Tranquillity then in the smart boutiques of football. Left Bank chic looks to have punctured all that dervish energy. The sense of what had been lost reached into every strut and beam of Croke Park on Saturday night.

They were taking the goalposts down before the team had even slipped from view. We felt work-worn and weary again, the purveyors of style having escaped le Grunt Republique.

If a country could lampoon itself, this was it. A ferocity of party spirit suddenly ebbing into easy melancholy. Bi-polar optics.

Richard Dunne came to the mixed zone bearing brave words and you wanted to believe him.

"It's our belief that we can go there and win the game," he said of Paris on Wednesday. But all around was a ruin of negative equity. We faced an eternity of Monday mornings again.

cronies

And, somewhere across the Continent, FIFA's old cronies were trying to suppress little celebratory jigs.

Manchester City got rid of Dunne a few months back with the virtual admission that his face didn't sell shirts in the Far East. Well, World Cups breathe on marketing and Sepp and the boys will be preparing to welcome Raymond Domenech and his repertory company of matinee idol lookalikes to South Africa with a businessman's embrace.

Aesthetes will exult too. They will see this as a sack of gravel removed from a flower bed.

Maybe it was our conceit to imagine things might be different. True, Nicolas Anelka's goal was a trick of outrageous fortune, the ball spooning up off Sean St Ledger and past a helpless Shay Given. Bad enough to manipulate the play-off draw with seedings. But when the gods connive against you too?

But you suspect we would have been no more than awkward company in South Africa. We have a national team equipped with hard work and gumption. The French, by comparison, brandish all of nature's grace notes.

They played us off the park in the second half, their balance and authority making us look clumsy. If anything, there was mild disdain in how they kept possession against snapping feet.

Yet, Ireland had opportunities and -- thereby -- a frustration lingered. As Dunne surmised: "It (the feeling within the team) is just disappointment really. There wasn't really anything in the game. Probably just one shot where it was looking dangerous and it went in. We created a couple of chances tonight from set-plays and we said that was going to be our big point.

"We're a goal down, but we still have to believe that we can go there on Wednesday and cause some trouble from those sort of situations.

"That's the attitude. It has to be. There's no point going there thinking it's over. We came here with the belief that we were going to qualify. Obviously, we're one down now. But it's still there. We've seen them tonight, decent players, but they've never really cut us open."

If anything, maybe their hubris stopped them. There were little eruptions of vanity from France that, in higher company, would be punished. Approaching half time, Anelka found himself without a forward passing option and coming under vigorous attention from Robbie Keane. The professional option would have been to slip the ball back to a defender. Anelka? He jinked and feinted like a dog trying to shake water off his mane. And Robbie just took the ball away.

Maybe five minutes later, Yoann Gourcuff essayed a back-heel on the Cusack Stand side that plopped into Keith Andrews' possession as gently as an incoming email. Andrews was startled; Domenech florid with rage.

As the teams went in at half-time, he stood at the mouth of the tunnel waiting for a brief consultation with his captain. And Thierry Henry walked towards Domenech with the urgency of a pall-bearer. He was last man off the field and it looked choreographed for the benefit of a French media that would happily strap Domenech to a tumbril. Hope still swam with giddiness at that point.

The French had looked vulnerable, specifically to aerial attack. Liam Lawrence's miss on 27 minutes -- after a high, hopeful delivery pitched them into chaos -- was startling. Not long after, Andrews couldn't get enough curl on a shot after nice interplay between Keane and Kevin Doyle. There was a palpable sense that Hugo Lloris's goal wasn't exactly pad-locked.

Yet, it wouldn't open.

"Obviously, the result is bad and it doesn't look good for us going forward," Dunne observed later. "But we'll just take positives, because we created probably three or four good chances from set-plays and different things. That's the thing. We just have to keep going, get the crowd behind us when we get over there and make things difficult for them.

"They had a lot of the ball tonight, a lot of movement and nice passing and stuff without doing too much. They had a couple of shots from outside the box. I mean it's difficult to get the ball off them at times. But every time the ball went into their box, it looked like they were panicking.

"Tonight was all about concentration. There wasn't a lot of tackles in the game, there wasn't a lot happening really. It was just being played about. And, for us, it's disappointing that we've not taken advantage. Because we had probably three good chances where we should have scored.

advantage

"The thing is we're going to have to probably try and play higher up the field and get a bit more set-piece situations. And take advantage of them this time."

The French bench and back-room had linked arms beforehand in respectful imitation of Pillar Caffrey and his Dubs. And Bacary Sagna's expression during La Marseillaise was that of a man who felt something move inside his shirt. No question, they had assembled on a war footing.

But their pulses calmed at half-time and they resumed with that familiar peacock strut. And, suddenly, the pitch seemed to lean in a cruel gradient towards the Hill.

Tactical sorcery from Domenech? "No, not really," shrugged Henry. "That's how we wanted to play the first half too."

Even through their early travails, they'd had a Gignac goal scrubbed out for offside. And, now their refinement really glowed. True, Damien Duff's wonderful back-heeled nutmeg of Sagna just after the resumption led to an outbreak of pin-ball in the French box but, thereafter, all was Gallic nonchalance.

Gourcuff, Lassana Diarra and Anelka all went close. Given scythed down Patrice Evra in the box. A penalty? "It might have been," conceded Dunne.

In other words, Anelka's eventual breakthrough didn't run contrary to the current. Ireland just couldn't get the ball. Or rather, when they did, they lacked the technical poise to keep it.

Gignac missed a late sitter to render Wednesday in Paris a virtual dead rubber and the night closed with an eruption of pushing and jostling, Lassana Diarra seeming to toss petrol on the embers of Irish disappointment with a few undiplomatic words.

Dunne was at the epicentre, dismissing it later as something that would "stay on the field".

He spoke instead of Ireland being compelled to make their own luck in the Stade de France now. "Tonight's game has not changed our feeling," he said. "They're a good side, but we still believe that we can definitely do them. It has to be done now in France, but we can still do it. They looked uncomfortable at times tonight. We just felt any balls going into their box, they didn't look too comfortable. So, that has to be the game plan.

Attitude

"As the manager said to us: 'It's half-time. Just keep going. We can still do it.' That's what the belief has been all week. We have to keep going. We don't change our attitude or the way we're feeling about things. It's disappointing, but when we sit back and talk about it, we're still in the game, still got a lot of football to play.

"When we go there, the pressure's obviously on them. The crowd is expecting them to win and I think they're expecting themselves to win. We can go there and play without pressure and really go for it. And, remember, we've scored goals more or less wherever we've gone. When Wednesday comes, we'll be ready for it."

It was a stirring cry, yet one -- you sensed -- that never quite registered in his eyes. For Ireland to make the great jamboree now, something virtually beyond the breadth of our comprehension must happen in Paris. Not quite a miracle perhaps. But something in that postal code.

Maybe the most withering words were Henry's at the close. "Yes," he acknowledged, you could say the winning goal had been lucky as a winning raffle ticket. "But in the second half, we had the ball most of the time. So, maybe that's why the luck turned our way!"

An old, unbreakable truth to carry home from soccer's last stand at Croker.

- Vincent Hogan

Irish Independent