With qualification secured, Martin O’Neill insists all he has to worry about now is which family his newly married daughter and her husband decide to spend their Christmas with. Beyond that he says he is beginning to get excited as he contemplates travelling to France for next summer’s European Championships with tens of thousands of Irish fans.
"I've seen in the past, Republic of Ireland fans going en masse to these events," O'Neill told Setanta in a lengthy interview screened on the channel for the first time last night, "and do you know what? I'm going to be part of this now. That is the great thing. I will look forward to that.
“That is something that will stand with me over the next couple of months when I start to visualise France and what it’s going to be like.
“I am actually part of this crowd going to France. You mention going to enjoy ourselves,” he says to the interviewer, “and we’ll try to do that but we’ll go there with determination to try and do well.
“We’ll see how we get on. The games are difficult but closer to the time I’ll probably be very upbeat and think we’re capable of winning it.”
Big matches
For now, he admits, it’s not quite the line up of group games that he would have wanted.
“If I had been picking the draw,” he says, “I would not have picked those teams. [But] can we win these games? I think we can because we beat some very good teams on the way to France. These were big matches and we came through these tests.”
The defeat of Bosnia and Herzegovina may ultimately have been the most important but there is little doubt which victory stood out as the most memorable in the manager’s eyes.
“The game against Germany will, I think, live forever. That, although we lost a couple of days later against Poland, gave us confidence to go and beat Bosnia in the playoffs which was great for us.
“I get goosebumps now actually thinking about it; the atmosphere was terrific that evening, we were playing the world champions which itself brings something and we were the underdogs, we were fighting every minute to get something out of it.
‘Overwhelmed us’
“At times in the first half they overwhelmed us in many aspects, certainly with their passing play, which you sometimes expect – they overwhelm better sides than us and that’s why they’re world champions.
“In the second half we got a bit of courage to start playing ourselves, we were a wee bit more confident on the ball; ‘let’s try to develop something in the game and don’t be scared of it, if you’re beaten and not really had a proper go then you’ll never forgive yourself.’
"So we did get into it in the second half but there were seven or eight minutes in that match before Shane Long scored, when I didn't realise that Scotland had gone 2-1 ahead against Poland.
“If those scores had stayed like that then we were effectively out. So that’s how close you can come to it, those are important moments. [But then] teams who have won World Cups have been on the edge of defeat in matches before.”
For some of the pundits, the nature of Long's winner, which came after a long kick downfield by Darren Randolph only tended to underline a view that the team still plays an unattractive brand of football but O'Neill rejects the criticism and is pretty dismissive of the critics involved.
“I know my team have a fair idea about flair and they certainly have a better idea about flair than some pundits who don’t even attend matches and are making a judgement from a studio.
“I don’t mind – I really genuinely don’t mind – a pundit having a say if he is backing it up with some cogent argument or something that he feels might make sense.
“But if he makes a judgment on something that is factually incorrect, then obviously you are going to have to question it or ignore it. Or both.”
Martin O’Neill’s Football Year
will be repeated on Setanta Ireland at 5.30pm today
, 3.30pm on Christmas Eve and 5.0pm on Christmas Day.
