Tactics handed the match to Croatia

The result was tight and people will probably bemoan the timing of Davor Suker's goal for years to come if we end up failing to qualify for these European Championships. But take a look at the bones of Saturday night's game for a moment and it's impossible not to conclude that for the first time in a very long time we got a right going over.

It might have taken the Croatians 94 minutes to score, but it took them only a matter of moments to take control in the game. Our tactics handed the home side the initiative in the opening minutes, and from then on there was only one side that could win the game.

I've said before that the only way you take a point from a game like this is by at least maintaining some sort of threat that you are capable of grabbing all three. On Saturday night we never threatened to do that even for a second, and because of the way we opted to play, we were simply left to dig in and hope for the best.

As it turned out there were plenty of decent performances. I thought we defended well for the bulk of the game, and Lee Carsley and Mark Kinsella worked their socks off for virtually the whole of the 90 minutes. The sad part, however, is that everything we did was defensive. No serious attempt to get forward was ever made and the home side were virtually given carte blanche to work on their attacking game without giving the prospect that they might get caught on the break a second thought.

I had felt that McCarthy would go for a 4-5-1 and that that might well be his best option in the circumstances. To be honest, though, it wouldn't have been a formation I would have seriously contemplated for such an important game in Zagreb, unless Robbie Keane had been one of the five midfielders.

Playing Tony Cascarino up front by himself against a team of Croatia's quality was little short of laughable. If you are going to play with one up front he must have some sort of pace, mobility and support. Cascarino, and Niall Quinn wouldn't have been noticeably different in the circumstances, had none of these and the result was that the home side quickly figured out that all they had to do was keep tight to him, leave a second defender there to cover any runs and then push everybody else forward.

The upshot was predictable. The Croatians got countless crosses in from all sorts of angles. They got 20 corner kicks and had numerous scoring chances, some of which we defended well, some of which we were just plain old lucky with.

What we needed was a playmaker who could put his foot on the ball, slow things down and play good quality balls forward for the wide men or, more particularly, for Cascarino. We didn't have one, though, so the veteran striker got on to very few of the balls were played in his general direction, and there were few runs forward from midfielders who were generally preoccupied with their defensive work.

That was natural in the circumstances. You can't expect players to keep looking to make long runs when there appears to be little prospect of the man they are attempting to support having the ball when they get there. Gary Kelly and Damien Duff suffered badly as a result, and neither got to make the contribution that they might have with a more positive line-up.

With Keane in there the Croatians would have had to give a good deal more thought to the possibility that they would be caught at the back. They didn't actually look all that great the two or three times that they were even slightly threatened, and some of their players, notably Robert Jarni, are certainly a lot more comfortable pushing forward in Saturday's sort of game than when they are put under a bit of pressure.

Overall, though, there just seemed to be an acceptance that anything better than a defeat would be a tremendous bonus.

McCarthy might argue that his approach nearly came off, but really he can have no complaints about the defeat. During the 90 minutes we were pulled all over the place, generally run ragged and were lucky more than once to stay on level terms. The five minutes of added time works equally for both sides: we can score during those five minutes just as they can. Anyway, nearly every game in the Premiership now has three or four minutes added on, so players should be well used to it.

What makes the approach all the more mystifying is that our third game in this series is against Malta. Now we all know that there's no such thing as an easy international game and all the rest of the cliches, but Malta haven't taken a single point from their games so far and we really shouldn't have allowed the prospect of visiting them to dictate the way we approached a match with our genuine rivals.

With the players that we appear to have saved for Wednesday, Saturday could have been a very different game and McCarthy could have been going into his final two games in a commanding position.

Even as it is, though, the Irish can still come out on top of this group. Like last Wednesday's victory over Yugoslavia, the team must put this defeat behind them and get on with the two matches to come. The game between Croatia and Yugoslavia will have an enormous bearing on our fortunes, but if we win our last two games we will almost certainly top the group.

That has to be our aim, but if we don't achieve it then McCarthy may well be left to rue what was a self-defeating attempt to be a little too cute this weekend when a little bit of boldness should have been the order of the day.

(In an interview with Emmet Malone)