THE REST of Ireland may be sitting around with its collective head in its hands, thinking that there's scarcely any point in RTÉ caving in to the French Federation's financial demands and postponing a perfectly good documentary on Borneo's pygmy elephant population. "What would it achieve," football fans up and down the country ask each other despondently, "other than make this bankrupt little nation of ours a little more miserable?", writes EMMET MALONE
In a dressingroom in Malahide, however, Ireland striker, Kevin Doyle has a message for the money men at Montrose: Write that cheque! Tear up the schedule! Forget about the (pint sized) elephants in the rooms! Ireland, insists our frontman in Paris, can win tomorrow night.
History and the bookies might suggest it is a long shot, while even L’Equipe might be nervously resigning itself to having its bête noir, Raymond Domenech, at the French helm for at least another eight months.
Doyle, though, good naturedly rejects Lassana Diarra’s rather colourfully articulated suggestion that the game is up for the Irish at the half-way point of the tie and maintains that while qualification is now a “massive ask” it remains, nevertheless, an achievable goal.
“I don’t think we have any problem believing that we can do it,” says the 26-year-old. “We’ve got to go and score but we’ve done that in the group, scored away in most games. I’ve been told that their record at home isn’t the best when it comes to keeping clean sheets. We’re all pretty confident. There seems to be that sort of aura around the squad that we will be able to do it on Wednesday.”
Within the squad, he says, the talk is not so about what went wrong at Croke Park but of being ready for Wednesday night and the Stade de France.
“But everybody seems to be up for it again already. The manager’s been making the point that it’s only half-time and 1-0. We have to go there and score but, in a way, it gives us that extra sense of everything just being against us, which suits in a way. Everyone apart from the players and the management will be thinking that it’s nearly done and we’ll hopefully be able to take advantage of that situation. Hopefully the French will feel the same, feel that they’re nearly in a World Cup.”
Assuming they manage to resist the temptation to think they have already qualified, the French, one suspects, are probably just as pleased to have everything going for them but Doyle remains adamant that there is still a logical basis for believing they can undone.
“In the first half we really played some good stuff. In the second half, the pitch was heavy, your legs go a bit and it gets harder to close them down. The nicking the ball that we were doing in the first half becomes that bit harder.
“And the way they play too, you saw [Nicolas] Anelka and [Thierry] Henry were picking it up off their centre halves, coming that deep, and it’s hard to cope with that – who do you track, who do you try to block?
“So we need to do a bit better, all right, and we have to keep a clean sheet. After that,” he continues, “we need to score. We seem to get most of our goals from corners and set-pieces and the like and they don’t seem to be the best in those situations really, so we’ll see.
“We would like to have got more at Croke Park but we got a few chances and nearly scored from one during the second half. If you look at our goals from over the group, probably a large percentage of them came from those sorts of situations so we have to take our chances.”
A modest enough case for rational optimism made, Doyle falls back on plain old wishful thinking. “They had a lot of possession but you could say that we had the better chances,” he added. “And their goal was jammy, to say the least; we just want that to happen us over there on Wednesday.”
