We didn't realise how big it was until we got back home

THERE are streets in Dublin where football doesn't just live, it breathes.

- Garry DOYLE

Hastings Street in Ringsend was like that - a tight little world wedged between the greyhound stadium and the city’s wide waters, where kids measured time by the rising floodlights of Shel-bourne Park and the walk to Lansdowne Road was short enough you didn't need a bus fare, only a father’s hand.

Liam O'Brien grew up on that street, in a neighbourhood where everyone played ball and everyone knew someone who'd worn the green. Davy Langan had come from there. So did Rocky O'Brien and Arthur Fitzsimons. Graham Kavanagh - whod end up marrying O'Brien’s sister - walked the same pavements. “It was a huge football area,” O'Brien says, the way a man talks about the church that raised him. “Everyone played. You grew up with it. And Ireland meant everything.”

Last weekend, as he watched Ireland break Hungary’s resistance and logic in a late Budapest surge, something inside him switched back to those old days. The roar. The disbelief. The certainty that if Ireland pushed long enough, something sacred would break their way.

“It reminded me of the old games,” he says. “The 1981 match when we beat France 3-2. The '77 game when we beat them 1-0. That never-say-die attitude. You could see Hungary panicking after Troy's second. You could feel it, even on the TV. I kept saying, ‘We're gonna get a chance! And we did.’”

He pauses. You get the sense he's watching it again in his mind, the way people revisit weddings, funerals, moments that mattered.

“At international level you win however you have to. If you win ugly, win ugly. Nobody cares. Fans want a trip away. They want a World Cup. Going into the playoffs, I'd be thinking the same thing - use your set-plays, get your big men in the box, win your second balls. That attitude gives you a chance.”

He was part of that. Sixteen caps between 1986 and 1996. A squad player in Germany for Euro '88. A moment in Irish history that still feels half-myth, half-memory.