“Ireland get battered, everywhere they go! Ireland get battered, everywhere they gooo!” The England fans were loving their song-for-the-day, but they also started leaving in large numbers from around 70 minutes, after their side went 4-0 up. Why risk getting stuck in the crowds at Wembley Park Tube station just to see England run in another goal or two against this shambles?
Ireland began with one of their best first-half performances in years and ended with their worst ever defeat to England. What are we to make of this? What kind of a team collapses so abjectly after playing so well?
“I’m kind of lost for words,” said Heimir Hallgrímsson. “Six minutes of madness. It was a shock, conceding a penalty, conceding a goal, losing a player. But we probably lost our heads at this moment, leading to a second goal and a third goal. And from there you can see, we lost our head, gave up ... it clearly took away all confidence from what we did really well in the first half.”
A moment later, Hallgrimsson was backtracking: “Maybe it’s too harsh to say gave up.” His point was that the rapid sequence of shocks early in the second half shattered Ireland’s confidence and scrambled their minds. “I wrote it down – first goal was 52 minutes. Two minutes later, 2-0, by 58 it’s 3-0.”
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His point was that it all happened too quickly for the manager to react. But what about the players? Ireland’s capitulation again exposed this team’s fatal lack of gamecraft. Their brittleness is matched only by their naivety.
Confronted with a suddenly rampant opponent, clever teams find ways to slow the game down. Maybe somebody realises they are injured and needs lengthy treatment. A couple of minutes slide by with nothing happening. The panic subsides, the opponents’ momentum slows, the crowd gets bored. Too often Ireland lurch along in a daze, letting the game happen to them.
Nor was this the first time in the game that Ireland’s innocence had cost them. On 21 minutes a long ball had bounced behind the England defence and Evan Ferguson sprinted after it, closing on Marc Guehi. It looked as though Ferguson might be about to force Guehi off the ball, so the English defender yanked him to the ground by the front of his shirt.
The referee, far behind the play, couldn’t have seen the shirt pull but it was a mystery why VAR did not let him know about it. For some reason, though, Ferguson was the only Irish player who appealed.
This was the second time in consecutive away matches that Ireland should have had a penalty for a clear foul on Ferguson, and also the second time that the team did not protest with the kind of vehement outrage that can pressurise the video referee to intervene. Now that the referee’s decision is no longer final, obnoxious appeals can help to swing decisions your way: look how Manchester City react to anything that looks remotely like a foul on a team-mate in the box. Hallgrímsson started this campaign looking for “bastards”, at this point even committed whingers would do.
Note the contrast with what England’s players did on 43 minutes, when Liam Scales kicked the ball away to prevent them taking a quick free kick. Several were immediately shouting at the referee to book Scales, and he quickly obliged. The true significance of this moment became plain six minutes into the second half, when Scales was – somewhat harshly – sent off for a second yellow.
Until that moment, it had been Ireland’s best performance in a long time. Hallgrímsson had admitted on Saturday that the 5-4-1 game plan for the first match against England in September had been a failure. This time Ireland started in a 4-1-4-1, with Nathan Collins playing as a defensive midfielder.
For 45 minutes it really worked. Not because Collins had a brilliant individual performance – he had only nine touches in that first half, fewer than anyone else in the game, and completed only two passes. But his presence closed off the central spaces from which England had done so much damage in the first half in Dublin, forcing them to pass around the sides in search of gaps.
The Irish wingers, Sammie Szmodics and Festy Ebosele, worked hard to close down opponents and as time passed the English crowd fell silent and the English team started to meander. “The first half, it’s a game like we wanted it to be. We were defending compact, they didn’t find ways to play through us,” Hallgrímsson said afterwards.
Harry Kane, anxious to remind everyone of his worth to the team after being left out of the side in Athens last Thursday, was hardly involved. When he came deep around 20 minutes to get on the ball Molumby slammed into him and knocked the ball away. A little later Kane turned on to a pass and ran, only for Scales to send him flying with a spectacular block tackle. The Irish fans loved that and their delight increased when Kane’s annoyance boiled over and he turned and threw Molumby to the ground.
But Kane was to have the last laugh, creating the penalty situation with a wicked swerving pass to Jude Bellingham and then sending Caoimhin Kelleher the wrong way from the spot. The farcical nature of England’s second goal – a mis-hit clearance by Collins bouncing off Josh Cullen and plopping into the path of Anthony Gordon – added insult to injury. The shell-shocked Irish defenders seemed to forget to defend the near post at the corner from which England got their third, scored by Gallagher from Guehi’s flick on.
The fourth was a poorly defended set-piece, with Ireland not noticing Jarred Bowen lurking unmarked on the edge of the box, the mass of defenders serving only to block Kelleher’s view of the ball. The fifth was a good header by Taylor Harwood-Bellis after Mark McGuinness failed to reach Bellingham’s cross. The win sent England back to League A, where they can pick on people their own size. Ireland can only hope that the lessons of a painful evening stick in their memory.
