You’d have hoped for some bit of old fight, perhaps even for some masterful brush strokes in the land of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. But not a bit of it.
If anything, watching paint dry would have been far more exciting than what unfolded on the pitch in Amsterdam and those familiar faces – of Didi, Shay and Richie – in the RTÉ studio had hangdog looks that have become something of a common theme throughout Ireland’s European qualifying campaign.
Before the match, there were some rays of positivity in the belief that Ireland had nothing to lose and all the pressure was on the Dutch. And Didi Hamann even seemed touched by the piece with Liam Scales and his journey to international football. “Inspirational,” Hamann called it.
Richie Sadlier responded to Joanne Cantwell’s yearning for some hope that Ireland could finally finish off the campaign with something other than just the points garnered against the footballing powerhouse of Gibraltar who – at the same time – were being out-mastered by France in a 14-0 trouncing.
So, what inspiration were we to expect? Or even hope for?
“What are we hoping to see tonight? It kind of feels like we’re in repeat mode. We are hoping to see a good performance and some fruits of that, that we can score and keep a clean sheet ... this is going to be difficult but it is doable. That may sound daft but there’s three midfielders in that Dutch team who have seven caps between them, really inexperienced. We need to be clinical up front and we need to keep the ball and actually hurt the Dutch team when we have the ball,” responded Sadlier.
It didn’t take long for those words of hope to evaporate, with Wout Weghorst’s stunning finish a stark contrast to the calamity of errors from the Irish players.
“I’ll tell you what, this is some finish,” gushed Darragh Maloney of the Dutch strike.
Beside him, co-commentator Ronnie Whelan was more taken by the Irish defending, such as it was. “They’ve run into each other in the middle of the park and run into each other again [in defence] and we give away a goal,” said a downbeat Whelan, not even attempting to hide his frustration.
In the half-time analysis, Shay Given couldn’t get over what he was seeing. “It’s a poor goal, so many mistakes on the one goal, the lads will be scratching their heads.”
Many of those watching on television were assuredly scratching their heads too. “At times in this game, you’d just think it is a preseason friendly,” said Whelan at one point in the second half as the paint dried and the Dutch went through the motions. “You have to think Ireland are looking for another manager. Who that is, I have no idea,” admitted Whelan. “It’s been a very, very weird game.”
Maloney didn’t disagree. “A one-nil hammering,” he observed, a fact that would have been clearer on the actual scoreboard but for Gavin Bazunu’s heroics, not unlike the Dutch boy who once upon a time plugged a hole in the dyke with his finger.
When it was all over, it really was all over.
“Was that just a really tough watch?” asked Joanne knowing full well the answer.
Given was not a happy man, feeling the Irish team had just gone “through the motions ... when you cross the white line for your country you just give everything you have got. It just seemed so flat. I don’t know.”
“Where do you go with it, Joanne?” continued Given further down the analysis. “I have no real answers, it is frustrating when you’re watching it. I’m trying to be positive, that’s the sort of person I am, but it is very difficult after you watch that against a poor Dutch team.”
If the match was uncomfortable viewing, so too was the post-match interview with RTÉ soccer correspondent Tony O’Donoghue and Ireland manager Stephen Kenny.
Kenny talked of the Netherlands – or Holland, as he put it – as being a “world class team,” adding: “The reason Ireland has never beaten a tier-one team in our history in an away game is because it’s bloody hard.”
It was an emotional two-way conversation which finished with a shake of the hands between the two men, both aware that it was most likely the last interview that Tony and Stephen will have after a competitive game.
“I was uncomfortable watching that,” admitted Sadlier back in studio. “In all the games we watched in the last three years with Stephen in charge I would always be interested to see what was said after the game, his words were relevant and they mattered and they gave us an insight into what he thought and what he might do the next time. There was really no relevance to what he said tonight. The words don’t matter any more.”
Time, it would seem, for different brushstrokes.
