ANOTHER DEFEAT FOR Ireland but not one to weaken the link between this team and its crowd: Ireland did enough in the hectic flush of the final half-hour to suggest they can find a result to redeem this brutal qualifier draw at some point over the next four games.
England are European champions and Sarina Wiegman expressed her unhappiness with Friday’s 1-1 draw with Sweden by making five changes to her starting team tonight. When she peels herself away from this occasion and analyses it, she may end up making even more changes for the next game, as England fell into the kind of game Ireland wanted. By the stage they did, however, they had the two-goal cushion that would be enough to win.
Eileen Gleeson made a couple of personnel changes of her own, but the most significant was a positional shift for Katie McCabe, who reverted to left wing-back from Friday’s post higher up the same wing.
That move was made at least partly with Lauren James in mind, on whom McCabe focused her attention. Perhaps too much. With McCabe pulled inside by James, right-back Lucy Bronze had acres of space into which to run, and it was the genesis of England’s opening goal. McCabe, again too close to James, was caught underneath a back-post cross to Bronze. Her header bounced off Anna Patten and was snapped in by James.
Ireland were right to pay extreme attention to James, the most deceptively lethal player in the women’s game. She is of a stockier build than most of her team-mates, but she doesn’t so much cover ground as hover over it; her languid style of striking more redolent of a Roger Federer forehand.
The problem was that the job was assigned to McCabe: it meant that Ireland’s back five were pinned deep and narrow, giving the England full-backs free rein and limiting Ireland’s counter attacks. This, of course, has been a recurring problem for the men’s team too, where much of the team becomes sucked into providing cover for three centre-backs. We are currently offering centre-backs the kind of protection we normally reserve for tech giants and landlords.
By the time that all changed, Ireland trailed 2-0, thanks to Alex Greenwood’s penalty. Reusha Littlejohn was pinged for a handball, raising her hands at point-blank range from Jessica Park’s volley. It was probably a fair call: much harsher was the subsequent handball by Louise Quinn, who saw the ball bounce off Alessio Russo and onto her arm. That Greenwood’s second penalty hit the post and spun away to safety was a flourish of justice.
In the second half, Ireland liberated themselves gradually and then suddenly. Initially Ireland crept a bit higher up the pitch – McCabe most notably, addressing the problems of the first-half – and Ireland’s last line held their nerve whenever they sought an offside flag.
McCabe, though, was maddeningly sloppy: having miscontrolled an easy pass out of play int he first-half, she butchered a potential counter-attack in undercooking a pass for Lucy Quinn.
On the hour mark, Gleeson sounded the trumpets for the counter-offensive. On came Megan Campbell and McCabe looked more like herself amid the bedlam that was then let loose. Campbell’s first act was to arc a run down the touchline and hurl a throw-in into the penalty area: there was no goal but England were at least put on notice. Ireland’s toil was rugged but it was effective, and Caitlin Hayes somehow miscued in front of an empty net when Louise Quinn stretched out to square McCabe’s deep cross.
Hayes then snuck to the back post and forced a save from Hannah Hampton when she was found by a pinpoint McCabe corner, and then McCabe gouged out a chance in bizarre circumstances. Initially she loitered by Hannah Hampton to force her to take a goal-kick out of her hands, and then jumped to block it: the ball spun and faded away from goal, but McCabe was first to it. She elected to shoot at the recovering Hampton from a tight angle but should have squared it instead. On Friday McCabe thumped the turf in anger when she wasn’t set-up in front of goal by Leanne Kiernan. This time Kiernan would have been forgiven for venting her own anger.
Ireland chased the game in the traditional means, by putting Louise Quinn up front for the closing minutes. It achieved little, doing more to panic Ireland than England, encouraging them to go long rather than play an extra pass. They would have been better doing the latter as McCabe roamed into space wherever she found it.
But then again, the endgame was predicated on panic and unpredictability, as it was the only kind of game that Ireland could win.
