How to pick yourself up after a stinging defeat

0:00Well after the heartache in Prague, the so near but yet so far, people are picking themselves up off the ground today. There'll be no glorious summer adventure at the World Cup and younger people, anchoring after an Italian 90 experience, will have to wait a little longer. For the players who came within a few minutes of victory, this must be especially difficult. On Tuesday instead of meeting Denmark for a place in the World Cup finals, they'll be playing a friendly against North Macedonia. Let's go back to that fateful moment now when Ireland's Alan Brown stepped forward to take his penalty with commentary from John Kenny here on Radio 1. Alan Brown is going to take this one. It's 3-3. He's got to score this one because if he doesn't, he'll be the home side of the chance to get into the final. This is a massive, massive penalty for Alan Brown, the Irish substitute. Kovar has already saved the penalty. The way to our left hand side. Here comes Alan Brown with a very small

1:03short run up and it's saying that it's a rental penalty by Brown and all it had to do was guess right the goalkeeper, Kovar. He didn't put into the corner, although that's a couple of penalties, some honest point of view have been awful. And that was an easy save to make if you guess right again. Sorry for inflicting that upon you again, following the match, Seamus Coleman gave his reaction to the defeat to our T.E.'s Adrian Eames. And for you as a player who dreamed of playing at a World Cup finals, is the dream gone now, Seamus? How do you look at us? I mean, I think that's not important. It's not about me. We just, we just lost. I play off-game. It's not about me. It's about the squad, it's about the farm, it's about our country. It's more than me that it has messed out on a World Cup place tonight. And in terms of the future, obviously, it's such a devastating blow, but we've reasons to be optimistic with that prefer. Yeah, I mean, we showed a lot of faith from, you know, the Arminio A game. You know, there's a lot of young lads in the group and they'll take a lot of learnings

2:04from this and then, yeah, they'll have to toss themselves down and go again. Let's have a word now with sports psychologist Dr. Paul O'Flynn. Thanks for being with us this afternoon for the players. How much harder will this be than a standard defeat and how difficult will it be for them to dust themselves down and start again? Yeah, hi Rachel, how are you? Well, I suppose just first and foremost, I suppose I'm like everybody else here and I was watching the game as a huge fan last night. And I feel the disappointment, but I suppose that will pale in comparison to what some of the players will be feeling. And, you know, the loss of, you know, a childhood dream there that some of the players may have had of playing in a World Cup will be a tough one to take, but even just listening to James's interview there, you can hear him talking about some of the green shoots and some of the positives that can be taken from the campaign, but it'll be hard for them to talk about that today. So for a psychologist

3:06than working with players, where do you start today? Well, I think the first step is that you need to have time to process the difficult emotions from from from a from a situation like they say that it'll really hurt them. And you know, they'll be they'll be looking internally to their own performances what they could have done. And as a group, they'll be looking to what they could have done as well. What might have they done better in preparation? But some of these questions are probably better left for maybe not in the immediate 24 hours after the game. But as you go through the time and time will help with this, you get to a situation of where you can really begin to contextualize what happened. And you can you can zoom out and maybe look at some of the stronger points because I mean, like if you think about where we were sitting after the first three games at a campaign, we were on one point. And it wasn't looking good. And you know, that zoom out can help because we won three games and we're all after that. And God ourselves into a situation

4:10of where we were competing again to play at the World Cup. So they have been in this situation before and have managed to to turn the performances around. But the fact that this is the end of the campaign and the World Cup dream is over is difficult and that will need a lot of time. They do have to gear up for a friendly next Tuesday. How important will it be for players that there's a decent crowd there on Tuesday? Yeah, I think it's very important. And you know, traditionally there's a great connection between the Irish fans and the Irish team. And I think that you'll definitely see that again. It was evident last night in Prague, you know, you could see all the build up during the week. The amount of player, the amount of fans that that traveled over without a ticket, just on the off chance of getting over there, potentially getting into the ground. And, you know, there'll be there'll be hopefully a huge crowd again there on Tuesday night to to reestablish that connection. You know, it's a chance for the players to come home and to show their appreciation to the fans for all the travel over the campaign and the sport. And it's also a chance for the fans to show, you know, how proud we are of the team. You know, there's disappointment

5:13there, but you know, I think we're we're all very proud of the way they they asserted themselves and the level of competition that they brought to two of the games. Dr. Paulo Flynn, thanks for being with us on the news at one