For Republic of Ireland fans, the nerves really started to kick in on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
Just hours after Heimir Hallgrimsson unveiled his 25-man squad for the World Cup play-off semi-final against the Czech Republic, Irish eyes turned to Prague early to watch Troy Parrott in action for AZ Alkmaar. <\/p>\n
Considering it was Parrott’s goalscoring heroics that propelled the Republic of Ireland to this position, the fans would have been forgiven for watching from behind the sofa.<\/p>\n
Thankfully for them, an injury scare was not forthcoming.<\/p>\n
Instead, Parrott left an early mark on the Czech capital, scoring and bagging an assist in his side’s 4-0 Uefa Conference League win over Slavia Prague. <\/p>\n
Less than 72 hours later, Parrott started again for Alkmaar. He played all 90 minutes in a 3-0 loss to Groningen, but supporters drew a collective sigh of relief when he came through unscathed. <\/p>\n
“Everyone was keeping an eye on his game,” said Republic of Ireland assistant coach John O’Shea. <\/p>\n
“Listen, the way it works for the weekend when the boys meet up, you’re nervous as soon as the games start on Friday. We had [players in games on] Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”<\/p>\n
Having avoided any late injury scares, the Republic of Ireland squad assembled on Sunday before the biggest week of their international careers.<\/p>\n
The mission is clear: win two games and they qualify for the country’s first World Cup since 2002. Anything less and the journey will end in heartache. <\/p>\n
Victory in Prague on Thursday (19:45 GMT) is the first job – and it is difficult to escape the feeling that a nation’s hopes are pinned on Parrott. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Republic of Ireland fans, the nerves really started to kick in on Thursday night. Just hours after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-364159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}