Into the sixth minute of the five minutes of added time, Caoimhín Kelleher on the ball in midfield, and everyone knows this will be the last attack. The Irish goalkeeper, who as usual has kept us in the game with great saves, lofts it beautifully into the area, the kind of ball that could cause trouble. And nobody has noticed yet, but Troy Parrott is already moving towards goal from the edge of the box.
With one last effort, Liam Scales leaps above Barnabás Varga and heads it down towards goal – into the space where Parrott’s run is taking him. The moment is so similar to Niall Quinn’s header for Robbie Keane in 2002 that everyone recognises it in real time.
Parrott stretches out his right leg like a ballet dancer, snarling with determination as Attila Mocsi drives a desperate elbow into his ribs, and connects with the ball at the furthest possible inch of his reach, prodding it with his studs, crucially sending it down, underneath the onrushing Dénes Dibusz, who was otherwise going to save.
The ball bounces into the net and the stadium – cliche dictates that here you would say the stadium explodes. It’s more like the stadium implodes. The stadium ceases to be. You can hear the Irish players’ howls and screams over the distant roar of the away fans way up in the top tier. It’s like a black hole has appeared and is about to suck in the entire Orbanbowl and everyone in it. This would probably be welcomed by the Hungarians.
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The most dramatic Ireland late winner ever is followed by the best goal celebration. The players on the field ran at Parrott from one side while the bench ran at him from the other side. Parrott outpaced them all and surged between the two converging crowds, tearing off his shirt before sliding to the ground on his back, already in tears, and disappearing beneath a pile of ecstatic Irish bodies.
The last 15 minutes of this game are the most astonishing quarter-hour in Irish football history. Can anyone remember a win like this? To go behind twice and win in the 96th minute? With our brilliant young centre forward scoring a hat-trick – the first Irish player ever to do so away from home in more than a century of trying?
Ireland’s greatest football moments have usually followed one of these patterns: early goal, heroic rearguard action to close out the win; or, early concession, heroic equaliser. We hardly ever win a big match more than 1-0. We broke the mould on Thursday with that 2-0 win against Portugal but this, this was on another level entirely.
Parrott’s interview on the pitch after the game befitted a legendary occasion. His voice cracking as he says “my family are here ...” – and millions of people fell in love with this team. Has any Irish team in any sport undergone such an incredible transformation of its image in the space of a few weeks? The clowns of Yerevan, the gods of Budapest. Now and in time to be, wherever green is worn, are changed, changed utterly ...
The match had been the campaign in miniature. An awful start, penned back, panicked, flustered, giving away silly free-kicks and corners, and conceding the first goal inside three minutes.
Then an immediate fightback, with Chiedozie Ogbene winning a penalty from Dara O’Shea’s ball over the top, and Parrott scoring it. The way Parrott took the penalty inspired confidence. The moment came to take it and Parrott just ... stood there, waiting, waiting ... waiting. He waited so long you started to wonder if he’d had some kind of brain freeze, the sort of thing you might see at a Mitch McConnell press conference.
But then he stepped forward and, with the same fierce expression on his face we were to see again at the very end, lashed it into the bottom corner.
Actually, as Parrott later told Tony O’Donoghue, he had been waiting for a referee’s whistle that never came, rather than consciously psyching out the stadium, but the next thing he said offered an insight into his mentality. “I’d rather have that pressure on me, and whatever happens happens, than to put it on somebody else, and leave it out of my hands. I’d rather it be in my hands.”
But after the equaliser, Parrott’s team-mates did not show the same will to take control, drifting again into passive mode and ultimately giving Varga way too much space and time to lash in a goal to make it 2-1 for Hungary.
The middle of the match was the wilderness period, where Ireland wandered in confusion trying and failing to build momentum. On 52 minutes, a gut punch, as Ogbene, whose running had scared the Hungarian defence all afternoon, tore a hamstring as he tried to gallop on to a brilliant reverse pass from Parrott. This was unmistakably the kind of thing that happens when it’s not your day.
Adam Idah replaced him, but he lacked the force Ogbene had brought, and on the couple of occasions we did find him in space he was offside. The substitutes were coming – four by the 60-minute mark – but the team was not showing much renewed energy.
Our leader, Séamus Coleman, had spent a lot of the game speaking softly into the ears of Hungarian players, saying things to them, things they didn’t seem to like. You thought of Hannibal Lecter whispering all night to Miggs, his neighbour in the next cell.
But now Coleman was subbed off, exhausted. The Hungarians were trying to kill the game and we were doing our best to help them, giving away silly fouls that allowed them to waste even more time. For some reason we were kidding ourselves that Festy Ebosele can take long throws. The World Cup was sliding away.
Your thoughts drifted to the debacle of Yerevan, that stupid night when the team had thrown it all away. Obviously no team can lose a game like that and still hope to qualify for a World Cup ...
Thankfully the players still had their heads in the game they were actually playing. A side effect of the subs was that Finn Azaz had been moved back into central midfield, into what you might call the new-model Bruno Fernandes role.
Azaz had struggled to put two good moments together in the first half – summed up by one episode where he played a great pass down the left to Ogbene, advanced to receive the return ball and promptly fell over like a drunk outside a chip shop.
But suddenly with a bit of space in his deeper central position he was doing everything right. In the 80th minute, he turned 40 yards from goal and saw Parrott unmarked to his left. As Pablo Aimar says: “In football, when two players see the same play, it’s almost unstoppable,” and suddenly Azaz and Parrott connected to make Hungary’s defence disappear.
Parrott saw the space, Azaz saw the pass, and the midfielder’s chip found the forward running into the box unmarked. Parrott killed the ball with two touches and lobbed it delicately over the charging Dibusz. Another sensational goal in what – really – must be the best four days an Irish player has ever had.
Now there were at least 15 minutes for Hungary to implode under the vast oppressive pressure Parrott had brought crashing down upon them. And Ireland were aided by invisible allies: the evil ghosts of Hungary’s many past failures.
It’s natural that every country is preoccupied with its own history and Ireland’s is dominated by disappointments and near-misses; we always expect things will ultimately go against us. We never considered the essentially tragic nature of Hungarian football. They are most famous for suffering the biggest upset in a World Cup final, when Puskás and the Golden Team lost to a West German side they’d thrashed 8-3 in the group stage.
So for Hungary, Kelleher’s long ball arced towards their penalty area with an awful air of inevitability. Now a new generation has relived the horror of 1954. At last, the Carpathian Brigade know how their grandfathers felt.
One had to feel for Viktor Orban, the football-obsessed Magyar potentate whose will and largesse brought that mighty stadium into being. The European darling of the Trump administration, he would have had an absolute whale of a time next summer in the US, hanging out with his Maga buddies. Well, he can always go as a fan.
While Hungary remain trapped in their recurring historic nightmare, Ireland are breaking new ground. This generation has yet to match what their forebears achieved in getting to the World Cups of 1990, 1994 and 2002 – but this week they’ve done things no Irish team has ever done, and given us our most exciting World Cup campaign in more than 20 years. It can still get even better but up to now, you’d have to say, it’s going rather well.
