Sometimes you just need to walk through open door

SITTING in the press box in the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday night behind a laptop and under a sky filled with paper planes, it was clear that travel — if not beautiful football — is what we do best.

And of course that the majority of Irish football fans come from the back of the classroom. Ireland sealed a 1-1 win and, as Liam Mackey wrote in this paper the following morning, “we went to a football game and a party broke out. Or was it the other way around”.

The big screen played a montage video at half-time and after the full-time whistle which could have been cut together by a team of manipulative psychologists, so successful was it in pushing our buttons.