Ken Early: Robbie Brady gives Ireland fans another night to remember in Helsinki

Festy Ebosele dipped a shoulder, skipped between Teemu Pukki and Tomas Galvez, and measured an inswinging cross to the far post with his left foot. It skimmed over the head of Adam Ståhl and dropped for the unmarked Robbie Brady, who had time to control and with his second touch smash it high into the net past Lucas Hradecky.
The roar from the Ireland fans as Brady ran across the track to celebrate in front of them was equal parts joyous and disbelieving. A first competitive win of 2024! A first competitive win against any non-Gibraltar entity since 2022! By the recent standards of Irish football, it is a night that will echo in eternity.
Ebosele’s team-mates pushed him to the front when the players went to salute the Irish fans after the final whistle. An 81st minute-substitute for Chiedozie Ogbene, he had made the decisive impact. He had nearly added a second assist when he picked out Troy Parrott on the edge of the box.
The players stood in front of the fans and milked the applause for a while. This had been a while coming.
This was a big improvement on the situation at the end of the first half, when Ireland’s last chance to attack was wasted by right back for the night, Dara O’Shea, who produced a foul throw.
As a centre back, O’Shea doesn’t usually take throws, but it’s reasonable to expect he should be able to handle that aspect of the right-back role. He’s being asked to take legal throw-ins, not speak fluent Chinese.
The Irish fans had responded to the half-time whistle a few seconds later with the now-regular half-time boos. It had been a cramped and scuffly game. The only players on the field who had time and space on the ball were the Ireland centre backs, Liam Scales and Nathan Collins, with Finland generally letting them play the ball around without pressing too high or hard.
Too often, though, the Irish defenders played it back and forth without any apparent idea how to work it further up the field. A team like Ireland can only do this so long before somebody makes a damaging mistake and on 17 minutes the captain contributed a stunner.
Scales’s pass across to Collins was slightly backwards, triggering a Finnish press from Glen Kamara and the meaty forward Joel Pohjanpalo, but Collins still had ample time and space to deal with the ball as it came to him.
It was difficult to understand what happened next. Collins seemed to hesitate before applying his right foot to the ball and producing … what even was it? The touch seemed too hard for a miscontrol, too soft for even an underhit backpass. Whatever it was, it was perfectly weighted for Pohjanpalo to accelerate on to it, leaving Collins flailing in his wake, and beat Caoimhín Kelleher with a low shot.
Before the game Collins had been asked if he would rather have a goal or a clean sheet and he answered that he would take both. Instead he had to settle for an assist. Four minutes later he nearly added a second, this time at the right end. Brady boomed a free-kick from the right towards the far post and Collins headed it back across for Evan Ferguson, who knocked it high into the net.
It would have been the centre forward’s first goal since November, but it was immediately cancelled by the officials, who said the ball had crossed the goal line before Collins headed it back across. The replays suggested they might have been wrong about that, but the Croatian VAR team rubber-stamped the on-field decision.
Other than this Ireland created nothing in the first half. They seemed to have no attacking ideas other than Brady measuring passes down the left touchline for Sammie Szmodics or Ferguson to run on to. The midfield unit of Josh Cullen, Jason Knight and Finn Azaz could not establish any rhythm or control.
Szmodics at least is sparky, trying to inject a bit of speed into moves. Ferguson, as so often for Ireland, was clean, efficient, and isolated. He was the only player to complete 100 per cent of his passes in the first half. He also had only 13 touches – fewer than any other player on the field except Kamara. You feel Ireland should be trying to get these two players working closer together, rather than Szmodics spending so much of the game wide and deep.
Indeed they combined for Ireland’s best move of the game shortly after half-time. Szmodics’s quick turn and pass inside found Ferguson, who beat the first defender with a shuffle on the edge of the box before Rasmus Schüller slid in to clear.
There was a general sense of increasing confidence, as though the team was realising that football is not really as hard as they had been making it look.
On 57 minutes, an equaliser. It came from a free-kick after Ogbene had been fouled on the right. Brady’s diagonal inswinger was nicely flighted and Scales produced a beautifully controlled header, cushioning it back across into the far top corner to give Bayer Leverkusen’s Lukas Hradecky no chance.
Kamara should have made it 2-1 after Cullen inadvertently teed him up for a shot from 16 yards, but he tried to plant it right in the top corner and sent it just the wrong side of the post. Substitute Benjamin Källman put a header across goal and wide. Then Ebosele stepped up, and Ireland’s torrid affair with Nations League B might just be set to go on and on.