Ireland will be happy to be in Marbella as World Cup playoffs get underway in New Zealand

Not that their Republic of Ireland team-mates weren’t already grateful to Courtney Brosnan for her penalty save and Amber Barrett for her match-winning goal in Glasgow last October, but this week, of all weeks, their gratitude might have risen several notches.

A goal here and a missed chance there in the group stage of the qualifying campaign and the squad could currently be recovering from jet lag in New Zealand while waiting to take part in the ... deep breath ... World Cup qualification inter-confederation playoffs that start in Hamilton and Auckland on Saturday.

But, as it proved, Ireland and Switzerland’s group results kept them ahead in the rankings of Portugal, the third of that October night’s European playoff winners, thereby sealing their slot in next summer’s tournament.

It’s Portugal, then, who are currently recovering from jet lag in New Zealand, waiting to see if they’ll play Cameroon or Thailand for one of the three remaining World Cup places, while Ireland only had to skip over to Marbella for a training camp ahead of next Wednesday’s friendly against China in Cadiz.

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They’re probably tucking Brosnan and Barrett in to bed every night, singing them lullabies.

And the grim news this week from New Zealand about the impact on its North Island of Cyclone Gabrielle would have made them all the more thankful for having avoided this qualifying route.

The resulting flooding and landslides caused untold damage and resulted in a national state of emergency being declared – and then the cyclone was followed by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake centred near Wellington. How much can any one place take?

The Papua New Guinea coach was eager to put it all in perspective. Yes, the preparations of the 10 competing teams were disrupted, training impossible during the catastrophe, but that mattered little next to what the locals had endured.

“It’s a bit of a disruptive week,” he said, “but not just for us, every team is in the same boat.”

‘He’ in this instance is Spencer Prior, a man who has taken one of football’s quirkier journeys.

English top flight-watchers in the 1990s and 2000s might recall him from his time playing at centre back for Norwich City and Leicester City in particular, although he had spells with a string of other clubs including Manchester City.

He headed to Australia near the end of his playing days and soon got into coaching at schools and club level before becoming assistant manager of the Australian women’s team in 2011. And since then he has largely stayed in women’s football, managing Thailand’s team a couple of years before their association hired a woman by the name of Vera Pauw as a technical adviser. It’s a small world.

“These experiences have given me huge, huge empathy for female footballers and the circumstances they face,” he said in an interview with Fifa. “There’s no doubt that in many countries they’re still second-class citizens when it comes to things like facilities and access to fields and good coaching. When and how that will change, I really don’t know.”

Reading the routes the 10 contenders in these playoffs have taken gives you a fair notion of the disparity between the haves and have-nots in the game. The line-up – lest you ever doubted it’s a global game – Portugal, Chile, Chinese Taipei, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Paraguay, Haiti, Panama, Cameroon and Senegal.

The last week we’ve heard about the Canadian women’s team and their battle with their governing body over pay equality, the women, 2020 Olympic gold medallists, ranked at six in the world, the men at 53. Yet the lads had $11 million spent on them in 2021, the lasses having to make do with $5.1 million. Whatever set of spectacles you put on, that looks pretty crappy.

But the bulk of the teams currently in New Zealand and dreaming of World Cup qualification, most of them having as much chance as ourselves of winning the lottery, are so many tiers below that level you can’t but wonder how Fifa manage to avoid investing even a speck of their untold wealth – $7.5 billion alone from commercial deals relating to Qatar 2022 – in nudging the game along in those territories.

Take Cameroon. They head to New Zealand having not played a competitive game since last July, their coach choosing a squad made up of players from leagues in Russia, Italy, the United States, France, Portugal, Spain, Nigeria, Belarus and Israel. Gifted, no doubt, but they’ll have hardly met each other before they take on Thailand.

Which makes these playoffs fascinating, most of the teams there through sure will, certainly not through support, financial or otherwise.

Papua New Guinea at least showed some ambition by appointing an ‘outsider’ with a decent CV. And then they lost 5-1 and 9-0 in two warm-ups against the Philippines.

This will, possibly, be the most unpredictable tournament ever. All we can be sure of is that Ireland are way better off in Marbella.