The joy and the lesson of Ireland hero Troy Parrott’s now-famous World Cup qualifier goal | OneFootball

Ireland's sensational victory is a crucial reminder that football “glory” comes in many forms – while giving UEFA something to think about.

Having put the ball where it needed to be, at the moment when it was most needed, Troy Parrott then put it best:

“This is why we love football… because things like this can happen.”

His voice then cracked a little as he spoke about his family and struggled to hold back tears – tears, he quickly clarified, that were “tears of joy.”

Many people outside Ireland and Hungary might not have expected to be interested in a match between two relatively middling international sides, but the occasion ended up producing scenes that absolutely everyone can relate to.

In the Puskás Arena dressing room, just after Parrott’s interview, the Irish players couldn’t stop watching his 96th-minute winner, which sent them to the play-offs in qualification for the 2026 World Cup. In doing so, they were just like every Irish fan. I know from family and friends that many were watching it multiple times, while holding back tears of their own.

The clip they kept replaying showed scenes that can only come when the game is pushed to its limits – limits of time, effort, and emotion.

With Ireland at 2–2 and needing just one goal, they opted for one desperate last attack. Goalkeeper Caoimhín Kelleher typically launched it forward, but with more focus than just trying to get it in there. He found Liam Scales, whose header in turn found space. Parrott had already been making a very calculated run – one that would continue into wild emotion… with one crucial check. As Dénes Dibusz came out to gather the ball, Parrott instinctively used his studs to slip it past the goalkeeper.

Desperation was elevated by deftness. Parrott then kept running, in utter joy. He was followed on one side by all of his teammates and from the other side by the entire Irish bench.

It was cinematic, except for the reality that you only really see this in sport, and you best see it at the World Cup.

I can already sense some responses: that this wasn’t the World Cup, that it was just a qualifier, and that there are still play-offs to come.

To which an absolutely key point – and the actual point of this Monday newsletter – is that glory comes in many forms. And, for a country the size of Ireland, this is the equivalent of England getting to a semi-final.

It’s about still having a chance at that glory, and so much more.

What was that about another dull international break? I have spent the last few days telling anyone who will listen that this is always the best week of football every four years – and you can see why. There is likely much more to come.

This is also why there should be some rational thought about what comes next, amid the emotion.

Once that emotion settled, former Ireland forward Kevin Doyle made a crucial point on broadcaster RTE. He spoke about how his own kids are utterly obsessed with Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

They’re like every other kid in the world in that sense – except they then saw Ronaldo get sent off in Dublin on Thursday, in an otherwise sensational match that somehow turned out to be Ireland’s support act for the main event.

“Then they see Ireland win,” Doyle went on, “and realise there’s a world outside of that.”

That world, to be fair, is generally more obsessed with the Premier League than anything else in football. The numbers illustrate it, not least in broadcasting. You only have to look at the billions flowing into the Premier League, at the expense of almost every other competition in the world – including where most of those Irish and Hungarian players appear.

Such habits, of course, shape attitudes to international breaks like this. The natural fixation on the major clubs ensures there’s a drastic decrease in stories outside that, which is why people now often don’t know the stakes of such qualification stages.

There’s also a hugely significant self-perpetuating element from the football ecosystem.

Since more people respond to content about big clubs, they get more of it, sending more fan interest and, consequently, commercial interest to the very top, increasingly squeezing out everything else.

Just look (or perhaps don’t) at the rage-bait “fan” media that has evolved around the big clubs. (It should be stressed that this is absolutely not a description we would apply to all fan media.)

But this is also the glorious thing about sport – especially a global sport like football – that Parrott so perfectly articulated.

One of its beauties is the very open sense of possibility.

It’s a very organic quality, gradually eroded by football’s constant narrowing of financial distribution.

But it’s still there. It still explodes in moments like this.

It’s why people are now endlessly seeking out footage of the Parrott goal online, just hoping for a post that is consistent with copyright law. It’s why The Independent’s own live blog on the Irish match trebled the numbers of the England match – one filled with international stars. One prominent former Premier League player even messaged me after Ireland's victory: "That's what the sport is actually about. It brings people together. Pure joy. We forget."

It’s also why the Super League failed, and why many football figures are now complaining about the expanded Champions League. You can’t confect moments like this, and they don’t come from the same big clubs endlessly playing each other. It has to be built up to.

That does touch on one area where Amazon appears to have done something very clever this week, even though I wouldn’t necessarily be given to thinking the super-growth of such conglomerates is all that positive for the game.

They still secured a broadcasting deal that allowed a cheap pay-per-view model for individual matches, at £2.49 a game.

Hence you could watch fixtures like this, or Germany–Slovakia tonight, or Scotland–Denmark tomorrow, without taking out a subscription you mightn’t otherwise want.

It’s a much smarter approach and actually makes it far likelier that UEFA get viewers for these games. That also comes as the European body tries to figure out this exact problem – and what to do with these qualifiers.

They’ve been greatly concerned about how earlier fixtures just don’t get high audiences, especially since it is this – rather than the Champions League – that generates much of the money invested into the wider game.

A Champions League “Swiss-style” system has already been ruled out due to broadcasting logistics, funnily enough. Expanding the Nations League is now being considered.

But that system is much less likely to produce moments like this. Sometimes a bit of patience is required, as Parrott displayed. It can't all be big games with big teams all the time… or else none of it is big. And the truly great moments actually come from something else.

It also points to something that won’t really be acknowledged, but should: these shorter groups – of just four teams – work much better. They’re sharper, and you get to moments like this much more quickly, but still in the same organic way.

The European Championships are different, since more teams qualify, and, well, it’s not the World Cup.

UEFA can do more to make this week an “event,” too, since that is what these games obviously are. How else to describe what we’ve just witnessed, and the emotion it produces?

This, as Parrott put it, is why we love football…

Miguel Delaney's Inside Football newsletter lands in your inbox every Monday and Friday (The Independent)

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