When it comes to these playoff things, our record speaks for itself. Played three, lost three. Not too much to quibble with there now, is there?

Certainly few would argue about the outcome in Paris in 1965, when a brave performance by the Irish made it hard for a Spanish side which nevertheless deserved their late winner and the place it earned them at the following year's World Cup finals in England.

Talking about the trip a couple of years ago, Noel Cantwell recalled how the night before the game had involved a visit by the Irish squad to the Folies Bergere.

"We didn't have a drink," laughed the most-capped Irish player of the era, "but the craic was good and then we went back to our hotel".

When, three decades later, Ireland travelled to Anfield to face the Dutch, the preparations were somewhat less relaxed. With a place in the European Championships at stake it was, remembers Ray Houghton, a very tense affair. But on the night it was far more one-sided than the game against Spain.

"I spent the night on the bench, which was frustrating because I felt that, having scored some important goals in big games, I could have made a difference if I'd only got on. To be fair, though, as it went on it gradually sank in that it wouldn't have made any difference.

"The Dutch were so much better than us that night that I really don't think there was any way that we could have won it. They overran us in just about every area and, if we're honest about it, they could have won it by more than the two goals."

Belgium over two legs was a very different story, he reckons. To most outsiders the 1-1 in the first leg was a serious setback, but Houghton insists that inside the squad everybody was still upbeat ahead of the trip to Brussels.

"The way we looked at it was that you could lose the tie in the first leg, but you couldn't really win it. You'd have had to be going there three or four up to really be able to relax, so to go there potentially only needing to score one goal seemed fine to us."

Houghton scored the goal all right, but unfortunately by then the home side was one up. "We'd been chasing the game a bit," he recalls, "but by then I think we were the better team and I really felt that we'd go on and win it.

"It was a blow when they took the lead again, but even then it wasn't really panic stations because the away goals rule meant that a single goal still would have done us, so we worked away and created a couple of chances. It just seemed that nothing would go in for us.

"When I think about it, I've got to say that the bottom line for us was that, while we knew we were up against a good team in the Belgians, we didn't know how good they were until we got out there with them.

"It's all very well watching videos and all that, but unless you play with guys week in week out in the league it's very hard to judge what they're going to be like or how they might change things for a particular game. It's going to be a lot like that for the lads against Turkey too."