Home town boys at the heart of delivering some HUGE results for Ireland

TROY PARROTT is a true son of the northeast inner city, a place that's known as much 21st century hurt as anywhere in the country.

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This is also the soccer home of his Belvedere schoolboy club, whom he played for, of Sheriff YC and Stella Maris and the concomitant pubs some Irish fans may only know because of Croke Park, as in Cleary’s of Amien Street, Lloyds, Cusacks, Gill's of Jones's Road.

Caoimhin Kelleher is from Cork, from the maybe not so polished area Mahon which has had it’s issues. But Ringmahon Rangers is a shining club and a shout out too for “The Rockies’, Blackrock NHC who have won more county and All-Ireland SH titles than any other Cork club.

Nathan Collins is from Leixlip in northeast Kildare which has a pub called Arthurs to mark the ‘definitive’ birthplace of Mr Guinness, the Salmon Leap, the Hitchin’ Post with its wonderful lost apostrophe.

His father David, was a bloody good footballer, spent 1988-92 at Liverpool, who were a super club back then and, as with his son, he too played his schoolboy football for Dublin's south-side superclub Cherry Orchard.

And there, yesterday, along the banks of the Danube, trailed an estimated 3,000 hardy souls on their way to the Puskas Arena in Budapest - little could they know what was to unfold in 100 minutes of football and a last 10 minutes of opportunist drama.

There is a connection between Ireland and their fans and it is nothing like, say, England's bravado mob, the Dutch Oranje or the Danish roligans.