Faroes trip a must win for Northern Ireland but anything against Italy is a bonus.

If pride comes before a fall Northern Ireland fans are teetering on the brink ahead of their team’s European Championship qualifier with Italy.  The last time such dizzy optimism infected the Green and White Army a new campaign was starting at Windsor Park, with Lawrie Sanchez’ men fresh from beating England the previous season.  The result?  A 3-0 mauling at the hands of Iceland.

The circumstances are slightly different this time.  Northern Ireland has already got this set of qualifiers up and running with an unlikely away win in Slovenia.  So 3 points are already on the board.  And the Italians comprise precisely the type of opposition which the Windsor roar has a habit of unsettling.

These portents have persuaded some supporters that Italy’s scalp will inevitably be added to those of illustrious predecessors like Spain and England.  It will surprise no-one to learn that I‘m not so certain.

Tomorrow evening has all the incipient ingredients of a damp squib.  Over-confidence, wounded opposition and a likely sense of anti-climax, should things not immediately go Northern Ireland’s way.

After their disastrous World Cup performance in South Africa, under a new manager and bereft of stellar names, the Italians are unlikely to be complacent.  Indeed Nigel Worthington’s squad are just as likely to be infected by that vice, as they showed against Slovakia in the previous campaign.

In Pirlo, Italy has a potent playmaker who Northern Ireland must take care to shackle from the earliest stages.  Chris Baird would be the natural choice to perform that role.

Up front, our best chance of a goal might be Kyle Lafferty, who has run into some form at Rangers.  If he can’t unlock the Italian defence, it will be up to midfielders like Davis and Brunt to produce a rare moment of magic.

The truth is that, should Italy win the game, as they probably will, it is not a disaster for Northern Ireland.  We shouldn’t expect to beat the top ranked teams.  The acid test is the Faroe Islands on Tuesday.  Anything less than a win there will be a disaster for Worthington.  And history shows that it is precisely the type of game which can trip us up.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more