Letter from Prague: 'For anyone my age this is the biggest game of our lives'

Republic of Ireland Fans In Prague ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup Play-Off semi-final, Prague. Pic: INPHO/Ryan Byrne

If Joxer’s trip to Stuttgart is the starting point then there is no end to the lengths Republic of Ireland fans will go to see their boys play since. 

Prague will be no different. By the end of the week, the latest batch of Odyssean epics will be committed to the pantheon.

Some, inevitably, will be fables. Most will likely blur fact with some fiction.

Scatterings of green were starting to show here late on Tuesday afternoon. The estimates are that anything between 3,000 and 6,000 will magnetise on the Czech capital by game day. 

The noise and the colour will, as usual, outdo even those numbers.

We’ve already heard of one guy coming all the way from California. Airports in Ireland and the UK are sending their usual hordes, and Prague’s place smack in the heart of this continent smooths the way for other streams from Berlin and Paris and beyond.

More again won’t even have to book a hotel or catch a flight. For a very lucky few, Ireland’s World Cup playoff semi-final against the Czechs will be, if not a home tie, then a once-in-a-lifetime home away from home engagement.

There can’t be a corner of this world that hasn’t caught an Irish accent by now and our government estimates that there might be 1,000 of its citizens living in Czechia. 

This promises to be the night of their lives. Disneyland has come to them.

Conor Cusack wasn’t long finished university when he landed. He really should have ended up in Canada with the bulk of his buddies, but never got the visa sorted in time. The UK didn’t appeal. He wanted something different. Prague it was.

The city offered a good choice of employment to English speakers so he rocked up off a flight one night during the pandemic knowing precisely nobody and found himself locked out of an unmanned hostel until a random guest spotted him and took him in.

He can laugh about it now.

“I definitely didn’t tell my mother the full story, that I stayed the first night with some random Belgian guy.” 

He grew up in and around the Limerick-Clare border, got caught by the Munster rugby bug, played some soccer for Coonagh United, and then gravitated to the GAA club when he found himself hundreds of miles away from home.

Now a player and PRO with Prague Hibernians, he is part of the usual motley crew that make up clubs outside of Ireland. They lean on the local Aussie Rules club for numbers (and vice versa) and there are Czechs, Brits and Americans and more flitting in and out.

Prague Hibernians player and PRO Conor Cusack

Training for the four big summer-time competitions that underpin the European GAA season only started this month, although this Wednesday’s session was scratched when the World Cup playoff was announced and friends and family shared plans to descend en masse.

“Inundated with messages about tickets. I don’t think there has ever been a match like it, ticket-wise, because the stadium is so small. I’ve had a fair few requests for couches and for where to go around the city.

“For anyone my age this is the biggest game of our lives. For the Euros in 2016 I was still in secondary school so we have people coming from all the other clubs in Europe, from Munich and Bratislava, for the game. It’s the ideal location to get to.”

Prague has a population of roughly 1.4m. Not much bigger in that sense than Dublin. It’s certainly no Paris or London. That should in theory hothouse any big-match fervour, but Cusack hasn’t seen much evidence of it just yet.

Why?

He has a theory that the Slavia-Sparta rivalry might be of more import to the local fans. 

The Czech men are world champions but, like the women, lost a quarter-final to Canada at the recent Winter Olympics that showed exactly how big ice hockey is here.

Cusack was struck at the time at how people would leave work early to watch those games, but if football isn’t prompting the same passion then the expectation is that a Fortuna Arena that holds just 19,370 punters will rekindle some of that.

Ireland isn’t the only country with problems.

Cusack reckons that buying a residential property here is even harder than back home when relative salary levels are taken into account. And the Fortuna Arena is actually the largest stadium available to the Czechs right now.

Czechia used three other venues in their Group L campaign, none of them able to hold anything more than 12,700 people, so the visiting Irish contingent this week has been restricted to just 1,024 in this week’s second chance saloon.

Conor Cusack, fifth from left in the back row, with his Prague Hibernians teammates.

Then again, this is the Irish we’re dealing with here.

There may well be some Prague Hibernians in the home sections.

“We’ll have to wait and see what happens on Thursday because there are plenty of reports from the Czech side that they are going to be ID-ing people going into the ground and if you don’t have a Czech passport you might be in trouble.

“But any Czech citizen was able to log on and buy four tickets, and whether they are allowed bring three Irish friends is a different story. I guess we’ll see on Thursday.” Whatever happens, they’ll have a story for life.