ITALY: Buffon (Juventus); Zambrotta (Milan), Chiellini (Juventus), Legrottaglie (Juventus), Grosso (Juventus); De Rossi (Roma), Palombo (Sampdoria); Camoranesi (Juventus), Pirlo (Milan), Di Natale (Udinese); Iaquinta (Juventus). Subs: Bochetti (Genoa) for Grosso and Gilardino (Fiorentina) for Di Natale (76 mins), Pepe (Udinese) for Palombo 89 mins).

Referee: Terje Hauge(Norway).