Is Martin O’Neill about to ask Tommy McNamara to choose sides?

"I'm hoping to get back there soon," says Tommy McNamara.

There is Ireland. It's preceded by the word back because he has already been - many times. New York-born, Roscommon and Sligo-bred, McNamara is a child of the mid-Atlantic, neither one nationality nor the other. So, instead, he's both.

But the next trip back there might have a whole lot to do with what he's doing here. Here is the Bronx, a place that in its not-too-distant past teemed with the children of the mid-Atlantic, a melting pot of Irish-Americanism that bubbled from the bottom of the Grand Concourse to the top.