Happiness is goals galore

THE CURTAIN comes down on a long season. The work is over for now. Tired legs but happy faces emerge from the dressing room and head through the crowd for the waiting bus. Everyone is pleased with the night's work but none is happier than Tony Cascarino.

"Of course I'm happy," he grins.

"These days I'm happy just to play, but it's great to get a couple of goals. We needed to score a few tonight and I think everybody is just delighted that we got back on track."

Cascarino remembers the pain Liechtenstein inflicted.

"Last time we blew it against them and it cost us our place in the European Championship. We weren't going to let that happen again."

He played his part in the victory but he readily conceded that the hard work had been done by David Connolly before he entered the fray. "If there is anyone going to break the Irish record for goals, it's him."

Connolly, though, was in generous mood too. "I enjoyed it and I'm delighted to have gotten three, but let's face it, anybody out there this evening would have been in with a chance of getting a couple. I'd say Charlie O'Leary, our kit man, could have picked up a hattrick against that lot tonight."

Jeff Kenna was happy with his night's work. "A couple of assists, that's my job done.. . I leave the goalscoring to the front lads," he said.

"If I was ever going to get my name on the scoresheet," said Kenny Cunningham, "that was the night to do it. Overall, though, it was a good night for us.

After the last couple of results, we had to get a decent result there tonight. We owed it to the fans as well because they had been great to us and they deserved better performance than we produced the last time we were here, against Iceland."

Steve Staunton, meanwhile, was thinking further back, to the day Jack Charlton's reign started to go off the rails in Liechtenstein. "I thought of that alright, but I never thought it was going to happen again tonight. We learned our lesson that day, we're too good to let it happen again against a team like that."