The Irish team arrive in Bordeaux this week for our second match in the group and this time it’s the wounded animal that is Belgium.
Matchday two is what some corporate types are calling it. To the layman it’s our second match in Group E and looking back at our previous record for our second fixtures at major tournaments, it makes for a bit of a mixed bag.
European Championships 1988 v Soviet Union
Arguably, our greatest ever performance at a major tournament in terms of sheer quality and entertainment. Buoyed by the famous win over England in our opening fixture, we met the Soviets in Hannover and it’s still a source of great mystery as to how we did not win the game.
Ronnie Whelan got us off to a dream start scoring that outrageous volley with the outside of his shin. Rather than sit back, we attacked with vim and vigour and routinely took the Soviets apart with some scintillating football.
Clip via Chimpanzeethat
We just couldn’t get that second goal and of course the Soviets scored with their only real attack of the game with Oleg Protasov grabbing the very undeserved equaliser.
The result was not what we deserved, but we played brilliantly.
World Cup 1990 v Egypt
Again we had got off to a decent start coming back to grab a draw against England in our opening group match and we moved on to Palermo to take on the group outsiders Egypt.
The following 90 minutes were forgettable and caused a young enough Eamon Dunphy to have an epic on-air meltdown, where he severely criticised Jack Charlton’s tactics. He got so incensed that he even threw his pen.
Clip via Mare Footage
The game finished scoreless and represented a dark day in the history of the Irish soccer team.
World Cup 1994 v Mexico
Again, we went into this game after a positive result having beaten Italy in our opening match with that goal from Ray Houghton at Giants Stadium.
We moved south to the searing heat of the Citrus Bowl in Orlando for a nice midday match against Mexico who had lost their opening match to Norway.
In conditions that just didn’t suit us we had no oomph at all and succumbed to the pacy Mexicans 2-1. The match will be remembered by Irish fans for the epic meltdown John Aldridge had on the sidelines with match officials as he tried to come on a substitute.
Aldo was fired up for sure and went on to grab a goal, a goal which ultimately proved hugely important and helped us finish second in the group behind Mexico.
Clip via PeteTop Carton
World Cup 2002 v Germany
We opened our World Cup account with a credible 1-1 draw against perennial World Cup participants Cameroon.
The Germans laid in wait for us in Ibaraki coming off an 8-0 trouncing of Saudi Arabia in their first match.
Miroslav Klose put the Germans one up in the 19th minute and the writing looked on the wall. We managed to keep them at bay and grew into the game a bit.
Cometh the hour and cometh the man, a very young Robbie Keane stepped up in the second minute of injury time to equalise and send the Irish fans into euphoria.
Clip via dinadingdong
European Championships 2012 v Spain
We were on the back foot going into this match against the World and European champions. We were beaten 3-1 by Croatia in our opening game and we travelled more in hope than expectation to take on Spain.
Gdansk saw a brilliant performance from our fans as they sang all night, but out on the pitch we were systematically dismantled by one of the greatest teams of all time.
We were hammered 4-0 and it could’ve been more.
So we’ve never won our second game of any previous major tournament, but we have had some great performances and others less so.
Records are there to be broken and it’s time we put this second game hoodoo to bed and no better time to do it than this Saturday in Bordeaux against Belgium.
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