Ken Early: Ireland’s attempt to reach the World Cup was, in one way, a spectacular success

In the aftermath of Ireland’s elimination in Prague it felt as though the future had been cancelled. But tomorrow the future arrives in the form of our partners in suffering, North Macedonia. Football is telling us that the future is happening, whether we like it or not, so it’s time to start getting our heads around it. We have no choice but to keep going.

The thing that stands out when you think about last week is just how crazy the country went for what was, in the end, only a playoff semi-final. People who weren’t born in time for Italia 90 were saying things like “this is our Italia 90!” For a playoff semi-final!

Clearly the mania-inflation is driven by the advent of ubiquitous and universal video content that means people everywhere can see and get excited by the goings-on in far-off places of which they would previously have been aware only in theory, or via whatever 30-second clip was included on the news.

A personal view is that the emergence of the self-aware, self-memifying crowd has been an unfortunate development for Irish national team fan culture. Many of the antics now feel drearily performative and – at least to someone who grew up before this became the way of the world – fake.

Yet even those of us most allergic to “The Craic” must confess to at least some morbid amusement at the general grotesquerie. So it’s a regret that we won’t get to see just how crazy things could have got if we’d made it all the way to the World Cup, even if I know deep down that the experience would have inflamed my inner Peter Hitchens.

You do wonder what the effect is on the players of being at the centre of such an eruption of headloss. They all talk about how precious it is to feel that connection with the fans, etc. At least at first, it must be a rush to know you have become the focus of a huge national moment.

But does there come a point when the sheer level of mania starts to rattle them? Does it create an extra level of pressure that most national teams don’t have to deal with?

A professional sportsman ideally wants to be focused, calm, to react to each moment in the way they have trained, to treat these two impostors just the same, and so on. But there are not many other national teams where the players are asked to do quite this much of keeping their heads while all around are losing theirs.

For fans of a country such as Italy, being in a playoff semi-final is a bit embarrassing; victory is simply expected. For the Irish players, everything about the fans’ behaviour in the build-up and the surroundings is telling them the situation they are in is completely abnormal and extraordinary. Might this foster an unconscious sense that we shouldn’t really be here? At least, you couldn’t blame them if they were struggling to ignore a voice in their heads hysterically screaming “This does not f***ing slip!”

But the trend towards ever-increasing mania is not going into reverse. Irish fans will keep getting more excited about playoff matches than many other crowds would get about an actual World Cup final.

And maybe to lecture them on the potential advantages of perspective and serenity would be to defeat the whole purpose of the exercise.

Because the chance to collectively lose your heads is, in the end, what football is all about. And if we think about this qualifying campaign from that perspective, then it has been a spectacular success.

Never before has an Irish team caused its supporters to experience such wild swings of emotion.

In the beginning there was Paddy McCarthy’s speech. His eyes ablaze with a mysterious and unfamiliar light, he declared that something very special was happening here with this very special group.

Then, right at the start of the first game, the special group immediately let in two ridiculous goals. We were plunged into stunned bewilderment, embarrassment, rage.

Then there was a long and nerve-shredding fightback, a vast collective effort of will that ultimately rescued a point. In the end the exhaustion was matched only by the relief.

We went from there to Armenia and promptly threw away everything that had been salvaged in the last game with a performance so bungling, it was actually comical. All our delusions – not even of grandeur, simply our delusions of competence – had been swept away in a manner that left bleak laughter as the only psychological defence.

It was as the humblest team in the world that we went to Portugal and fought a brave rearguard action, in which we resisted long enough to experience the first fleeting tingles of hope, but had to settle in the end for a sense of tragic dignity. Still doomed, but no longer ashamed.

The grinding home win against Armenia allowed us to feel for the first time in the group the satisfaction of actually getting the job done.

And then came Portugal at home. Not many over the age of 10 could feel real hope at the beginning. We went from delight when Troy Parrott gave us the lead, to ecstasy when he scored the second, to hilarity when Ronaldo was sent off.

The perfect drama of the final match against Hungary combined nearly every one of these feelings in 100 minutes.

That incredible week in November really was a hell of a drug, and that’s why we were all so eager to do it again this month.

Matej Kovar’s own goal that put us 2-0 up in Prague created that rarest of emotions for an Ireland fan – the feeling of being totally drunk on power. For two minutes we got to feel like Trump probably feels all the time: “We are totally obliterating them, like you’ve never seen before ...”

Then Ryan Manning gave away the penalty and we remembered we were only human, and from then on it was back to one of our most familiar collective emotions, the gnawing dread that we are sinking slowly into the quicksand and there is nothing we can do about it.

Jan Kliment’s winning penalty hit the net and with a horrible sucking sound the mud closed over our heads. The dream of the 2026 World Cup was dead, but for a while there, we were really living.

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