Ben Symes

That is a huge turning point for this team.

These players showed character.

Absolutely.

And the players have referenced all weekend, and Hamer did again yesterday, that the loss in Lisbon against Portugal was when everyone got back into the dressing room and said, hold on now, we can do this.

We've just matched one of the best attacking teams in the world.

And, you know...

a 91st minute winner from Ruben Eves kind of just felt like it was meant to be Diogo Jota's best friend he reveals the tattoo and there's not much you can do about that but the players took so much confidence from that but we played minus football in that game like we literally didn't cross the halfway line but I think that was just a building block though it was a building block and I think the confidence had been so shot by the Armenia game that it was like let's just do everything we can to try and get a result in this game and then

the coaching staff and the players learned from that for the Portugal home game and they exploited look Nuno Mendes being missing let's not you know let's call it spade to spade that was huge because a lot of Ireland's tactic was playing over the top of the full backs and not having Nuno Mendes there was quite big it allowed you to run right down that right hand side but they learned from that game

in Lisbon that this is how you counter-attack them and the players and the coaches have learned from that and then again in Hungary to go 2-1 down and to have the character and the resilience to go we've been here before in this campaign we've been back to the wall and we've managed to drag ourselves back into this which let's not forget that Saturday when we played Hungary in September I think it was the 6th of September yeah

we were all saying all we want to do is be in with a shout of getting to a playoff by the last game going to that Budapest game and we got that and we were back against Wall got back to get that and then with 9 minutes to go against Hungary managed to beat back against Wall and do it again yeah

we went away to check you, and sorry, I sound like I'm just glossing over it, that was an absolutely glorious moment.

Yeah, one of the best moments of my life.

I will never forget that, like I was in Krakow at the time in the airport, just going absolutely mental, getting phone calls from home, you know, Irish people in the airport coming up and just hugging everyone, you know, really, really beautiful scenes.

And then, let's go away to check you, and yes, it's such a big disappointment what happened, but the start of that game and coming out from the blocks and,

And we had that moment where we lost a run of ourselves and we dreamed of going to Mexico and it got crudely taken away from us.

All we could have asked for going into this campaign was to go to a playoff and be able to shout.

That's what we were given.

We saw green shoots of improvements and advancements from the team and what the team might look like going forward.

We saw new players be blooded into the camp, especially recently.

I mean, Harvey Vail, like, he wasn't on anyone's radar a month ago and he came on in, albeit under, you know, circumstances that we wouldn't want it to happen in Prague when Sami Shabani gets sent off.