Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Steve Staunton's first game as Ireland manager: a 3-0 shellacking of a Sweden side featuring one Zlatan Ibrahimovic. This game sadly proved to be the falsest of dawns for Ireland, as Stan soon trooped away from the job defeated, with nights against Cyprus and San Marino nadirs of a miserable Euro 2008 qualifying campaign.
The gloomy end was so utterly incongruous with the optimism of the beginning, as positive feeling abounded among the Irish media in the wake of Staunton's victorious debut. Here is how some of the Irish media reacted to the win.
The Irish Independent
Gerry McDermott's match report was jubilant, saying that the performance "lifted the gloom that surrounded Ireland's non-qualification" for the 2006 World Cup, a performance to "warm the cockles of the heart on a bitterly cold night in Dublin".
Vincent Hogan wrote a typically brilliant piece studying Staunton's body language throughout the night, foreshadowing the intense writhing emotion that would partly prove to be Stan's downfall as he went from experienced player to inexperienced manager:
Staunton seemed disinterested in the work of the Swedes, watching impassively whenever they attacked the Wanderers' end. But every fibre in his being tautened when Ireland had the ball.
It can't have been easy. A young man steps into management and suddenly contemporary life is an obstacle course in front of him. From adolescence, your world is black and white. You've been pampered, revered, cocooned in the shell of a team.
Nothing was complex. In fact, you life was childlike. You ate, slept, played and took your money. Your life was just airport boarding cards, traffic, big hotels. You followed someone else's rules.
Now, suddenly, you're the guru. The world of platitude and cliche now titlts at a different angle. You must be wise and sanguine and above all else visibly in control.
And cope with the possibility you will be none of those things.
The Irish Times
Tom Humphries captured the mad optimism of that night brilliantly with this opening line:
As honeymoons go this was like marrying for love and finding out that you've wedded money as well.
The Irish Times soccer writer Emmet Malone wrote that "even Steve Staunton must have been surprised by the panache with which they took to the challenge", although admitted that it would "be foolish to forget there was little at stake for Sweden". This did not prevent Malone ending on an optimistic note, ending on the line "right now, though, it's hard not to feel just a little tingle".
Mark Lawrenson was more cautious in the same paper, writing under the headline that "Promising start, but we're still lacking", writing relatively presciently that if the opposition could stop Damien Duff and Robbie Keane, they would stop Ireland.
Elsewhere, Gavin Cummiskey paused to remember the departed Brian Kerr, writing that "the sceptics will have to wait".
The Sunday Independent
The following Sunday, Dion Fanning recalled the week that was, as Staunton sought to return Ireland to the some of the principles which made Jack Charlton a success. On the appointment of Robbie Keane as captain:
The appointment of Keane as captain announces to the players he is not playing a media game. There are more adept spokesmen than Keane, there are players with a more comfortable relationship with the media, but Keane's appointment shows the squad is united against outside forces.
On the decay of Kerr's regime:
Kerr's ideas may have been in keeping with how a progressive squad should behave, but the Irish players - most of whom do not play in the Champions League where the most advanced coaches are working - had a notion of what meeting up with an Ireland squad should be.
Even those who admitted he could be a difficult man now acknowledge that Mick Byrne was an intagiable part of that.
On the encouraging nostalgia of Staunton's burgeoning reign:
