Long wait for nearly over for Kevin

In keeping with his surname, it might have taken Kevin Long a fair old length of time to finally get his first senior Irish call-up but it took him only 20 minutes to reach last week’s squad training base at Fota Island from his family home in Ballyphehane.

And it wasn’t too far either from Turner’s Cross where he began making waves as a promising young defender before leaving to join Burnley in 2009. In another sense, however, his Cork City experience was a world away. Long having broken through into the first team in the dark days - very different from now - when financial turmoil ruled and the club’s very existence was in jeopardy.

“That was a strange situation,” he recalls. “Everything happened so fast for me at the time. I just broke into the Cork City team and within a few months I was over in England and had signed for a Premier League club.