Celts collide: special night beckons for Ireland and Scotland

It is a long time since the Irish stopped coming to the city of Glasgow in significant numbers. The tidal wave of immigrants that helped transform the city through the latter part of the 19th century when they gave rise to Celtic Football Club reduced many years ago to a trickle.

The football still draws them, though, and the suddenness of today’s influx will feel like a tsunami as kick-off draws near and the Irish, by birth or belief, descend on the city’s shabby east end.

Faced with the need to relocate from Hampden Park for the night, it still seems strange that the SFA allowed finance to decide the matter and plumped for Celtic Park. Gordon Strachan spoke with some determination yesterday about the importance of making it "Scotland Park", if only for one night. But for many of those who will cheer the visitors on and one or two who will be more closely involved with them than that, there is still a slight sense of home about the place.

Martin O’Neill admitted last night how “weird” it would feel to be heading for the away dressing room this evening. For others the sense may be more spiritual but it seems almost impossible that the place could be made to feel like enemy territory in quite the way Ibrox might have been. It may not make an awful lot of difference on the night but in a game as tightly balanced as this looks, O’Neill and co will take every break they can get.

Injuries

They could do with a couple after losing two likely starters in midfielders yesterday. O’Neill never sounded convinced that Glenn Whelan could feature in this game after the injury the Dubliner picked up in Gelsenkirchen and the manager had come across as more hopeful than anything with regard to James McCarthy. In the end, before the team trained for the last time in Dublin, he decided their battle was lost and both returned to their clubs.

The pair will be missed and their absence will look like a major opportunity to the locals to assert themselves in central midfield. However, O'Neill has successfully expanded his options in that department over the course of his first year in charge and if Darron Gibson can deliver this evening there is no reason why Ireland cannot make a match of it in the middle.

Assuming Gibson starts, O’Neill’s selection issues would appear to come down to which two from David Meyler, Jeff Hendrick, Stephen Quinn and Jon Walters are in there as well. Meyler and Hendrick would go head to head to play alongside Gibson while either Quinn or Walters would play further forward, providing support to Robbie Keane.

If O’Neill can strike upon the right combination, as he has tended to in his previous two competitive away games, and the Irish hold their own against a capable and quick Scottish midfield, there is everything to play for. The home side’s defence can certainly be vulnerable if the game is contested far enough upfield to allow Robbie Keane and Ireland’s attack generally to play a meaningful role.

That will require support of the sort that can rarely be provided when teams get pushed back. If things go well James McClean and Aiden McGeady will be critical to Ireland’s prospects, for the Scots are not brilliantly fixed in the full-back positions while their centre halves have looked vulnerable under crosses and at set pieces, most obviously against Poland and Germany.

For Strachan, the main selection issue is at left back where he must choose between Celtic’s Charlie Mulgrew and the younger, more offensively minded, Andrew Robertson. The latter is seen as a decent prospect, a sort of Scottish Seamus Coleman by his more ardent admirers.

Solid

In midfield and attack, though, the team is solid, fast and strong with a lack of height perhaps their only obvious concern on physical front, something that is likely to lend weight to the case for Mulgrew at left back, although the 28-year-old could still feature in midfield.

O’Neill sounded impressed with the way he says McClean has matured over the last year or so and the way he applies himself to his game these days but he is a long-standing fan too of Steven Fletcher, who he signed to Sunderland for the precisely the reasons he will be wary of him this evening.

But then, as the Ireland manager acknowledged last night, everyone knows each other in this game and a great deal will depend on how that knowledge is applied over the course of the 90 minutes.

Strachan, it might be argued, is under the greater pressure to take the points and for his part O’Neill insisted last night: “When we finish we will have played three pretty difficult away games and we’ll still be in the hunt regardless so I think what we do at the Aviva in 2015 will determine our fate.”

As to the type of the match it might be, few who have attempted to characterise its likely nature over the last few weeks have managed to say much that would generate any great anticipation in your average aesthete.

And yet there is still the same strong sense of excitement there was back in February when the fixture, then the venue, was announced. This could be one of the special nights, one when at least 126 years of history might joyously collide with the here and now.