Gdynia goes green as 15,000 turn up to watch Ireland train

As Giovanni Trapattoni himself has often made a point of saying, Ireland aren’t exactly a team blessed with big names.

But, yesterday in Gdynia, it must have been impossible for the players not to feel like exactly that – not to mention the Premier League stars and, more importantly, the qualified Euro 2012 nation they genuinely are.

I spoke here yesterday about how almost every moment in Poland in the build-up to the tournament brings something that only deepens the realisation of what qualification actually means. That process took a quantum leap yesterday.