A 1-1 draw with Georgia isn't the end of the world, particularly when we can go top of the group with two games to play if we win our next game, but it's the performance that makes Ireland's failure to win against Georgia so incredibly frustrating for Ireland fans.
It was all so typical. The moment we take the lead we turn into a different team. How many times have we seen this happen? I'll always have faith that we can get a result, and often our panic after taking the lead has not caused us to drop points, but it's clear to see that something shifts once we know we don't have to score another goal to win.
Watching the match was puzzling. In the build-up, Martin O'Neill told the media that he thinks Ireland need to retain possession against Georgia in order to win. You would have hoped he told the players too, but from minute one it didn't look like he did.
Last week I thought Harry Arter was one of the better players on the pitch against Man City, and while I would have liked to have seen Wes Hoolahan ahead of them to encourage them to pass forward, I would have thought that himself and Glenn Whelan would at the least prevent Georgia from getting at us through the middle.
In the end, their deserved equaliser came from a basic bit of tidy footwork while walking straight through the middle of us. I also do not believe what we saw is how O'Neill sent his team out to play.
There was something off.
We were playing some awful stuff, and the players knew it. We were shrinking, packing 10 behind the ball and not even looking when we won back possession before blasting it as far as we could like we were getting points for total distance hoofed. Martin O'Neill did his best to shout and gesticulate from the sideline, but where was the leadership from our experienced players?
James McClean at least tried, as always, to get his teammates going, and he got the man of the match award for it because there wasn't really anyone else. Apart from ten players in white that is.
That Georgia side are good, technical players who try and play expansive attractive football, but they are absolutely not better than the players our guys are facing week-in, week-out. We needed someone to get us 20 yards further up the pitch, and to bollock each and every player until things started going right.
Everybody seems to have forgotten that Georgia came and outplayed us for 45 minutes in our own back garden last October. They were zipping the ball about and we were chasing shadows, but one man wasn't having it.
Seamus Coleman had to stick that ball up his jumper and head for the try line like we were playing the Georgian rugby team, but for all of the comical ugliness of that goal, it summed up the will to win of Killybegs man as he was just not going to be stopped.
My season ticket for Ireland games places me behind the goal to the right as you look from the TV cameras, almost as far away from Seamus Coleman as I can be when Ireland are attacking into us (and when he's not celebrating goals in front of us like he was that time), but I can still hear his trademark high-pitched yelp louder than anything else.
You'd hear it watching Everton games too, it's unmistakable. A constant. Keeping his teammates, and the ref, on their toes.
We were crying out for Seamus in Tbilisi on Saturday. Not only because he's our best player, but because he would have told the midfielders to show for the bloody ball, and if they didn't he'd go and do it himself.
Cyrus Christie is a decent player, and someone we are fortunate to have to come in. While he has lapses in concentration occasionally, he is a valuable option in attack and while some rolled their eyes and cursed him as he ran our final chance at getting a winner out of play yesterday, I admired his bravery to take defenders on and try and make something happen. But Seamus Coleman, he is not.
When we lost him for the campaign, aside from being gutted for him personally, most feared losing his defensive skills and attacking threat as any side would when losing a full-back of his calibre, but it seems we underestimated the unseen stuff he brings to our team.
He can't drag us to wins by the scruff of the neck like Roy Keane, but he can give us the kick up the arse we sorely needed against Georgia. What's truly frustrating is the reason that he's not there, but there is no point in dwelling on the past with so much left to play for.
What we need now is someone to step up and be that presence. We need a leader against Serbia, someone who will set the tone and let the other Irish players know that they need to show something. I have hope that Jon Walters will do it, as he has done before. We need a performance similar to the one we got when Bosnia came to down with a place at Euro 2016 on the line. So many were nervous that we couldn't handle the expectation with the lead on away goals, but we brushed them aside without a bother, and Walters was immense.. But we also managed to use the ball with some sort of competence.
What I don't want to see is us start on Tuesday without a plan to play football, find ourselves a goal behind, and face a final 20 minutes where we desperately try and scramble a goal so that we can say "a draw isn't the end of the world lads" yet again.
I'm not expecting the team to change too much, and I'm not deluded enough to hope we outpass Nemanja Matic in midfield, but I am certainly expecting to see some more endeavour, composure and bravery. I'll be there, and I'll vocal in my support for the boys in green.
I'll also call on anyone else attending to make this feel like a big game we are confident we can go out and win, because if the atmosphere in the crowd is anything like Twitter was after the Georgia game, we're in deep shit.
