Ireland play their penultimate Euro 2024 qualifier against Gibraltar in Faro tonight.
Tonight Greece are where Ireland wanted to be, hosting the Netherlands and rallying their crowd to inspire them to a famous win and the cusp of automatic qualification for Euro 2024.
A bleached stadium about 10% full on the edge of a Portuguese motorway feels an appropriately stark stage for which this to play out. Gibraltar’s windswept ground at the foot of the Rock is being renovated, and so they have decamped to a stadium built for Euro 2004 and hardly filled since. The play-off format is convoluted but the TL;DR version of it is that Ireland could never afford for more than two sides ranked below them in the Nations League ladder to qualify automatically. That would mean three heavy-hitters ranked above Ireland would need recourse to the play-offs, thereby nabbing the places we so deeply coveted.
Advertisement “It’s not something that’s really entered our heads”, said Stephen Kenny. “If we were to play any game, we’d play to win. It’s not something that really we’d focus on.” “From my point of view I am contracted to the end of the campaign so I just want to finish strong, finish the campaign strong. If there is a playoff we can assess that”, conceded Kenny, tellingly.
At one point toward the end of his press conference, Kenny was asked if it was still fun to be Ireland manager.
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