Well, well fecken done.  3-0 drubbing of the boys from Belarus.  Never mind that their keeper had an absolute shocker - hat tipped to you CB sir.  Far be it from me to single out specific players for particular mention (I normally reserve that treatment for our illustrious leader), but Rory Fecken Ó Raighne - it's about time!

With a result like that, I'm not going to go looking for petty questionable selections to take umbrage with, I would say they'll be plenty more fruitful opportunity before these qualifiers are done.  I'm just going to focus on one particular aspect of this match - Ó Raighne.  On paper the best striker this country has ever produced by some considerable margin, but according to the NC -  not comfortable at NT level.  From a recent interview on TM Ireland, when asked why McDermott was preferred over Ó Rags for the Hungarian match: "Quite easy call to make, O Raighne has played 5 games for the NT side and drawn a blank, Mc Dermott has played four times and has 1 goal and an assist, obviously O Raighne is a great player but for whatever reason it is not happening for him at International level yet."  

That bothers me a bit.  That our National Coach is making selection decisions, based on some notion of 'international form'.  Never even mind that 4 and 5 matches are decidedly tiny samples for these deductions.

Newsflash mate - those idiots on the international forum who cry 'This game is so random!' don't have a clue.  It is based on probability, or as dictionary.com so glibly puts it:

The relative possibility that an event will occur, as expressed by the ratio of the number of actual occurrences to the total number of possible occurrences.

In other words, the boy was just having bad luck!  He was not more or less likely to score based on his 'poor' form at international level; the guy scored 27 goals for his club two seasons running for God's sake.  Perhaps our NC views the 2nd division with such abject disdain to discount these efforts entirely.  That result tonight sure makes Rory Ó's NT record look substantially more healthy, what?    

I haven't said it once, but I am going to say it again, basing selections for international matches on some kind of spurious assumptions around the existence of 'international form' is downright silly.  Ó Raighne is the best striker in this country and tonight's performance proved it.

As to the rest of the game, as I said I'm not going to go looking for stuff to pick holes in - people will think I'm even more of a miserable git than they do already.  Not that I necessarily give a fuck.  I'm just pleased we won.

Overall, it was a good performance.  The selection of Greene at keeper is a little contentious; though he was only tested twice on the night, but he did get two assists.  The Belorussian GK had only 3 saves to make tho, poor guy.  

So, Derek Gaffer signing off, delighted with that result actually.  Just drop these weird ideas of leaving the best guys out of the team and we might even be all right.  It's not about hindsight, it's about logicality: reasoning in accordance with the principles of logic...

Talk to you later.