It’s not in their heads. Not any more. It was in the bar rooms and front rooms of Cork and Clontarf, Dublin and Dundalk. It was in the lanes and boulevards of Paris, where optimism and hope flowed like the waters of the Seine. It was in the stands at the Stade de France, where every tackle brought the house down and the Mexican waves were being rolled out long before the end. And most importantly it was out there on the field, where the 23 men of Ireland strode into the quarter-finals of the World Cup as if it were the most natural instinct in the world.
They came not just to praise the new Ireland, but to bury the old one. An Ireland that always seemed to spasm in games like this. An Ireland that felt the pressure. For all the respectful words lavished on the Scots this week, once the game began it was clear that these two teams were on entirely different wavelengths. As Ireland worked their mesmerising patterns Scotland swarmed and chased and regrouped, unaware that they were already two phases behind the game, that they were facing opponents who were moving through a different gravity, playing to a different tempo. In their heads, they were still fighting. But the contest they were trying to win had already disappeared.
