One by one the forced smiles passed. Brave but hollow words passed too before the players disappeared into the night. Then out wandered David Connolly, the party line prepared. "We did well to create so many chances" and "there's nothing to fear from them when we go away" but the ocean of tears in his eyes tell a very different story. The 20-year-old forward manages a few more lines about how the team have to take heart from the multitude of chances they created but that only seems to re-enforce his emotional conclusion that he, as the team's young goal-getter, has let everybody down. His voice crackles, his head bows Connolly cuts a very different figure to the young man in May who had just scored a hat-trick.

"Maybe it's because it was my first competitive match of the season but I didn't do well, I'm very disappointed with the way I've performed out there tonight.

"I didn't feel sharp, I couldn't seem to make the ball stick and I gave the ball away a lot. When the ball fell for me in the area, which it did a bit when Niall and then Cas knocked it down for me, I just couldn't seem to get on the end of it and I should have done more. The fans deserved better and so did the team."

Connolly's striking partner through the latter part of the game sees many of the same problems and also accepts his portion of the blame. But big Cas has been around a bit longer and knows that even from the darkest of nights the team can find their way back into the light.

"Sure it's disappointing to have created so much and still have nothing to show for it," he sighs "but on the night a couple of things have gone wrong for us - we've finished badly and their goalkeeper has made a couple of good saves - and we've just got to put that behind us and concentrate on making sure that from now on things go our way."

Similarly Ray Houghton comes out with his head held high. Another of the men on whose shoulders the task of breaking the visitors down rested. He knows that he might have won the game at the end of either half but is keen to put his own failure and that of his team in perspective.

"I'm actually not too disappointed," he tells a group of disappointed journalists who would deeply love to believe that the man who brought us a couple of our most memorable days ever is not simply stringing us along now, now that things are bad.

"But I still think we can come back from this," he concludes adding that "we're still on course because we can win the remaining games and qualify." Mmmm, we agree and scribble, hoping that he knows what he's talking about. Still, as we leave, it is image of Connolly's tear-filled eyes that won't go away. Like the youngest star in Mick McCarthy's outfit we've seen what the old hands have but like him, for all the brave words, we think we know failure when we see it.