Ken Early: We must admit Ireland’s shortcomings and accept life as a giant cockroach

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, has the most famous opening line in Czech literature. The wording in English varies according to the translation, but it goes something like: “One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect.”

On Friday morning, thousands of Irish football fans woke in Prague knowing exactly how Samsa felt. The beautiful shimmering vision of the Azteca dissolving into the sordid reality of life as a giant cockroach.

No Mexican summer for us. We have become outcasts, confined to our bedroom where we must subsist on the rotten garbage of friendlies against Qatar, Granada and Canada.

Samsa sometimes broke the monotony of his new existence by crawling up and down the walls and ceiling of his room. The biggest thing we have to look forward to in 2026 is a depressing and ugly battle about whether we should play Israel in the Nations League.

The cruellest part is we had all just become excited again about watching this team, and now we won’t get to see them play another really big game until the Euro 2028 qualifiers begin in the autumn of 2027. The football calendar is stuffed full of more matches than ever, but somehow Ireland always seem to be waiting forever for the next big one to come along.

At moments such as this, fingers must be pointed, guilty men must be hunted out. Ryan Manning, Finn Azaz and Alan Browne are the ones most exposed, since they were the ones who made the crucial mistakes that everybody noticed. That is to say, they weren’t the only ones who made mistakes, but they were the unlucky ones whose mistakes were punished to the maximum degree.

The manager, too, will be questioned, as happens after a defeat. The reflex question when you lose a shoot-out: why didn’t we practice penalties? Some international coaches swear by group penalty practice and, after three losing shoot-outs in a row, it’s probably something Ireland need to think about.

But ultimately, if players want to be really good at penalties, the only way to be sure is to practice them on their own time – not just in the run-up to knock-out internationals, but every week of their careers.

Harry Kane practices penalties almost obsessively, which is why he is one of the best penalty takers in the world. He still missed what might prove to have been the most significant penalty of his career (in the 2022 World Cup quarter-final against France). The dream of total control is an illusion.

Heimir Hallgrímsson was correct in his prediction that the match would be very physical, largely consisting of duels and set pieces and likely to be decided by mistakes. The only surprising thing about the Czechs was just how much they lived down to that expectation. Their first thought was always to go long to their giant target man.

That Ireland threw it away against such a limited side is painful, but rather than rage at the individuals who missed the mark in crucial moments we should be honest about our own shortcomings.

The limitations of this squad had been compounded by injuries, suspensions and bad luck. We were unlucky that our main counter-attacking threats, Chiedozie Ogbene and Adam Idah, were short of match sharpness after playing so little in recent weeks. We were unlucky that just as Josh Cullen had matured into a confident organiser of the midfield, he tore his ACL. We don’t have such deep resources that we could shrug off the suspension of Liam Scales, who created two of Troy Parrott’s five goals in November.

We were also lucky the Czechs gave us a penalty and bundled another goal into their own net. When you go 2-0 up, you should win.

The crucial problem was Ireland lacked the quality to exploit the space the Czechs were leaving behind as they chased the equalising goal. A top team would have cut them to pieces on the counter-attack, but when Ireland did win back possession, we always failed to exploit the situations. Either we couldn’t find the pass or we couldn’t make the run, or both.

Azaz is our best spotter of a pass in midfield but Hallgrímsson did not want to be overpowered in that area of the pitch, so Jack Taylor and Jayson Molumby started there, with Alan Browne coming off the bench. Azaz only moved there in the last minutes of extra time. We can have creativity or we can have strength but we don’t have players who give us both.

We picked Séamus Coleman at right wing-back for his spiritual qualities and in doing so we had to accept the trade-off that he cannot sprint into space as he once did. We can have inspiration or we can have speed, but we can’t have both.

It’s not easy to name an alternative Ireland XI team that isn’t full of these kinds of compromises. You know there will be weaknesses and you hope you get away with them.

We could argue afterwards that maybe Hallgrímsson paid too much respect to the legend of Coleman, that his presence into extra time had a touch of El Cid strapped to his horse, that the energy and speed of players such as Harvey Vale or Sammie Szmodics could have been more valuable at that point than Coleman’s inspirational presence.

But after the way the qualifying group had gone, you know why the coach left Coleman out there until cramp forced him off.

Now that we’ve lost, we wish we had taken more risks in search of a third goal, but at the time, killing the game looked the obvious option. In hindsight the really decisive moment had already happened and it was also one of the smallest and silliest details: an instinctive shirt-pull by a player who is used to defending set pieces in England, where they have relaxed the rules at defensive set pieces, in a division that doesn’t use VAR. The unwelcome emergence, under pressure, of an ingrained habit.

When Samsa turns into an insect, his family react in different ways.

His father displays open hatred, largely because he realises the son can no longer work to support the family. It feels almost like gloating to mention that missing the World Cup costs this team a big chance to improve the financial situation of the impoverished Irish football family.

Samsa’s sister tries at first to hide her own disgust, but eventually they all shun him. The harsh truth is that his having randomly become an insect turns out to be a deal-breaker for his loved ones.

Prague was a hyper-event of “Irishness”, a people greedily consuming endless images of itself. RTÉ reported colossal viewing figures for Thursday night’s match, which broke streaming records on the RTÉ player. It will be interesting to see how many empty seats there are for Tuesday’s losers’ playoff against North Macedonia, which, let’s be fair, is an appalling prospect.

When Ireland beat Hungary in November, Hallgrímsson warned the players to beware the false friends who would try to glom on to their success. Now they’ll see how many stay by their side as they spend the next year and a half moping in their room, eating garbage.

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