The troubling memories of four summers ago have travelled with the Republic of Ireland team to France. In the weeks before the Republic's chastening and winless journey through Euro 2012, there was a belief that making it through to major tournaments brought with it an unwritten guarantee that something special would happen to Irish teams.
From the near-miraculous inclusion in Euro 88 through to the wonderfully chaotic summer of 1990 and Ray Houghton's moment against Italy four years later, recent history taught the Irish football family to be expect episodes of magic. All of that drained away in those grimly lopsided games against Croatia, Spain and Italy and the defeats which appeared to verify Giovanni Trapattoni's conviction that he had managed to take a group of artisan footballers further than they had any right to go.
Against the cream of European football, their limitations were horribly exposed, leaving nothing except the dauntless loyalty of the travelling fans. In many ways, it seems longer than four years since the Italian was in charge.
Martin O’Neill has since reshaped the national team in both personnel and approach and mentality.
Even through the diciest moments of the Republic’s high-wire qualification walk, the Derry man emphasised the potential within his squad rather than its shortcomings. Whether O’Neill explicitly refers to the disastrous series of group games in Poland doesn’t matter: the players retain a sharp recollection of just how suddenly the tournament can leave a team adrift.
Necessary evil
In Poland,
Shane Long
travelled as a reserve striker under a manager who regarded substitutions as little more than a necessary evil. He comes to Paris fizzing with confidence as Ireland’s main goal threat. Underlying the enormity of his role is the healthy fear of losing relevance after the first 90 minutes.
In Poland, the Irish – team and public – were left reeling after the 3-1 lecture delivered by the Croats. As it turned out, that night was as good as it got.
“I was a bit of a fringe player four years ago,” Long says now.
“I think I got about 10 or 15 minutes on the pitch in total. But it was still an amazing experience and I have learned from it. I know straight after even the second game, the disappointed heads in the dressing room, we knew that that was more or less it – after the two years’ hard work, to just let it fall like that.
“So I take experience from it. I know it can be all over so quickly, so I want to make sure, especially in the Sweden game, that first game, that we start off on the right foot.”
It is easy to forget that for a few months, O'Neill was the lone voice in refusing to concede that his Republic team were out of the running for qualification. Go back to the turbulent Friday night in November 2014 when Shaun Moloney's goal in Celtic Park gave the Scots the whip-hand in the race for third place. Even now, Gordon Strachan must be struggling to reconcile himself to the fact that his Scottish players are the odd team out in the general invasion from Ireland and the British Isles.
Ireland's hopes hung by the slenderest thread on several big European football nights over the past two years, from John O'Shea's priceless goal to earn a draw against the stunned Germans in Gelsenkirchen to Long's injury-time goal against Poland to earn a draw in Dublin.
For most of the campaign, it seemed that the Republic were merely prolonging an inevitable elimination rather than setting about qualifying.
The possibility of actually making it was only truly fired with Long's thunderbolt of a goal against Germany last October. It was one of those results which made the football world sit up and take instant notice. In Dublin, the impromptu street parties were reminiscent of '90 and '94. Something was re-awoken. Nobody cared about the validity of Jogi Loew's exasperated – if slightly churlish – observations that his team had failed to take countless chances to put the Irish away that night. Ireland had beaten the world champions. The victory created the purest vapours of self-belief in the Irish dressing room afterwards.
"We're afraid of nobody," Seamus Coleman, who wasn't even in the Republic squad four summers ago, says now.
“We have shown that as we beat Germany at home and drew away. We’re a good unit at the minute and we all know what we’re about. We have a good defensive record and we can score goals.”
On one level, Coleman was merely reciting a stock reply but you have to feel, too, that these achievements are precisely what O’Neill is constantly reminding his players about. Under Trapattoni, Ireland travelled to Poland with a legendary authoritarian figure who clearly felt that he had fulfilled his contractual obligation – and worked a minor miracle – by getting the team there.
O’Neill has been a bundle of nervous energy in the weeks leading up to this weekend, with a firm focus on what his team can achieve in France. He has put together a team that is sticky in its self-belief. The governing quality of their qualifying campaign was a refusal to quit.
“People wrote us off,” Long says flatly.
“I think after we drew to Scotland, everyone was saying it was a three-horse race and Ireland were out of it. It really spurred us to go on. Of course, we relied on a few other results to go our way but we still had to capitalise on our games.
“Just to qualify is an amazing feeling. We’ve been here once before and we didn’t really perform the way we should have or the way we can, and we’ve been regretting it for four years. So hopefully we can put that right this time.”
Even if it has nothing to do with O'Neill or Roy Keane, working with a team nursing a private grievance of having blown a major tournament is no bad thing. The composition of the starting XI will be fairly predictable but unlike the Trapattoni era, when it was as hard to get left out of the first team as to get into it, O'Neill's general caginess has left his players guessing and feeling that they can play a meaningful role in the group games. Tournament games produce the unexpected.
“Everyone out there feels as if they have a chance of being in the team,” Coleman says.
“I don’t know if you watched all of training but you can see it has stepped up a level and everyone is working hard to perform well and be in the team. It’s been quite intense since we’ve met up really but it’s getting a bit more real now since we’ve got over here.”
That's the phrase the players have been using a lot over the past few days: that it feels real. Touching down in France; seeing the Euro 2016 banners everywhere; the security at training. Even in Cork, the tournament was still an abstract notion. Watching the France-Romania game in their hotel last night will have brought about the tingles.
Excited
“I’m just excited,” Long admits. “It’s been a hard training camp for two weeks, keeping the fitness levels up. Now we are over here, it just feels like we are part of the Euros now. We have prepared well and we are looking forward to it. It’s been a big build-up. For four months now I have been waiting for this Sweden game. And we are preparing for it now and watching set-pieces.
“I just really want to get out there now and try to get the result. We have worked hard to get here, we have come from a difficult situation in the group to qualify and it would be a shame to just throw it all away in the first game. So that’s our full motivation now to go out there and beat Sweden and put ourselves in a good position to qualify.”
Contained within those remarks are Giovanni Trapattoni’s lasting gift to Irish football. 3-1. 4-0. 2-0: those score lines obliterated Ireland’s reputation for daring and romantic raids on big summer football festivals.
The starkness of the results diminished the fondly held notion that where the Republic of Ireland was concerned, the greater the odds, the better the chances.
From senior men like John O'Shea and Robbie Keane and Shay Given through to cutting-edge figures like Long and Coleman, there seems to be a collective pact to make sure that their international era is not defined by those dismal few weeks in Poland, when there was nothing to sing about even though the Irish sang anyway.
In O’Neill they have a manager whose chief qualities are pragmatism and a compelling nervous energy; a manager who is hugely ambitious for his team now that they have reached the glittering stage.
In a way, the situation is much the same as it was four years ago. Ireland are perceived as being up against it. But they have earned the right to be respected as a difficult team and one that won’t collapse even if the result does not go as planned against Sweden on Monday night.
Here they come, chasing glory and seeking atonement.
