Game not quite up for Ireland but it's a long shot

GROUP C PERMUTATIONS:HAVING SPENT so much time citing Greece's title success of 2004, Giovanni Trapattoni and his players might well like to shift their focus towards Portugal's performance in that year as they search for a new inspiration here in Poland. Like the Czechs in 1996, Figo and co went all the way to the final eight years ago after losing their opening game.

Once there, also like the Czech Republic, they lost to the same team again. But then: Ireland to be edged by the Croats in Kiev on July 1st? In footballing parlance, Trapattoni and his players would bite your hand off if you offered it to them right now.

Fractionally more plausible is the idea of the Irish putting Sunday’s defeat behind them and getting enough points to squeeze through to the quarter-finals.

Three will not be enough so a draw and a win (though not necessarily in that order) is the very least that is required, while the only other combination of results open to Ireland that would do the team any good, two victories, would guarantee progression at this stage and still has the potential to deliver the group’s top spot.

Over the course of the last four European Championships four points has been enough to secure second spot in half of the 16 first-round groups contested.

In half of those, however, more than one team has finished on four points so Ireland would have to beat the teams with whom they are tied on the basis of the other criteria specified in the tournament regulations – a longish list that starts with points gained in the games between the teams concerned and, in extreme examples, includes the provision that qualification can be decided on the basis of a nation’s placing in the Uefa coefficient ranking list.

In any case, Trapattoni will not need to be told the game is not quite up yet and he may well be spending a bit of time reminding his players of the fact.

The sort of recovery required is, in fact, common enough. Over the course of those same last four European Championships eight teams, or 25 per cent of those to have made it to the knockout stages, have had to bounce back from opening day defeats.

Last time around the proportion involved was much higher, with three of the quarter-finalists in Switzerland and Austria having to pick themselves up, brush themselves down and start afresh to get out of their respective groups.

Even more encouraging from an Irish perspective in the wake of their 3-1 defeat is that all lost by at least two goals, with Turkey going down 2-0 to Portugal before beating the Swiss and the Czechs, Italy beaten 3-0 by the Netherlands after which they drew 1-1 with Romania and overcame France 2-0, while Russia lost 4-1 to Spain prior to wins against Greece and Sweden in which they kept clean sheets.

It is not, however, all good news for Ireland. In the majority of cases (seven out of eight) mentioned above, the defeated team progressed along with the side that had beaten them in that opening game.

That would tend to suggest that Ireland’s best chance of survival now is for Croatia to push on from their win by taking further points from Spain and Italy, something the teams that have won each of the last two World Cups between them might have something to say about.

Which brings us to our final point: none of the precedents from the last 16 years to which Ireland might look for inspiration involves an outsider on the scale of Ireland upsetting the odds quite so gloriously as to progress at the simultaneous expense of two powerhouses of the international game.

When relatively lowly-ranked teams lose their opening game, the figures tend to show that further poor results often follow and the Irish players may not want to be reminded of how their favourite “minnows” – Greece – returned to the European Championships as title holders four years ago and lost their opener 2-0 to Sweden. Far from bouncing back, they simply lost their remaining games 1-0 to Russia and 2-1 to Spain, becoming the fifth team in four tournaments to go home without a single point.