REPUBLIC OF IRELAND captain Seamus Coleman expressed anger and embarrassment after this evening’s shock 1-0 defeat to Luxembourg at the Aviva Stadium.
Gerson Rodrigues scored the only goal of the game with a long-range strike in the 85th minute to give the visitors their first away win in a qualification game since 2008.
It leaves Stephen Kenny still searching for a first win as manager after 10 games in charge, but Coleman insisted that the players must take responsibility.
“It’s a shocking result, an embarrassing result,” he told RTÉ. “Let’s not hide behind anyone for that. That’s on us as players. We should be embarrassed.
“As players we need to have a good, hard look at ourselves. You need people demanding the ball out there and I don’t think we did that enough. If you’re building up on one side you need people to want it out the other side, and I don’t think we had enough voices.
“Listen, I’ve got to come out here and do an interview but there are no words for that. It’s embarrassing on behalf of everyone at home watching. As players we take that on the chin but it’s nowhere near what we wanted.
“There’s anger, embarrassment, a bit of everything. It’s not good enough and there’s no words I can say to make the people at home feel any better.”
Goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu produced a composed performance on his international debut but the 19-year-old Dubliner could do nothing about the decisive goal.
Coleman said: “As players we should be disappointed to have Gavin’s debut tainted like that – a great lad, fantastic player, and as senior players out there we should be taking it on the chin for the younger lads.
“I have no words for what happened and I can’t speak for every other player. It’s trying to get on the ball, trying to demand it, but they got the goal, a sucker punch, but I can’t say that we deserved anything out of the game either.”
After beginning the qualification campaign for next year’s World Cup with defeats to Serbia and Luxembourg, Ireland now turn their attention to Tuesday’s friendly against Qatar.
The qualifying games will resume in September, when a daunting trip to Portugal will be followed by home fixtures against Azerbaijan and Serbia.
“The only thing you can do is keep your head down and keep going through the storm as players. You’ve got to be resilient in this game and we’ve got to take what’s coming as professionals,” Coleman added.
“As senior players we have to take the deserved criticism. We have to keep going forward, it’s a tough start to the World Cup campaign, but we’ve got to show some pride in the shirt and I don’t think we did that tonight.
“It’s not the start we wanted. The only thing we can do is look to respond in some way but it’ll take a while to get over this one because it’s embarrassing.”
