Leaning against an open doorway with a cup of tea in his hand, Tony Cascarino was beaming. It might have gone better, he knew. He might well have equalled Frank Stapleton's international goalscoring record. But hey, Big Cas, wasn't in the mood for raining on his team-mates' parade. The smile was broad, the talk upbeat.

"When they were down to nine men I thought I might get a chance to get a goal, and I'm a bit disappointed not to have got one in the end, but if they'd been two up out there I don't think they'd have been doing too much except making us run around, so I'm happy enough that we were doing to them exactly what they would have done to us in the same situation.

"To be fair, nobody could complain. We've got a young team and the goal coming so early on gave us confidence. We were up against a very good side, I could see how they came third in the World Cup, but we worked hard to close them down and we got what we deserved in the end."

It was, said the Nancy striker, just the start this young team needed to keep then on the road for qualification and a display, he pointed out, that brought out some of McCarthy's new side's strengths. "I think we've got a lot more pace in this team than we had in the old team. If we can combine that, the aggression we've always had, and a bit of passing, then we'll definitely be going the right way.

"I think we've seen today that we're progressing and we'll see a bit more clearly how far we've still got to go next month in Yugoslavia, where we're going to have a really big test."

When he emerged from the dressing room, Kenny Cunningham echoed his team-mate's sentiments, all that is, except Cascarino's longing for a third goal.

"I think it's understandable that some people wanted to get forward for another one but the fear is that it's very easy to get caught up in the emotion of a situation like that, and say `let's go on and win by four or five,' but the danger is that you start to become ill-disciplined," said the Wimbledon defender. "We were very conscious of the fact that we didn't want to concede a goal because if we'd done that then suddenly, at 2-1, it would have been a very jittery last 15 or 20 minutes.

"In the circumstances, the priority had to be hang on to what we had. When you're 2-0 up at this level of football, the game should be finished and when they had two men sent off in the second half, this match was won. The most important thing was to keep it that way."

Even without Alen Boksic and Davor Suker, Cunningham made it clear that the Croatians were capable of snatching something throughout the game. "Even when they were down to nine men they had the sort of players who were capable of carving out chances," he said. "The two strikers were very good. They didn't make the sort of long straight runs you get used to in the Premiership but kept coming short and then trying to pull you all over the place.

"It's going to be a very different proposition out there for the return leg, of course, but I think this squad has come a long way over the last two years. It's matured a lot. It was important for everybody to take something from this game, not just the result but confidence and certainly everyone who played out there will be able to go into the next game with a lot more self belief because of the way we've played here."

Though hardly one of the newcomers at this stage, Jason McAteer, struggling to nail down a place in Liverpool's first team may well be one of those to benefit most from being part of this victory on Saturday, a suspicion which appeared to be supported by the positive demeanor of the 27-year-old when he emerged after the game.

The result, he said, was pleasing. The fact that the Irish had a kept a clean sheet was, he added, a welcome bonus for a lot of defensive work had been done this past week on the training pitch.