Snapshots from the wake.
At the school gate on Friday morning, one of the mams gave a look, a shrug and a pained, “Ah, that was very hard to take last night.” When Ireland had gone 2-0 up – and even when they were leading 2-1 for so long – she was enjoying the thoughts of Italia 90 all over again. “And did you see the video of the Irish fans in the parrot heads joining in the wedding in Prague? Gas…”
Late on Thursday night, one of the WhatsApp groups buzzed with a question from normie world. “How do you do this week in week out?” our friend asked. By ‘this’, she meant watching sport, living sport, having your heart lifted and broken by sport – something she, as a sane and reasoned person, generally does not do.
Yet there she was, to the bitter end of the shoot-out, completely enmeshed like everyone else. “Masochists, the lot of ye,” she said, signing off for the night.
Republic of Ireland captain Nathan Collins dejected after Thursday night’s defeat. Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho
And like, she’s not wrong. Everything hurts right now. Of course it does. People are swinging from blind rage to deep despair and sweeping up everything in between. Why did Ryan Manning have to pull that jersey? How could the little lad from Wolves be first to that header at the front post? In what world does a referee give 25 free kicks against the Czechs and yet only pull out a single yellow card?
Those are the questions we’re asking aloud, bouncing off each other in our dumb little sporting world together. Core questions about the nitty-gritty of it all, brandished at each other like broadswords of knowledge, silly and vital and real. Ireland were 2-0 up in a World Cup playoff game and found a way not to go through. That’s going to scald and scar for a long, long time.
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But there’s another layer too. Out there in the world, where for so long the Ireland soccer team were never a matter of interest or even curiosity, really. Where you have to go back a decade for the last time your mam knew the name of the Ireland goalie, where there hasn’t been a matinee idol like Troy Parrott since forever. Out there, Thursday night mattered.
It kept kids up long past their bedtime. Another of the mams said the chat overnight in her house was about how her daughter thought the new away Ireland strip was slay and how they’d have to get it and how she’d get good wear out of it even though it was fairly pricey now in fairness. A men’s Ireland team connecting with 10-year-old girls. That hasn’t happened for a while.
But it happened this week. It made people cancel plans and swap shifts and move things around to make sure to be on the sofa in time for kick-off. It turned a nothing weekday evening in late March into a Reeling In The Years event, gathering the whole country around the fire to warm its hands. Something like that lasts.
Troy Parrott scores Ireland’s first goal against the Czech Republic. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho
“Stick with us,” said Parrott in his interview with Tony O’Donoghue after the game. That’s the interesting bit now. The slate for the rest of the year wouldn’t exactly get the pulse racing, whether you’re into football or not. North Macedonia on Tuesday night. Qatar and Grenada in May, Canada in June. Israel and everything that comes with it in the autumn, with Kosovo and Austria on the bill as well.
Fair to say nothing in that line-up is going to coddle the new faces on the Ireland-supporting scene. It will obviously be the case that the next few months of grinding through these fixtures is going to reveal the cultural phenomenon of a week like this to be a mile wide and an inch deep. But that’s okay. That’s as it should be.
If everything is the greatest thing since Italia 90 then nothing is the greatest thing since Italia 90. Sticking with Parrott and his team doesn’t have to mean everyone bailing into the Aviva when Qatar come to town in a couple of months. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t force this stuff. It has to be organic.
Sticking with them will mean different things to different people. You may roll your eyes at some lad online calling Alan Browne and Finn Azaz all the names under the sun and yeah, he’s a gobshite and a ludramán and not worth the steam off your proverbial. But in his own twisted way, that’s him sticking with the Ireland team. That’s him feeling it deeply, just as irrationally and organically as the 10-year-old girl who thinks the jersey is slay.
The Ireland soccer team is everyone’s, in a way that virtually nothing else on our sodden little rock is everyone’s. Just as nothing lifts the country like an Ireland football team going well, nothing hurts like the dashed hopes of another nearly-but-not campaign. This time around gathered more people into the tent than usual, and though plenty of them will drift away over the coming year or so, they might not go as far as they usually would.
Don’t forget that the Euros are on the horizon. On June 12th, 2028, assuming everything goes as it should, Ireland will host their opening game of the tournament in Lansdowne Road. It will be 40 years to the day since Stuttgart, since the day this thing properly started, since the whole idea of the Ireland team as a national gathering point exploded. That will be a day.
This campaign has ended in the worst way possible and the aftermath feels brutal. But it changed the way people see the Ireland team, hopefully for a while. We shouldn’t be surprised if we find out down the line that the seeds planted along the way are still sprouting long into the future.