Could be the best time to play the Czechs

On Soccer:Though clearly not even in the same league as its rugby counterpart, soccer's World Cup can also take a while to settle before the quality starts to tell and the one-sided nature of some of the first-round contests stops playing tricks on the mind.

Still, it's hard not to make snap judgments when you're there and almost impossible if you get carried away with the emotion of it all and let your heart start ruling your head.

This may be what happened to me last year in Germany, where I had arrived anxious to see the Czechs pick up where they left off at Euro 2004 in Portugal two years earlier. They had been brilliant more than once at the tournament but ended up losing a semi-final they dominated to the eventual champions, Greece.

Karel Bruckner's side had, for me at least, been the best and most exciting team there and should have been given the title for their unforgettable comeback against the Netherlands in Aveiro alone.

The then 65-year-old coach showed himself to be a master tactician with his substitutions and positional switches that night as Jan Koller and Milan Baros scored to cancel out a 2-0 deficit before Vladimir Smicer came on to break the hearts of the Dutch with an 88th-minute winner.

Otto Rehhagel would subsequently eclipse Bruckner by guiding a comparatively ordinary group of players to the trophy but I wasn't alone in believing that the veteran might round off his career by taking the biggest prize of them all in Germany.

Things certainly started brightly enough. At Gelsenkirchen, just a few days into the tournament, the Czechs ran riot against the Americans. Koller scored the opener before two quite stunning strikes from Tomas Rosicky wrapped things up.

They really looked the finished item that day with full-back Zdenek Grygera tormenting opponents down the right, Tomas Ujfalusi commanding at the heart of the defence, Tomas Galasek helping Rosicky to run the show from central midfield and Pavel Nedved (back from retirement for the umpteenth time) mesmerising everyone as he thrived on the freedom to roam as he wished between midfield and Koller.

Then, without warning, it all went wrong. The Czechs lost 2-0 to both Italy and Ghana, never coming close to doing themselves justice in either game.

Only later did I hear the rumours that the win over the USA had prompted long and vigorous celebrations from which the players, it seems, never fully recovered.

The tournament then, proved to be a huge disappointment, but Bruckner, who had been expected to walk away regardless of how things went, decided to stay on - unable to believe, perhaps, that his side had blown its shot at achieving something really great.

Some of the media here believed events in Germany had cost the manager his authority with the group and he should go. More worrying for Bruckner, it seems segments of the squad privately agreed.

Things have not been good since for the Czechs. Some of the better players, most notably Nedved, have departed and there has only been one genuinely good result - the 3-0 defeat of their neighbours Slovakia - in the intervening 15 months, with the upshot that their world ranking, which stood at two in May of last year, is now nine after having briefly been lower.

Having just about beaten Wales here in the opening game of this campaign, they couldn't manage a goal at the start of the summer in Cardiff, where the game ended in a draw.

Worse, when they lost at home to Germany many of the players embarked on a rather wild party back at their team hotel, which prompted fines and came close to resulting in criminal charges.

They're staying somewhere else this time.

The press, meanwhile, were again critical after Saturday's workmanlike 3-0 defeat of San Marino. Bruckner has reacted by severely curtailing his increasingly frosty contact with journalists: a downward spiral of the kind we are all too familiar with in Ireland.

The appointment of the former star Karel Poborsky as team manager - a sort of link man between the players, their manager and the association - has helped matters somewhat but there are still said to be factions within the squad and so expectations in this part of the world are remarkably low.

They're not much better, of course, at home in Ireland, but the unavoidable conclusion is that if Ireland are ever to end their 20-year run without a genuinely good away win in a competitive game then maybe, just maybe, this is an opportunity waiting to be seized.

Richard Dunne spoke yesterday about the fact that the remaining results in this campaign are important because, if nothing else, they will help to determine Ireland's seeding when the draw is made for the World Cup's qualifying groups. In fact, that is all but decided on the basis of the games played already, with Ireland virtually certain to be a third seed.

What may be at stake, though, is Steve Staunton's future, for the manager was damaged again by the manner in which his side ended up drawing with Slovakia at the weekend. Retaining any chance of qualifying for next summer's European finals depends on a win too, although even if the three points are secured there will still be several more obstacles to be overcome.

More than that, though, with memories of the 1-0 home win over the Netherlands and the better performances at the subsequent 2002 World Cup fading, the players need to remind us that they can still sometimes rise to an occasion and do something that, in their terms, is just a little bit great.