Parrott's heroics spark memories of a play-off like no other

SHORT of Troy Parrott celebrating another hat-trick by climbing onto the Charles Bridge parapet to read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the upcoming trip to Prague has little hope of being recalled as the nation's most madcap playoff experience.

- Roy CURTIS

Even if Troy summons his inner Pearse, events in the home town of Franz Kafka will struggle to rival the preposterous absurdity, wild bureaucracy and off-the-charts strangeness of a turn-of-the-Millennium week in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Among the ingredients in a bizarre stew: 9/11, the seeds of Ireland’s second civil war, diktats from Ayatollahs, Prohibition, a missing Roy Keane, a speakeasy high in the Alborz mountains and a Tehran street named after an IRA hunger-striker.

Not to mention Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, Morrissey from The Smiths and a plane journey out of Iran that puts the one in the 2012 Ben Affleck movie Argo in the ha'penny (or half dinar) place.

Almost as an aside, a triviality, an insignificance, the weekend had as its sporting highpoint only Ireland's third ever - and still most recent - World Cup qualification.

Even before landing at Mehrabad Airport, there was a curious atmosphere - an uneasiness that was a consequence of stepping into the unknown at a fraught moment in history - on the Aer Lingus charter carrying Mick McCarthy and his team, as well as journalists and a small number of fans.

Looking back through the telescope of time, the events of almost a quarter of a century ago - 24 years last week to be precise - remain unusually untouched by the passing decades.

As we crossed into Iranian airspace, all females, including flight crew, were, in line with Sharia Law, obliged to cover their heads before landing. Not the kind of demand that was made at the old Lansdowne Road turnstiles.

‘The match itself would mark the first time in 20 years that women - all of them with the Irish party - were admitted to the arena.

Just two months had passed since a pair of hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers and, in those post-9/11 days of suspicion and recrimination, tensions between the West and the Islamic world were at fever-pitch.