“This is why we love football because things like this can happen.”
So, not only did Troy Parrott produce the magic on the pitch in Budapest, he somehow managed to sum it all up when he spoke to RTÉ’s Tony O’Donoghue after the game.
He apologised for his tears. “They’re tears of joy,” he said. “My family is here, this is the first time I’ve cried in years. I love where I’m from, so this means the world to me.”
His interviews after both the Portugal and Hungary games probably drew as much attention as his performances against the two nations, the raw emotion of the fella, and how much it all meant to him, evident.
RM Block
We are, of course, quick to write off players who don’t live up to early lofty expectations, without ever giving much thought to what they’re enduring while trying to make their way in their careers.
Of Ireland’s group of young strikers, Parrott was close enough to being the forgotten man since making his senior debut six years ago. Most of us had shifted the weight of expectation on to Evan Ferguson’s shoulders, with Adam Idah getting an occasional look-in.
Parrott, still only 23, was to be the new Robbie Keane, and all that, but between largely fruitless loan spells in the nether regions of English football, and no end of injuries that stymied his progress, it was becoming a struggle.
When his mother, Jennifer, spoke to RTÉ after his double against Portugal last Friday, she said that she “just kept on praying and praying” that he wouldn’t get injured during the game. The goals were a bonus. Such is the lot of a parent who regularly gets those “I’m injured again, Ma” messages.
The challenges Parrott has faced, since being effectively written off by Spurs, having kept Harry Kane company in their attack for a brief spell in his teens, have been huge. Many a young player who went through the same journey continued falling down the rungs of the game before disappearing from it altogether.
But, as we’ve oft read, he rejuvenated his career with that move to the Netherlands, when the easier shift might have been to eke out a living in England’s lower divisions. Instead, he was brave enough to move out of that comfort zone and try pastures new. Granted, it wasn’t the biggest of culture changes, the Dutch speaking better English than we do, but still.
If Ferguson had been fit, though, for the games against Portugal and Hungary, Parrott would, most likely, have been left on the bench. Instead, on his return from another injury, while Ferguson was ruled out with his own, opportunity knocked. And boy, how he took it. Five goals in those two games, the fifth one for the ages.
Under any circumstances, any player would be emotional after doing what he, remarkably, did, but there was almost a sense of release and relief from Parrott. When you’re feted like he was as a teenager, to finally unleash that talent on stages as big as these must have been overwhelming.
“I just really, really can’t believe it,” he said in Budapest. “Everyone’s crying. I said after Portugal that this is what dreams are made of, but this ... I don’t think I’ll ever have a better night in my whole life. It’s a fairytale, you can’t even dream about something like that.”
Fourteen years his senior, Séamus Coleman was in tears too. When he was substituted after an hour, there was a fair chance that that would be the last time we’d see him in an Irish jersey.
Heimir Hallgrímsson, perhaps, anticipated as much when he paid tribute to the Donegal man before the game. “There are two kinds of people – people that are vacuums and people that are batteries, you know, that will give energy, will give joy, will give enthusiasm. And he is a really, really, really big battery for this group, the biggest battery I have worked with in a football team.”
Coleman, as it’s turned out, isn’t done yet – there’s a World Cup qualifying playoff to come. Thanks, largely, to how Troy Parrott charged up the team’s efforts to get to their first finals in 24 years.
What happened in Budapest was nigh-on unimaginable. But this is why we love football – things like this can happen.
