It was a time for taking stock in the Irish camp in Ayia Napa yesterday, a day for reflecting on what went wrong in Tuesday's defeat by England, but one, too, to put the situation in some sort of perspective.

Team manager Brian Kerr and his coach, Noel O'Reilly, were upbeat as they mixed with their players around their hotel. Suggestions that there might be a sense of despondency running through the squad were dismissed. There is still a chance of Ireland making Sunday's final here, but, on the other hand, the third place play-off would be a respectable enough prize in itself.

"We can still make the final," said Kerr, "and that's the way that we have to think about it. But even if we don't, last night was the 20th competitive match we've played over the last year (this includes under-16 and under-18 games and counts invitation tournaments) and it's the first one we've lost. So I don't think there is a whole lot of gloom in the camp about it to be honest."

Kerr went on to reflect positively on how far the Irish set up has come in a short space of time, with experience of this level equipping them with the sort of knowledge that should be of benefit at all levels of the Irish game over the coming seasons.

"There's a great desire for countries to reach these sort of finals," he said, citing the case of the Armenian FA who entered their under-18 team in their national league's first division for two years in order to improve their standard. In the end, the team lost out on a place here in the second leg of a play-off against the Portuguese, played in front of 12,000 supporters, but when the winning team's coaches came away, they told their Irish counterparts that the Armenians had produced a team to be reckoned with.

"There's all sorts of stuff like that. Just bits of information and an understanding of what's being tried in other places that enables us in Ireland to look at the way we're doing things. And I have lots of ideas about how (in his other role as the FAI's technical director) I'm going to spread that sort of information around as widely as possible."

In the immediate future, however, the priority is doing as well at these European Youth Championships as possible, and the hope remains that the Croatians will revive Ireland's title hopes by beating the English. Under a complex system of qualifying rules such a result, assuming the Irish, as expected, beat the hosts, would put Kerr's team through to the final.

In effect, the fact that Ireland beat Croatia who beat England who in turn beat the Irish would render the first way of separating teams level on points - the results in the games between those particular teams - meaningless. The process would then move on to goal difference, but only from the matches between the top three teams for, while the points gained against the group's bottom team, presumably Cyprus in this case, are counted, the scorelines from those matches are disregarded.

The upshot is that Ireland's three-goal margin of victory over Croatia could still prove vital, as the team's goal difference remains plus two, compared to minus three for Croatia and plus one for England. In the event of Croatia and Ireland winning tonight, then our scoreline would be meaningless while Croatia would have to win by five. A draw would be enough to put England through as group winners, a win would guarantee the Irish second place.

The Irish manager will only decide today which changes to make, admitting that he faces the choice of "putting in fresh legs or sticking with the lads who have generally been the best players for us to now".

Because everyone is available, however, his options are at least a little wider than those of his Cypriot counterpart. The host team were initially dealt a blow by a sending off in the England game, which means they are missing one player through suspension this evening. Further misfortune followed though, with one player receiving four stitches to a cut near his eye after a team-mate opened the door of their room while he was bending over to get something out of a drawer and, startled, caught his eye on the handle of a press as he jumped up. Then, even more bizarrely, one of the team's goalkeeper's fell off the squad masseuse's table and injured his arm.

"It's not the sort of stuff I'd be running to tell you boys," Kerr confided yesterday with a grin.