VIDEO: Shane Long’s stunner lights up Aviva

A question for the world champions: Can we play you every week?

After the minor miracle of Gelsenkirchen, this was the major miracle of Dublin, a win against all the odds to end years of coming up short — and worse, much worse — on home soil against all of football’s big guns.

And it was achieved in classic Irish fashion: through sheer guts, incredible discipline and lung-busting levels of energy, epitomised by the command performance in the green shirt from James McCarthy we have long been waiting for.