JOHN O’SHEA’S HOPES that Ireland would once again be horrible to play against were not realised in Aveiro tonight. No, we are still stuck on the horrible to watch stage of this evolution. This was another night in which Ireland were utterly outclassed by a team that will admittedly contend for the European Championships, which is another of the game’s grand celebrations to which we are not invited.
Cristiano Ronaldo will, as ever, elbow his way to centre-stage in Germany: two second-half goals tonight – the first one that might appear in his own end-of-career showreel – is proof that he’s ready to be central to Portuguese plans this summer. Much of the pre-game talk centred on how Ireland must once again be ‘hard to beat’, with the results so far under O’Shea held up as proof we were once again trending back to our founding virtues. That notion didn’t survive tonight, though, and this was Ireland’s heaviest defeat since the 3-0 friendly hammering against England at an empty Wembley in 2020.
While you have to make allowances for the fact that this was an end-of-season friendly ahead of a tournament to which Ireland aren’t going, the size of the gap between these sides tonight when compared to their Algarve meeting in 2021 was jarring. On that night Stephen Kenny was denied a potentially transformative win by two injury-time goals by Ronaldo: tonight his brace came with Portugal already 1-0 up through Joao Felix and some shambolic Irish defending on a co.
