Almost exactly a year on from a sluggish, passive UEFA Nations League defeat to Armenia, Stephen Kenny is targeting "a big away victory" to ignite the Republic of Ireland's Euros qualification campaign.
In June 2022, Ireland slipped to a bad defeat in Yerevan with several players in the halfway house between the end of the club season and the start of pre-season.
They looked off the pace that evening, losing at home to Ukraine four days later before responding with a comprehensive 3-0 victory over Scotland and then drawing with the Ukrainians in the Polish city of Lodz.
This time around Kenny is confident his squad will be in better shape for the crunch clash against Gus Poyet's Greece in Athens, where temperatures could hover around the 30-degree Celsius mark.
He held a training camp in Bristol last week for the players operating outside of the Premier League, which only wrapped up last weekend, and on Monday he'll take his full 25-man squad to Turkey for some warm-weather acclimatisation.
Juggling a panel of footballers who fall into a few different categories (free agents, those getting minimal playing time at their clubs, others only just returning from injury) is tricky, but Kenny believes he can strike the right balance.
"This is a conventional camp of two games in a nine-day window," he said.
"We needed to have that camp in Bristol because... we need football sessions, we need to train with the team.
"It was to get people focused. It wasn't just running sessions; they were all football sessions.
"Some of the players who got promoted with their teams - Sheffield United and Burnley - the teams were in the city, the tour bus, all the celebrations, and then they bring them to Vegas for five days. That's what they do when they win trophies like that.
"You've got to come back off that and then come back to reality.
"Last year was quite unique because it was a four-game window. We had to go to Armenia and then had to play Ukraine, in Poland. It was a 20-day camp.
"We lost to Armenia but we came back and beat Scotland 3-0 and played well away against Ukraine, we played very well in that match. But I will admit out performance against Armenia was well below par."
He's braced for an awkward test against the Greeks. Poyet led them out of Nations League Group C last autumn when they finished top of their table ahead of Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Cyprus.
They already have three points on the board having beaten Gibraltar in March, though they also lost 3-0 to the Netherlands in that window.
If Ireland are to maintain any realistic hopes of finishing second in the group behind likely winners France, they need to beat Greece in two weeks' time and then take care of Gibraltar at the Aviva Stadium three days later.
"It's a game we want to win for sure," Kenny added.
"We'd like a big away victory. Greece are a formidable team. They won their four games last June in the [Nations League] group. They're a team that have really improved under the manager and I think they're expansive, 4-3-3.
"They're already in a play-off [by virtue of their Nations League showing] so they'll view it like they've nothing to lose.
"They're quite an attacking team so we'll absolutely make sure we'll get ourselves into the best possible condition and frame of mind to play, and we'll go in search of a big away win."
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