I’m here to play, says cool Daryl Horgan

Nobody in the ilk of Damien Duff has graced the Ireland squad since the magician retired after Euro 2012, but Daryl Horgan hopes the similarities in appearance noticed by his new teammates yesterday can in some way be replicated in a football sense.

The Galway man is far too modest to be putting himself in the same bracket as the centurion and has followed a completely different career path which has elevated him to the senior Ireland squad at 24 as the League of Ireland’s standout performer.

He was accompanied to the team hotel on Monday evening by his Dundalk colleague Andy Boyle, enabling him to an extent park the last-gasp FAI Cup final defeat to Cork City just 24 hours earlier, and within an hour, the pair were taken aside by the man a 10-year-old Horgan had watched in awe spearheading Ireland’s passage to the 2002 World Cup.