Ireland and the Nations League - a trying relationship

"Bulgaria stand between us and our League B status," cries the RTÉ promo for this week's promotion/ relegation tie.

As marketing drives go, it's not exactly of the 'it all comes down to this' variety.

The rugby crowd may have a gift for making every fixture sound seismic and epoch-defining - even the Emerging Ireland tour is taking on a new significance now - but the soccer folk aren't infused by the same giddy chutzpah.

The marketing community certainly would appear to have an uphill slog on their hands, judging by recent comments.

"I don't even know what the game is this week," said Damien Duff last Friday.

"God's honest truth. I only found out the other day it was Bulgaria, home and away. I'm not sure what it means. It's a play-off. I don't know."

Since emerging as the domestic game's most surprising and fervent evangelist, Duffer has been bluntly talking up the sense of apathy around the national team for some time.

On learning there was a game and that it was Bulgaria we were playing, he asked a friend whether he was going - "He laughed at me."

The Nations League turns seven this year and has never been fully embraced by the casual Irish football fan.

Partly because its implications have always remained far too opaque for the floating punter and even a fair few committed punters.

We should know enough by now that a decent Nations League showing does offer a route into a play-off. But in real-time, the process is loaded with too many caveats and contingencies and, in any case, the picture won't become clear until the end of the traditional qualification series. ("That late equaliser for Slovenia in Skopje has probably killed off Ireland's chances of a play-off").

And partly because its arrival on the scene coincided with Ireland's drop off from dogged play-off regulars to virtual qualification no-hopers, slumming it with the minnows.

There's a sense that Ireland and the Nations League got off the wrong foot.

Our inaugural fixture in the new tournament was the 4-1 loss to Wales in Cardiff in September 2018, as Martin O'Neill's reign entered its grim and forgettable final stretch.

Despite offering Loughnane-esque assurances that he would qualify Ireland for Euro 2020 - "because I'm good" - O'Neill was eventually shunted out the door that November following a couple of 0-0 draws against Northern Ireland and Denmark, games so bad they would have refrained from showing them to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay on humanitarian grounds.

We were introduced to the strange Mick McCarthy-Stephen Kenny succession plan. The suspicion was that the chief executive at the time appointed Kenny as an eleventh hour stab at placating the League of Ireland community, which had always held him in contempt. But he didn't trust him to guide Ireland to the next European Championships, at which Dublin was then down to host a few games.

Soon after, said chief executive would meet his Waterloo in the form of a failed attempt at a court injunction, the whole thing subsequently kicking off while Ireland were lumbering to a 1-0 win out in Gibraltar.

All in all, it's been a chaotic half decade or more for the national team.

Through it all, Ireland have remained in the second tier of the Nations League, despite their best efforts.

We had assumed we'd been relegated on our first go at the competition, only for UEFA to pull an Allianz Hurling League on it and issue a late reprieve in the shape of a format revamp. Teams would go up, but no one was going down.

In 2020-21 - Kenny's first Nations League campaign - Ireland somehow survived in League B despite winning no games and registering a princely tally of one goal in six matches because our opponents this week managed to fare even worse.

Shane Duffy's header against Bulgaria was Ireland's only goal of 2020

Following a somewhat encouraging finish to 2021, the gaffer, in a fit of enthusiasm, trumpeted that Ireland were in the shape to win their Nations League group in 2022. A crack at the top tier beckoned.

A disastrous 1-0 defeat in Armenia and then a 1-0 home loss to Ukraine killed those chances and the whole scene was enveloped in gloom again, our default mode since about 2018.

Ireland did at least register their first Nations League victory - in their 13th game - in that campaign, an uplifting 3-0 win over Scotland in the glorious June sunshine offering some rare ammunition for the pro-Kenny faction to fire at the knockers.

Still, the eventual third-place finish wasn't what had been promised at the outset and its costly implications were only fully grasped when the draw was made for the Euro 2024 qualifiers, Ireland plonked in an absurdly awful group alongside Netherlands and the second seed grim reaper card, France.

Strange to say, Ireland's latest Nations League showing may have represented their best of the lot, amidst very modest competition. At any rate, it was the first time they had managed to exceed the most pessimistic predictions beforehand.

The borderline emotional reaction to the away win in Finland threw into relief how beaten down Irish fans had become over the previous two years. With the Greeks reinvigorated after shaking off their own ennui and England plainly operating beneath their level in League B, third place was as good as Ireland could hope for in Heimir Hallgrimsson's first campaign.

And so, it's another two-leg meeting with our old friends Bulgaria - where the situation is even more dire and poisonous than here - to cling onto our second tier status for the fourth time running. The odd suspicious refereeing clanger in Sofia notwithstanding, we have a decent history against the Bulgarians - even before our glorious victory in the slow bicycle race for third spot in the 2020-21 Nations League group.

Throughout our torturous Nations League journey, there has been an accompanying narrative that Ireland might be better off getting a spin in League C; that UEFA may in fact have done us dirty by tweaking the format for the second edition.

This notion was bolstered early on by the sight of Scotland qualifying for Euro 2020 - their first tournament appearance since the days of Colin Hendry and Don Hutchinson - via the comparatively softer play-off path on offer in the third tier (though beating Serbia to qualify was nothing to be sniffed at).

With Kenny forced to phase out the older heads and having to blood a new, callow generation, we might have benefitted from more manageable games against confidence-inducing opposition.

Of course, the alternative hypothesis is we could have gotten stuck down there like the Bulgarians, the air of recrimination and despair deepening.

As of now, the question of whether dipping into the third tier might have implications for our involvement in Euro 2028 remains up in the air. The fact that Northern Ireland now have no stadium to kick into the bid may render it immaterial. The assumption is that UEFA are leaving two automatic spots available for host nations that don't qualify automatically.

Heimir Hallgrimsson

From an optics and goodwill point of view, Heimir could do without the hassle of explaining away how we ended up in League C, as he embarks on his second calendar year in the job.

Our genial Icelandic gaffer is doing his level best to tiptoe around local sensitivities, having been well-briefed on the fractious and fissiparous world into which he's entered.

Even his biggest diplomatic misstep - suggesting that Shamrock Rovers could get a decent career move out of their run in Europe - was smoothed over by a thoughtful apology, which was received appreciatively by Stephen Bradley.

In the unlikely event that word would ever reach Giovanni Trapattoni that the Shamrock Rovers manager had criticised him, he'd have probably asked first for the gentleman's name and then "who are Shamrock Rovers?"

After a fairly traumatic September window - where the air of fatalism reached unprecedented highs - the manager has generally impressed on the PR front, most fans appreciating his cool temperament and frank insights into where the team are at.

A fall into League C would herald more gloom and be a further blow to our shaky self-esteem, as we head into a World Cup qualification year.

Watch Bulgaria v Republic of Ireland in the UEFA Nations League on Thursday from 7pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app. Listen to live commentary on an extended 2fm's Game On.

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