It was reported on Tuesday that Iceland experienced a baby boom nine months after they beat England at last summer’s European Championships. If the same happens nine months on from this game, it will be because a record number of couples decided there were better ways to spend their evening.
The selling point for this match seemed to be the chance to witness the most authentic version of the Icelandic thunderclap performed by real Icelanders – or at least perform it in front of real Icelandic footballers, but when the Mexican wave started up shortly after kick off, it seemed even that wasn’t enough to hold the attention.
The atmosphere around the Ireland squad has been understandably subdued since Friday and the horrific injury to Seamus Coleman. The last thing many would surely have wanted to do was to play in a game as pointless as this one.
And so it transpired, with the only consolation for the players being that nobody would remember if they put in a bad performance in a game which was hard to remember even as you were sitting watching it.
O’Neill had made some curious selections, picking Alex Pearce ahead of Andy Boyle and Jonny Hayes started while Daryl Horgan was on the bench.
The pair came on in the second half and Horgan was lively, while Callum O’Dowda demonstrated when he came on that he is another player who could make a difference in an Irish context
John Egan made an impressive debut, but it was tempting to wonder how much any Irish player can do in a game as devoid of meaning on the field.
Ireland under Martin O’Neill demand an aggression and competitiveness that are impossible to replicate in friendlies. O’Neill says friendlies have helped him form opinions on players, but the truth is that he has been influenced by how they have played in the meaningful games. In this, friendlies are meaningless.
For those who don’t represent the new, then it was hard to make a mark. Aiden McGeady has, they say, been reborn at Preston, but this was a familiar McGeady.
For a player like McGeady, these evenings are tough. His form at club level has lifted expectation but in a game that lacks an edge, he is expected to make a difference and when he doesn’t, we decide that nothing has changed.
But this is not the only way in which friendlies could be said to be harmful. O’Neill said on Monday that friendly victories can help towards his side’s Fifa ranking which was a reason to take them seriously. This could matter if Ireland are in a play-off in November. Yet one of the reasons put forward for Wales’s rise in the ranking was the absence of friendlies from their schedule as ranking points are divided by the number of games played and friendly victories don’t offer enough to compensate. Defeats, naturally, offer even less so Wales rose up the table when they played fewer friendlies, but Ireland still play them and will have two more in June.
For those in attendance, they could comfort themselves with the knowledge that the evening would soon be over, while those who had brought children could trot out some line about how there can’t be a rainbow without rain.
Sitting through Ireland-Iceland and thinking of those fuckers who say 'Only boring people get bored'
— Dion Fanning (@dionfanning) March 28, 2017
Although the kids, if they had their wits about them, would ask what a rainbow had to do with this 90 minutes of pointlessness and the parents would have to respond with a shrug and say, “Kid, you ask too many questions.”
Instead we all sat and tried to get it through the best we could. Ireland fruitlessly chased an equaliser which could have some bureaucratic significance and this seemed to be the best way of viewing it. This was the equivalent of spending two hours online trying to get a better deal on your car insurance and coming away with a saving of seven cent. Who can say, in that instance, if you really have gained anything at all?
