The boys of summer

IT WAS the night we went to a football match and a party broke out. Or maybe it was the other way around.

At times it was hard to determine whether you were at a sporting event or a rock festival in the Aviva Stadium but all that mattered in the end was that, ten years after the country’s last appearance at the World Cup finals and 24 years after their first appearance at the European Championship finals, the referee’s final whistle officially confirmed that Irish football will be back in the big time next summer.

It was an occasion if not a game to be savoured. An exceedingly pedestrian match will still go down in history as marking the first time Ireland ever achieved qualification on home soil, though there’s a case to made that, in truth, passage to Poland and Ukraine was really secured in the Baltics last Friday when that sensational 4-0 win made the overall outcome of the play-off a foregone conclusion.