A point well made by the Dunny monster

IF WE didn’t know better – and if Richard Dunne wasn’t as big as he is – we might dare to suggest that the Manchester City man’s pre-match injection on Saturday night must have been of the performance-enhancing kind.

As Shay Given quipped afterwards, he should consider having one every week.

Dunne wasn’t just the man of the match in Sofia, he was a man for many seasons, giving arguably the greatest individual defensive performance in a green shirt that we have seen since Paul McGrath proved an equally impenetrable one-man barrier against Italy at USA ‘94. Coincidentally, McGrath famously played that game with a gammy arm but it no more hampered his performance then than a suspect knee diminished Dunne’s against the Bulgarians.