Hard lessons learned as Irish squad go their separate ways

The locals were smiling and waving at the Irish more enthusiastically than ever as their team bus wound its way towards Kano's international airport. It was understandable for Brian Kerr and his players had shown themselves to be the perfect guests. Good company while they were around and polite enough to depart just before their company started to become tiresome.

Having thought they had seen the last of the Republic's team bus, though, many of the city's population were baffled a couple of hours later to see it heading back towards the town centre. Technical problems with the plane on which the squad was to travel to Lagos delayed their departure by more than four hours.

"We like the place so much we've decided to stay," chuckled Kerr from the front of the bus. Half an hour later, the Ireland boss looked more relaxed as he reflected on his last competitive outing with this particular group of players. Half a dozen of the panel will probably be included in the under-18 squad which Kerr will name next week for the forthcoming European Championship qualification play-off against Northern Ireland in Dublin. The rest will move on to under-21 level and, in some cases, beyond that to the senior international game.

"Yeah, that's the last time that that bunch of lads will play together as a team, but that's the way it goes. Hopefully a lot of them will progress into the under-21s as the last group did.

"The squad for the trip to Macedonia there recently had eight players, I think, from the group that were in Malaysia a couple of years ago and I don't see any reason why this lot won't at least equal that, they're European champions, they're winners."

The manner in which his side had gone out was a source both of irritation and of pride to Kerr as he reflected on it yesterday. There was certainly still some anger about the handling of the game by the referee who, he felt, had been under considerable pressure from his superiors to facilitate the hosts nation's progress to the quarterfinals of the competition. And he was also less than pleased with FIFA, for he believes that some of the earlier clashes with officials in Ibadan contributed to the organisers' rather belligerent attitude to the Irish management at the Sani Abacha stadium on Wednesday afternoon.

But the players, he made clear, had done everything that had been asked of them and come "within a whisker of making it to the quarter-finals, which I would have felt was a great achievement before we came out here.

"I suppose the record will just show that we went out in the last 16, but I think in reality we've reinforced our reputation with the way we've played since we got here."

There was particular sympathy for Thomas Heary, whose penalty miss will also make cold reading in the record books, "but I told him afterwards, he played brilliantly in all four games, he had the guts to step up and take the penalty and, anyway, if he hadn't done so well on their wing in the game yesterday, we probably wouldn't have even gotten to the penalties in the first place."

Heary wasn't the only player feeling down about the manner of the team's exit from the competition, Damien Duff and several others were very emotional after the game, but Kerr was adamant that all will benefit from the experience that they have had here over the past couple of weeks.

"Damien was upset all right," he said, "but that just shows how important this competition is to everyone. I mean you didn't see Damien moping around since we got here, carrying on about how he wished he was back playing in the Premiership.

"They'll all have learned something from this tournament and hopefully they'll go back and look like better players with their clubs than they looked before they joined up with the squad last month. After all, that's precisely what coming to tournaments like this is supposed to be about."