Troy Parrott’s last-gasp goal and DR Congo’s triumph proved once again why the best soccer is almost never about the soccer
L
ast Thursday, Irish football was in a bleak place. They had two games remaining in World Cup qualifying and apparently no hope of making it to North America next summer. Another campaign had collapsed in predictable ways: they couldn’t score, they made bafflingly simple errors, too few of their players play for elite sides and those that do seemed unable to reproduce club form for their country.
Their one possible star, Evan Ferguson, had not been energised by a move to Roma – quite the reverse – and although there was vague talk of a new contract for their manager, the amiable Icelandic dentist Heimir Hallgrímsson, everybody thought he would be off after the game in Hungary and was vaguely dreading another Football Association of Ireland recruitment saga, which would inevitably take months, throw up a series of implausible names and result in the job being given to Hallgrímsson’s assistant, John O’Shea.
What made it all the more frustrating was that, if you could somehow leave aside the abject defeat in Armenia and the two daft goals conceded early against Hungary in Dublin, there had actually been, if you looked really closely, glimmers of positivity – albeit those are much clearer in hindsight. They had played pretty well to come back to draw that game against Hungary. They had held Portugal in Lisbon until injury-time, despite an extremely soft penalty being awarded against them. But when Ferguson, who had scored the only goal in an uninspiring home win over Armenia last month, succumbed to an ankle injury, all seemed lost.
