Ken Early: Ireland are a poor side, and we're getting worse

It is sadly typical of this luckless Ireland team that the best performance they’ve given in a competitive game for about five years ended in the bitterest disappointment.

Most of the team’s recent disappointments have been accompanied by a frustrating sense of untapped potential – a suspicion that the result might have been different if only certain obvious adjustments had been made.

A paradoxical benefit of Trapattoni's many exasperating tactical quirks was that he always left supporters feeling that there was a much better potential team there that could burst into life — if only. If only he would let the full backs venture into the opposing half, if only he used three rather than two in central midfield, if only he picked Wes Hoolahan.

On Saturday Martin O’Neill’s Ireland team did all those things. They delivered what was probably the best competitive performance in five or six years, and still they couldn’t beat mediocre opposition in a must-win home game.

There’s room for quibbles, as there always is. If Daryl Murphy was a better player than Shane Long, then why is he playing in the Championship while Long was the highest-placed Irishman in last season’s Premier League?

You could argue that Murphy scored 27 goals for Ipswich last season, while Long scored only seven for Southampton. To which the obvious rejoinder is, if Long played in the Championship like Murphy, he’d probably have scored 20+ goals last season too.

Yet it is difficult to get too worked up about that decision. We’ve all seen Long miss too many chances at the Aviva to believe passionately that it all would have worked out if only he had started the game rather than Murphy. In the event, Murphy had a hand in the goal and played about as well as could reasonably be expected.

Similarly, O’Neill’s decision to withdraw Wes Hoolahan with 15 minutes remaining seemed perverse at the time. UEFA’s statistics record that Hoolahan trudged off the field having completed 100 per cent of his 25 passes – the only starter who had not given the ball away – and created more chances from play than any other player. Which other team would chase a goal by taking off their most creative attacker?

Afterwards, O’Neill explained that Ireland’s play in the last few minutes of the game would necessarily be more direct, with longer balls into the box bypassing the areas just outside where Hoolahan tends to operate.

It wasn’t particularly persuasive stuff from the Ireland manager, but neither was it so outlandish as to invite ridicule. You could understand his logic, even if you didn’t agree with it. Hoolahan had looked by far Ireland’s classiest player whenever he was on the ball, but equally, nobody could honestly claim that he had been dominating the match.

O’Neill’s future will become the focus of conversation in the coming months, if only to give us all something to talk about now that qualification itself seems so unlikely.

His contract expires at the end of this campaign and he has not yet indicated whether he even wants to stick around for the next one. If we assume that he does, should the FAI offer him another deal? Again, it’s difficult to feel a strong conviction either way.

On the one hand, the energy and urgency the players displayed on Saturday makes a good case for O’Neill. At the same time, Ireland had a fairly crude gameplan based on Robbie Brady crossing towards a big centre forward. O’Neill mentioned that Scotland’s goal came from a lucky deflection. That’s true, but it also featured the sort of intelligent passing and movement in the build-up that his own team seldom produced.

In the absence of any of the usual scapegoats – an obviously underperforming player, or an obviously misguided managerial decision – we have sometimes been able to claim that villainous outside forces have conspired against us.

When O’Neill said that Steven Naismith had refereed most of the game it was recognisable as one of the flippant remarks he often makes only to withdraw them in the next instant, saying he was just joking. In the newspaper briefing after the main press conference it was obvious that he didn’t want the papers to make a big deal out of the comment.

The Scots could not be expected to ignore the invitation to mock O’Neill’s apparent sour grapes, however, and yesterday’s reaction in Scotland ironically rebuked referee Naismith for failing to notice that Ireland’s goal was offside, and for not sending off James McCarthy after his elbow on Russell Martin.

For once, in the end, we knew we had no excuses. So rather than outrage over the Hand of Henry or the refereeing of Naismith, rather than furious debate over the various tactical and philosophical roads not taken, all there is in the wake of Saturday’s game is a stagnant sense of resignation.

The gameplan basically made sense. Our best players were mostly on the field. There were no forgotten heroes left waiting in the wings. Most of our guys played creditably well. And still it wasn’t good enough.

We also know that our best performers on Saturday – Hoolahan, Walters, O’Shea – were all over 30 years old. So we’re a poor team that looks like it’s getting worse. We’re reduced to hoping that acceptance will prove the first step on the road to regeneration.