Players unfazed by unruly pupils

The Leaving Certificate may be in full swing at home but Giovanni Trapattoni’s squad slept through the worst excesses of the local ‘School’s Out’ party which took place just a few hundred yards from the team hotel on Sopot’s beach front on Tuesday night.

A few thousand Polish students began assembling in the town’s main street as the sun went down and soon there was a wave of teenagers clutching bottles of local beers and shuffling in pairs and small groups down the main drag and through the main square.

The route took them past the lines of bars, restaurants and nightclubs, the Irish team’s Sheraton Hotel and finally onto the sand where they celebrated their end of term clustered on the darkened shoreline on what just happened to be the Republic’s first night in Poland.