Albanians are happy to wait for Judgement Day

The last time the Albanians were competing in the same qualification group as Ireland there were reports that some of the country's players had to be apprehended at an airport after taking items of jewellery with them from the duty free.

It was the "free" bit in the shop's title, they explained, that had prompted the confusion.

A decade on and it was the Albanians who cried "thief" as they left Dublin for Switzerland over the weekend. Their anger had been obvious as they left the pitch at Lansdowne Road where several became embroiled in minor scuffles as they tried to make clear their displeasure over the tactics of their Irish counterparts to the match officials and the departing Irish players.

Through bad sportsmanship, they alleged, their hosts had simply stolen Saturday's 2-1 win.

"I never thought an Irish team would behave like this," said Brescia striker Igli Tare. "We have heard a lot about their fair play, but when the ball went out for an (injured) Irish player it was given back. I had to go off for an injury and it should have been given back but it wasn't."

Instead, the throw-in started the move that led to Ireland's winner. It was the second time that the Irish had opted not to give the ball back to the Albanians after the visitors had put it out of play to allow treatment to one of their players and the tactic clearly infuriated Tare and his team-mates.

"There is one God up there who will judge us all," he said as he left the ground. "I'm sorry to say this about an Irish team that I had another opinion about. Everybody wants to win, but there is a way of doing things."

Needless to say that nobody in the Irish camp seemed to anticipate any major fallout in the afterlife as a result of their actions.

The fairly commonly held view amongst the players was that the Albanians had been unsporting in the way that they had repeatedly dived and sought to both waste time and disrupt the pattern of the game.

"It was very frustrating, the diving and cheating," said Matt Holland.

"It's very hard to take and there certainly was a number of occasions in the game when players went down and you wouldn't have thought that there was too much wrong with them.

"Once or twice you even had players stretchered off and within a matter of seconds there appeared to be nothing wrong with them. That sort of thing was hard to cope with."

Like his manager, Brian Kerr, Holland clearly felt that, despite some agreement over the origins of the problem, the Irish had been justified in the way that they behaved themselves.

The overall performance, he admitted, however, had fallen some way short of what should have been produced on such an important occasion.

"People expect teams like Albania to come here and roll over and that's just not going to happen. Just look at Spain getting beaten at home by Greece, who would have predicted that?

"But, obviously, we know that we will have to play a lot better against the Georgians. There were a lot of things that we could have done much better in this game and we will be looking at them."

The concession of the goal so soon after Ireland had taken the lead was, he added, a particular disappointment.

"It was sloppy play. We scored the goal ourselves and just seemed to think to ourselves for a moment that, 'well, we're going to go on and win this'.

"At that point something switched off in us momentarily and the next we know the Albanians have gotten themselves back into it. It was very disappointing.

"For most of the game, though, I thought they looked far happier with the draw, though and we worked hard for the win. It was difficult for us."