First off, there's nothing to be gained by being churlish about this. Northern Ireland's tortuous 1-0 win over Finland at Windsor Park last Saturday was welcome, given that it was their first competitive win under manager Lawrie McMenemy and the first in any serious competition for two years.
Never mind the quality of the opposition - and a lacklustre Finland team gave Saturday's other star performers, Bulgaria, the air of potential world-beaters - feel the quantity of three European Championship qualifier points.
Right. That's the cosy, self-serving Northern media view of things out of the way. Consider this alternative view. The reality is that these were two mediocre teams with only one player of true international quality, Jari Litmanen of Ajax, in either of their assembled ranks. And he was on the field for only 15 minutes. Finland are no giants of European, never mind international football, and Northern Ireland's stuttering win should be viewed in this context. The rising Baltic tide clearly hasn't lifted all boats and Finland's efforts paled into insignificance when compared to Sweden's impressive progress through England's group.
The Finnish line was led by Mixu Paatelainen, a player who found the rigours of the Scottish Premier League just a little bit above him and jumped ship to the more relaxed confines of the English First Division. Also, Finland's chasing of the game in the later stages was very much of the "hit long and hope high" variety.
Only two of Northern Ireland's starting 11 last Saturday - Neil Lennon and Michael Hughes - are playing regular Premiership football, while the rest ply their trade in the lower divisions in England. It's even given rise to a new football truism: "Three QPR players do not a credible international side make".
Of the two big boys, Wimbledon's Hughes was the only one with genuine star quality. He was the supporters' player of the year at his demanding club last season, and it's easy to see why. While Lennon looks for the square or reverse pass with a regularity that would please that past master of negativity, Ray Wilkins, Hughes drives forward with both imagination and intelligence.
But Northern Ireland's problems go far beyond a mere dearth of quality players. The official attendance of 10,000 seemed a little optimistic at a ground that holds only 14,000 when full to the brim. But even allowing for a little massaging of the figures, it reveals an international side that is singularly failing to appeal to a significant percentage of its target audience. An afternoon or evening spent watching Northern Ireland is no occasion for a family picnic, and even those supporters who trudge week in, week out to Irish League games balk at the prospect of a visit to Windsor on international day. When they chant: "Stand up for the Ulster men," you can be pretty sure that they're not expressing unyielding support for Brian McEniff's Railway Cup team.
The sectarianism that bedevils the international team is being addressed, but the pace of change makes the moves towards arms decommissioning here look like a reckless, hell-for-leather, devil-may-care sprint. Lawrie McMenemy's immediate predecessor, Bryan Hamilton, was astute enough to sense what way the wind was blowing here and he made sincere and concerted efforts to bring about change. Hamilton wanted a "team for all the people" and did his best to ensure that this went beyond the bare words of a trite soundbite. Soccer is thriving at primary and secondary level here in schools of both persuasions, and there are numerous, crosscommunity cup competitions played throughout the school year. The Northern Ireland Milk Cup is one of the biggest and best organised youth football competitions in Europe and it, too, can point, quite proudly, to its ecumenism.
But the harsh reality is that something happens between there and here. Perhaps the problem is with the senior clubs, who take on the brightest of the young talent only to place them in the same sectarian goldfish bowl that has poisoned Irish League football for decades. The best, inevitably, make the transition to full-time professional football in England and Scotland. But the rest - the above average and the merely average club players - are left behind, and they are the international supporters of today and tomorrow. Little wonder, then, that support from the Nationalist community haemorrhages to the Republic.
This isn't a process that began today or yesterday, but it has been allowed to continue virtually untramelled. And it needn't be this way. Anyone who has been at a Premiership match in England or a Premier League game in Scotland recently will know that the games are heavily stewarded and that supporters making racist or sectarian remarks are swiftly removed.
The Celtic supporters barred for life recently by the club for disrupting a minute's silence in memory of the Omagh bomb victims will tell you all you need to know about how a process like this works. No sign of it being introduced by the great and the good of the IFA, though.
There is, of course, another way to generate confidence in the Northern Irish team - results. Everyone loves a winner and the bandwagon effect that success brings has the tendency to run over almost everything in its path - witness the general euphoria and feel good factor created by Billy Bingham's World Cup heroics 16 years ago. All the PR gymnastics in the world couldn't save Bryan Hamilton in the face of Northern Ireland's inexorable slide down the FIFA rankings, and he was sacrificed on the altar of expediency by the president of the IFA, Jimmy Boyce. Operating with resources so meagre that he must spend a large part of every day casting envious eyes at Mick McCarthy's embarrassment of international riches, McMenemy has made a slow but steady start. Under his tutelage, Northern Ireland have now won all their home games, but they were brought shuddering back to earth by a 3-0 hammering in Turkey last month.
A win over Finland and the outside possibility of the almost obligatory brave performance against Germany later in the group probably represents the summit of McMenemy's ambitions, with qualification looking like a straight fight between the Germans and the Turks.
The mantra is that all Northern Ireland need is a goalscorer capable of displacing Iain Dowie, an ageing lumbering centre forward with the turning circle of the Belfast to Stranraer ferry. But Northern Ireland will have to join an ever-lengthening international queue that includes, without exception, all the countries within these islands. McMenemy has been around enough international corners to know that he can trade on a result like that on Saturday for the duration of this qualifying campaign. "Bearing in mind the circumstances," he said, "it was wonderful." It remains to be seen if he will settle for the occasional encouraging result, or whether he has got his eye on a more enduring legacy.
