A night to forget
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A game memorable as a muddy dusk for Ireland.
Giovanni Trapattoni shed his invincible glow, the hitherto unbeaten Irish left as sheepish as latecomers to a funeral. It was a resolutely Polish night in Croke Park, a night of booming drums and bright red embers.
Dublin's burgeoning Polish community came out in force, the bulk of them corralled into a corner of the Cusack Stand. They sang their songs, they danced, they celebrated home.
For this night, we lived in the foothills of their world.
Once upon a time, Poland was a kind of grey-stoned convenience store for Irish football that had a magnetic hold on the FAI.
They seemed drawn to it like kids to Butlins, feeding our national team's education with economy trips to places like Katowice, Wroclaw and Poznan.
Ray Treacy once joked that he had won 43 caps for Ireland, "probably about 40 of them against Poland!". He exaggerated of course. Treacy actually faced Poland nine times in his international career. Only about a quarter of his entire haul then.
It wasn't football, food or weather that drew the Irish east. It was the zloty. Dollars could be exchanged for the local currency at up to 10 times their value on the black market. Poland simply made sense.
Friendships were forged, businesses established, enterprise preached. The players, solid citizens that they were, always turned up too. So Poland-Ireland was a rivalry forged on unromantic things, the football a stolid diversion.
In these hair-shirt times, perhaps we are already on our way back to that kind of era. Yet, last night, only the game mattered.
Poland looked what they've almost always looked. Technically sound. They kept the ball well and passed smartly.
But they didn't have a player with the conspicuous grace of Deyna or one with the venom of Lato.
Then again, they didn't need them. They were ahead inside three minutes through the kind of goal that Italians pretty much learn in the womb how to circumvent. For Trapattoni, this was like losing his wallet to a thief with a water-pistol.
Delivery
Gargula's delivery brought no audible sirens but the giant Lewandowski, with Folan and O'Shea in close attendance, got the faintest of touches and Given was beaten. Cries of "Polska, Polska, Polska" rolled around the stadium. Giovanni looked at his shoes.
It felt like the home team was ahead.
They had come a mite depleted, three of their number -- including injured Celtic goalkeeper, Artur Boruc -- suspended for a drinking binge after a recent friendly against the Ukraine.
Truth to tell, you wouldn't have known. The rest of Leo Beenhakker's crew must be abstemious as Mormons.
Damien Duff apart, Ireland had little creative spark. In fact, the further the game evolved, the more conspicuous the elephant in the corner. The one, of course, answering to the name of Andy.
Funny, Trapattoni's first year at the helm has been impressive, yet he encounters the kind of negativity George Dubya might attract going walkabout in Baghdad. Why?
Perhaps his sin is simply that he understands the business of building a team better than his critics. He cherishes the integrity of the co-operative, picking a player to serve the collective, not to adorn it.
Andy Reid is a gifted footballer whose career looks set to flame out on the periphery of real achievement.
He isn't a regular starter under Roy Keane at Sunderland, nor was he under Martin Jol at Tottenham. Given his creative gifts, those facts shine an awkward light on other areas of his game.
Physically, Reid looks a throw-back. He can pick a pass others have scarcely the capacity to imagine. He has a wicked feint. You could imagine him bossing the fields of Skinner Normanton's time.
Michael Parkinson once lovingly described the little Barnsley 'hard man' as having legs "sturdy as pit-props with bulging shin-pads and bulbous toecaps that glowed with dubbin and menace".
Maybe with Skinner minding the house, Reid could flower in beautiful freedom. But the game today demands players to be a composite. Part Reid, part Normanton, part butterfly, part beetle.
Combination
True, the combination of Glenn Whelan and Darron Gibson seemed to lean a mite over-zealously towards Skinner's DNA last night. And Reid would, no doubt, have opened a few doors that stayed so resolutely padlocked.
But in the whitest of heat, perhaps Trapattoni suspects something that Keane and Jol have already seen.
Would he have made a difference last night? Probably. Would it have sign-posted much for the hard days ahead? Questionable.
The Poles were better than Ireland and enjoyed the business of articulating that fact. Only a wonderful intervention from Richard Dunne stopped Brozek from doubling the Poles' advantage on 40 minutes before Duff linked sweetly with Folan before steering his shot just wide of the target.
Then, just after the resumption, substitute Guerreiro scored with a splendid drive at the Hill-end. It was his first touch, his shirt still dry as parchment. Not long after, Wasilewski missed a sitter. Ireland were being run ragged.
Trapattoni quickly began emptying his bench like a gambler suspecting holes in his pockets. Tragically, there were.
The game ended in a blur, Stephen Hunt's late penalty followed by Lewandowski's wonder strike and, finally, Keith Andrews' thunderbolt.
Three goals in three minutes. The better team still ascendant.
- Vincent Hogan
