THE MORE things change the more they remain the same. World Cup soccer came to Croke Park for the first time last night but there was very little which felt exotic about a game played out between gusts and showers on Jones's Road.
For Giovanni Trapattoni, our venerable Italian manager, it was the first competitive game in the Gaelic shrine. You can take the man out of Italy but you can't take Italy out of the man, however. Ireland scored after four minutes and we settled in for some fun. Wrong! We are in the hairshirt era.
The long-established firm of Damien Duff and Robbie Keane settled the issue in the first five minutes.
Duff gave us a little remembrance of good times past with his schoolboyish jinking on the right. The Cypriots, like chickens in a henhouse shutting their eyes and hoping the fox would just go away, ignored Keane entirely. Keane headed the ball into a gaping net.
Long ago an early goal like that one would have been a rousing bugle call to action. For an Italian, though, there is no amount of time between here and eternity for which a 1-0 lead cannot be lovingly defended.
Had we known just then that the goal would be our entire ration for the evening we might have celebrated a little more lustily. You go a goal up against a weakened Cyprus team after four minutes though and you want to save something in the legs for the Mexican waving when the fifth goal of the night goes in.
You don't expect to be noting 85 minutes later that but for the grace of some seat-of-the-pants defending we could have been looking down the barrel of an embarrassing draw.
Not that it was dull. The Cypriots, as befits a side who thumped five past us in recent history, fancied themselves and threw the ball into our area every chance they got.
Our own attacks yielded some excitement and some exemplary saves from Antonis Giorgallis kept us in our seats.
For Giovanni, who has come with a spanking new broom from both ends of which he promises to get the best, there were moments when he must have wondered what he has got himself into but he declared himself content. We nodded but were dubious. Enough already with this post-Tiger austerity.