The longest game

THEY SAY there languishes somewhere in the vaults a low-rent Hollywood medieval war epic which would otherwise be forgotten but for a memorable scene at the beginning in which we meet a peasant leaving his village to do battle.

"Farewell, my beloved," he calls to his tearful wife, "for I am off to fight in the Hundred Years War."

Although the protracted nature of the build-up might suggest otherwise, Ireland versus France shouldn't last quite as long as that classic tie between France and England, an end-to-end ding-dong battle which went to extra-time and then some.