With just a couple of minutes of injury time to go and Ireland losing 2-1, Killian Phillips went over to the right side to take a long throw.
Irish players jostled their markers as Phillips backed up towards the hoardings and then endlessly sized up his options in the penalty area. The process took so long that the Armenian crowd started to boo, even though they should have been cheering. Ireland were wasting the last of their own precious time.
How can we waste so much time setting up to take a long throw in this situation, rather than getting the game back under way as quickly as possible? Yes, long throws are part of the team’s basic gameplan, but you have to be able to recognise when it’s no longer the moment to stick with plan A. The whole scene seemed typical of a team that cannot think, cannot react, cannot adapt.
Phillips took the throw which looped harmlessly and was headed away by an Armenian without Ireland getting a flick on.
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Ireland’s Nathan Collins and Killian Phillips dejected after the match. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
Even by Ireland’s standards this defeat was an utter farce. All the faults the team has shown – lack of creativity, lack of capacity to control games, inability to concentrate – were here in abundance, and the virtues of physicality and effort that impressed us all on Saturday night had disappeared.
The second half debacle was so total that it is impossible to find single reasons. But this is a team that seems determined to make a fool of their manager.
Everything he says boomerangs back into his face. This “group” looked like a team of strangers. Think back to May, when Hallgrimsson decided to give most of the Championship players the June window off. He said he wanted them to rest because he needed them to be fit and strong to play next June at the World Cup in North America.
Maybe they’d have been better off coming in and spending some time getting to know each other’s games.
Hallgrimsson dropped Matt Doherty but curiously chose Jack Taylor, a defensive midfielder, as a kind of support striker role ahead of Adam Idah, who scored what in hindsight is no longer such an important goal on Saturday. It was impossible to understand why Taylor had been chosen and he was subbed off at half-time.
But by then Armenia were in the lead after Nathan Collins clumsily conceded a penalty which was scored by Eduard Spertsyan. They had begun the game in a kind of panic, with the stand-in keeper Chancharevich spilling a simple catch and nearly letting Evan Ferguson score with a lob, but after 10 minutes they seemed to realise Ireland weren’t going to do anything and from that point they grew in confidence.
The second half was a rout. The killer goal came when Jake O’Brien failed to sense the danger developing on his blind side, where Nayair Tiknizyan was calling for a pass, and a through-ball pierced the inviting gap between the Irish right-back and Collins. Collins also had failed to spot the danger and was beaten to the cross by Grant-Leon Ranos.
But there were so many more dangerous attacks, including a late 3-1 that was eventually ruled out for offside, and only Kelleher kept the score respectable.
The first goal Ireland conceded with Hallgrimsson as manager came about as a result of Trent Alexander-Arnold playing Anthony Gordon in on goal with a 50-yard ball.
“Straight through the heart of the team. That can never happen,” Hallgrimsson said after that game. Here we were a year on in Yerevan, and the heart of the Irish team had turned into a superhighway through which Armenian attacks sped for most of the second half. If this is what a Hallgrimsson team looks like after a year of whipping them into shape you shudder to think how bad they might be after another year.
It was impossible to begrudge the home fans their joy. Their team has endured a difficult 12 months, losing six out of nine games in that time, including a 1-0 home defeat to the Faroe Islands. Here they took brutal revenge on the Group F whipping boys, delighting the near-capacity crowd.
As for Ireland: is this rock bottom? We wish. If there’s one thing this team has taught us over the last 20 years, it’s that things can always get worse.