No margin for error remains

Soccer analyst: Not the cleverest of performances. You do get some strange results this time of year. It's always something you have to guard against when you haven't been playing for a while. Often your football brain goes into neutral. And, really, that's what happened us in Lansdowne Road on Saturday night.

Everybody's going to moan about the referee and the decisions he made but you have to say the chances we missed, by Damien Duff and John O'Shea in particular, were unbelievable - really, the referee shouldn't have mattered in the end.

Having lost the lead the team just couldn't work out how to regain it - and, inevitably, you desperately miss Roy Keane in a situation like that. He would have ensured that they just kept playing. He wouldn't necessarily have improved the performance, but he would have improved the thought about the performance.

His absence, of course, couldn't be helped, he was suspended. The point is, though, that it showed, perhaps more than ever, that we just don't have any one to replace him and his influence on the team.

In many ways we were leaderless when we most needed leading. Graham Kavanagh, Matt Holland and the rest are decent players, but they have no great stature on the pitch. Kenny Cunningham's been really good, really consistent for us, but he does his job, whereas Keane does his job and makes sure everybody else does theirs too.

Some of them never really coped with what happened in the first half, it was just a lack of cool heads. And we lacked a little bit of intelligence - yes, we continued making chances, but in all honesty we were frantic, having had the perfect start.

Robbie Keane's goal was sheer brilliance, so watching him go off gave the opposition a lift. That will always be our problem, when we lose any of our three key players - the two Keanes and Duff - we become an ordinary side without them. And suddenly we were without two of the three.

We said from the start of this campaign we would have a really good chance of qualifying if the two Keanes and Duff were fit, without any of them we're greatly weakened. We're in the middle of it watching these games, caught up in it all, but people divorced from it would say: "Well without two of your three best players on the pitch what did you really expect?"

I thought the substitution - bringing on Kavanagh for Robbie - was okay. To be fair to Brian Kerr there weren't too many options on the bench, that is our problem. But it just showed that without Robbie we don't have anything up front that's just a little bit different. With the best will in the world, Clinton Morrison is no more than a decent player. I really don't think his movement is particularly good, and he's not capable of being the "main man" up front.

Inevitably when Duff moves up front he doesn't have the same influence on the game. You want him running from deep, committing defenders. More often than not in the second half he had his back to goal. You want him running on to things, taking people on, going past people.

Meanwhile the midfield lost its cool and lost a little bit of invention. As ordinary as the Israelis are, you still need a little bit of magic to get through them because they're well coached and well organised. They are hard working, hard to play against. They're quite physical, but they're not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good side. In the end we lost the points because we lost our cool.

When Gary Doherty came on we began pumping it up there from 40, 50 yards out, and that's no good, that's playing to the only defensive strength they have. It's easy to defend against that - as a defender you're coming on to the ball all the time. We just stopped getting in crosses from 18 yards or so, crosses that would really hurt them, turn them around.

You have to be intelligent the way you play football. Yeah, we got a few knock-downs from Doherty and you make a few half-chances, but you don't open teams up as much.

There was plenty of cheating and play-acting from them but we allowed our frustration to get the better of us. You get frustrated and you stop thinking rationally, and when you stop thinking rationally how on earth can you win football games?

Yes, the referee drove them mad at times (the Israeli penalty? You'd have 15 to 20 penalties in every Premiership match if he was refereeing), but you just have to cope with it. You can't start convincing yourself that every decision is going to go against you . . . Morrison appealed for a couple of penalties, but they were never penalties. You've lost it at that stage, you're charging around, feeling aggrieved, instead of getting on with it and clearing your head. It becomes an excuse, especially for players who don't want to admit they've made a mistake or haven't played well.

Their goalkeeper was a clown, a nuisance, a nark, but he stopped the ball going in the net probably three times, when he knew nothing about it. He was also a cheat - the sending-off of Andy O'Brien was pathetic, but the goalkeeper got away with it.

So, all a bit frantic, all a bit frayed, and now, well, we're looking at having to win the France and Switzerland games. The margin of error in this group has just been dramatically reduced.