IT'S LIKE a scene from a Dublin bar late on a Friday night.

A drunk, old, ugly Irishman spots a stunning Czech supermodel at the bar, gets up the courage to ask her out and gets laughed out of the joint. "At least I tried," he says when he goes back to his mates, disappointed that he's not taking the six-foot stunna back to his place, but pleased with himself that he had the courage to talk to her.

The laughter on the chubby face of Sepp Blatter in response to an FAI suggestion that Ireland be admitted to the 2010 World Cup finals as the "33rd team" showed what he thought of the proposal. The chuckles of more laughter from his audience at the Soccerexpo conference in Cape Town yesterday showed what they thought of the idea too. "They have asked for that, really," Blatter added in response to the giggles from his audience.

Blatter wasn't the only figure from world football who was yesterday taking time out to crack a few jokes and ease the mood of economic depression with a smile. Raymond Domenech, the French manager who is rarely short of a word when it suits him, was also poking fun at the Irish.

He wasn't all that upset at the suggestion of Ireland, the team vanquished in the play-offs by his side, entering the World Cup as nation No. 33, but he was still chuckling at Ireland's national sense of moral outrage over the Thierry Henry handball and our demands for a replay of the Paris game.

"We'll replay Ireland v Georgia," he said. "The Irish were not trying to lecture the whole world then, saying 'we will replay that match'."

That was a clear reference to Ireland's qualifier at home to Georgia in February of this year. To refresh your memory of a night best forgotten, it was not Ireland's finest hour or 90 minutes in the campaign. Ireland were 1-0 down after Karlsruhe man Alexander Iahsvili beat Shay Given with a goal in the first minute. We should have been 2-0 down after an hour as Iahsvili beat Given again but his shot was ruled offside.

Following the goal we endured a nervous 70 minutes of huffing and puffing after that before Ireland got a break, Robbie Keane scoring the equaliser from the penalty spot. Ucha Lobjanidze was deemed to have handled the ball in the box by the referee even thought most people agreed it had just about glanced his shoulder -- and it should have been a free out anyway as the linesman had flagged for offside just before that.

HOUNDED

We got the equaliser from Robbie's penalty, Keane scored again four minutes from time to give us the win, so we got the three points, the Georgians got nothing and the referee Jouni Hyytia was not hounded around his native Finland by angry journalists and camera crews from Tbilisi.

This is the same Georgia, we must also remember, who were very unfairly denied the chance to play Ireland on home soil last year due to the war with Russia. Having the game played in front of a tiny crowd -- most of them Irish -- in a small German city on a sleepy Saturday afternoon handed Ireland an advantage in the group denied to any other team in the 53-nation European section of the qualifiers.

Blatter's smugness was hard to take, but Domenech -- for all his madness and arrogance -- did have a point. No one remembers that Georgia were cheated out of a point in that game and they have all moved on, especially their then manager Hector Cuper, now in charge of a Greek club team.

Georgian newspapers did not transform Robbie Keane's head into a dartboard and ask their readers to vent their anger on Keane from the oche. They grumbled on the night, sulked on the plane home but then moved on.

Now we need to do the same, to save what's left of our sanity and our dignity.

In a way, the plea for the "33rd team" idea was a clever ploy by the FAI. They knew it was never going to be accepted by anyone at FIFA -- the South African organising committee have enough on their hands without thinking about how they will accommodate a 33rd team, a five-team group, four more matches than originally planned.

The 32 countries who have qualified for the finals in the normal way were never going to run with the idea. Big nations like Germany, Spain and Brazil have their planning for the group stages of tournaments like the World Cup down to a fine art: win your first two games and win them well, so your third and last group game is a match of no real consequence when you can rest key players and try out the fringe lads.

Now shake all that up by having someone like Spain in a five-team group in South Africa next summer, just to keep those Irish happy (the same Irish who have failed to qualify for six of the previous seven major finals, lest we forget), throwing all of their plans and schemes into disarray.

Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and not one of the 32 countries whose names will be in Friday's draw for the finals will want to go through the nightmare of an extra round of games, just so our TV audience of 4million (half the size of the population of central Moscow, lest we forget about our standing on the world stage) can watch Leon Best and Shane Long take on the world.

So the 33rd team idea was never a runner, and the FAI probably knew that. "Won't work, but no harm in asking" seems to be the thinking behind the idea. It shows that the FAI have at least refused to lie down and take their punishment.

It was a busy day for the FAI on another front as they were forced to come out and issue a statement, reacting to weekend reports that the team's performance in Paris came about due to a revolt by senior players who demanded that the manager remove the shackles of tactics and allow them play.

"Since taking up his role as manager with the Republic of Ireland team, Mr Trapattoni has (as has always been his habit) used video material to show his players their previous matches, studying their errors and positions on the pitch," said the FAI statement.

ANALYSIS

"On the evening before and morning of all matches, he makes a detailed analysis for the squad, looking at the positive and negative aspects. The opposition are also analysed in detail, both as individuals and as a team. The tactics are decided by Mr Trapattoni.

"The improvements shown progressively during the World Cup qualification campaign against Georgia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy and France have happened because the players know their exact roles and have learnt from what Mr Trapattoni has told them.

"Each player knows his exact task on the pitch before every game and they have followed this to the letter. No player decides what to do on the pitch. Under Mr Trapattoni's management, the players follow only what Mr Trapattoni has asked them to do."

Strong words there, a statement which came out just hours after Blatter and his mates had laughed us out of the building in Cape Town.

But for all yesterday's bluster, nothing changes -- we won't be in South Africa, no matter if the Georgians were robbed (twice), if we were robbed in Paris or if Trapattoni had to defend his 'schema' to angry players.

Time to move on.