His left foot: Blue-blood Sheedy still a hero

IT was nice to run into Kevin Sheedy again in Dublin last week.

Talk of the heroes of Genoa invariably focuses on Bonner and O’ Leary: it’s easy to forget that the responsibility of getting Ireland off on the right foot in the penalty shoot-out against Romania fell to the man they call ‘Sheeds’.

Actually, make that the left foot; he simply blasted the ball straight down the middle to cancel out Hagi’s opener. And, of course, it was that same trusty left foot which had saved a nation’s sanity a couple of weeks earlier, when an unerring Sheedy drive ensured that Ireland’s debut on the world stage would not end with the frankly intolerable pain of defeat to England.