Beating Portugal changed how people see the Ireland team. Long may it last

Where do you even start with what happened in the Aviva on Thursday night? Maybe at the end, with the Ireland players doing a lap of honour and nobody thinking it unearned or premature or in any way too much. As they walked around, bedraggled and buzzing, waving up into the fizzing stands, you were reminded once again that nothing in Irish sport revs the national engines like the football team pulling off a big result.

Kids getting to stay up past bedtime. Pubs windows steamed late on a Thursday night all across the country. Ronaldo making social media fun again, even just for a few hours. Troy Parrott’s mam on the radio on a Friday morning, talking the nation through her nerves. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

Everything gets cast in a new light by the win over Portugal. Think of how you thought about this Ireland team in the week leading up to the game. List off your dominating emotions. Despair, dismissal, derision. Maybe, in your lighter moments, a shrug of fatalism. Sure look, they are who they are. We know it this long time.

But now? Now that there’s a bit of hope, you’re suddenly back into the natural, giddy self-deceptions of the sports fan. You’re talking yourself into things, you’re eyeing up the road ahead and convincing yourself of possibilities. And you’re able to do so without feeling like too much of a rube because this result makes everything look as though it was leading somewhere.

Here’s a thing, for starters. Beating Portugal 2-0 on Thursday night means that Ireland have gone through 2025 without losing a game at home. Five matches in Dublin – three wins, two draws. Eight goals scored, four conceded. It’s the first year any Ireland team has done this since 2019 and only the third time since Lansdowne Road was rebuilt.

[ Ken Early: Ireland’s best home win in years. Not even in our dreams did we see this comingOpens in new window ]

Now. Let’s say you were talking to somebody about the match on Thursday lunchtime and you started banging on about Ireland’s home record. No defeats all year, haven’t lost at Lansdowne since Greece in September 2024, and sure that was only Heimir’s second game in charge and he barely knew the players’ names at that point. How far into your spiel would you have made it before you started to sound ridiculous, even to yourself?

This changes that, regardless of what happens on Sunday in Budapest. Whether Ireland win and continue to the play-offs or don’t win and the campaign comes to an end, at least there’s a foundation stone there now. Let the word go out – Ireland are hard to beat in Dublin. It might not sound like much but God knows we’ve spent enough nights sitting in that stadium and watching the opposite be the case.

[ 'Disgraceful’ Ronaldo and Ireland’s ‘racehorses’: Portuguese media react to Aviva upsetOpens in new window ]

And what about Hallgrimsson himself? His standing has changed too. Suddenly, all that calmness and equanimity and basic refusal to get swept into the mini-tornados of bulls**t regularly thrown up by Irish football has got its reward.

Before Thursday, we kind of presumed he’d see out the weekend and that would be that. Contract up, end of the road reached, a parting of the ways. There’d be no big clamour for him to be kept on. Neither would there appear to be any major incentive on his end to hang about.

After all, it ain’t the sexiest job in world football. The €650k salary sounds hefty enough but it’s middle-of-the-Championship stuff when it comes down to brass tacks. Hallgrimsson has been on the circuit for over a decade now and his reputation is solid. He’d be employed and employable whatever happened.

He goes up a notch now, though. Even if Ireland don’t get past Hungary, Heimir’s name has moved up a few slots on the board the next time some mid-ranking national federation is going manager-shopping. He’s not just the dude who inspired Iceland to beat England in the 2016 Euros – he’s also the guy who got a mediocre Ireland side to give Portugal a chasing. Suddenly, it’s not completely inconceivable that the FAI might have competition for his services.

[ Kevin Kilbane: This group of Ireland players need to beat Hungary and create a legacyOpens in new window ]

This is the power of one result. Even if it doesn’t lead to the World Cup, even if it’s only for 72 hours. Even if they go to Budapest and find that Hungary are able to squeeze that little bit more out of their middling bunch of players than Ireland are, Thursday night showed there’s the makings of something here now. Which is all anyone ever wants to see.

The greatest fallacy around the Ireland football team is always that the public expect too much of them. You’d never get too long into a conversation about the latest sorrowful mysteries before some dose would push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and go, “But sure we don’t have the players. It’s that simple.”

It’s a reasonable point. But it’s also so, so far from the point. Because no, of course Ireland don’t have the players to win a World Cup, to properly compete at a World Cup, probably even to qualify for a World Cup. But nobody’s asking them to be all of that. All anyone ever wants is a bit of defiance, a bit of composure, maybe a bit of wildness and the occasional big splash of a performance.

All the things, basically, that make Séamus Coleman the unmatched hero of the past decade.

There he was on Thursday night, doughtily covering the back post, driving the likes of Ronaldo and Joao Felix and Diogo Dalot up the walls. Getting in there, being awkward, contaminating possession. And then, when he had it, always refusing to be hasty, never submitting to panic, trying to do the hard thing rather than boot it blindly away. Always, always affronted by the idea of an Irish team lying down and taking its beating.

Can we get Séamus Coleman to a World Cup? Please, can we do that for him? Before Thursday night, it would have sounded like the dumbest thing in the world to ask for. But now there’s a chance.

A small chance. Probably not that much of a chance, actually, when you boil it down and consider all the things that have to go right between now and next summer. But a chance all the same. One that, however fleetingly, people can bring themselves to believe in.

That’s what Thursday night changed. Long may it last.

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