Sorry RTE, but you can put this to the top of the Irish football montages.
In many ways, the performance against Serbia wasn't massively different to those we turned in during the Euros. The starkest difference was in our differing moods afterwards, according to Richard Dunne:
I think everyone looks at the Euros with rose tinted glasses and thinks it was brilliant, and it is wonderful, but it wasn't that good. We did well: we got a good result against a second Italian team, really, and we were hammered by Belgium. We played really well against Sweden for a while, then we scored and sat back. In the France game, we scored and people got tired, but we lost our shape and got run a bit ragged. There were periods in all games where we passed the ball nicely, and periods where we hit the ball long.
But because it was so positive and we got caught up in the whole thing, it was a really good tournament, and it was a successful tournament. But if you were to analyse the games individually, and then look at the Serbia game, and if you add the atmosphere and the situation to the Serbia game, you'd say well look, we got a draw against Serbia in a European tournament and we fought back, it's great.
It was the sense of a journey, compressed into those couple of weeks in France, that gripped the nation, and, to be honest, it's been quite difficult coming back down to earth.
That said, now that we're here, there's no harm in remembering those heady days in France. There is no better way of doing exactly that than by looking at this utterly magnificent montage posted in our Facebook group. It was posted in the group by Jay Keating, and is an original by Irish fan Michael Marangos.
Give it a watch below: it's bloody brilliant.
Euro 2016 Roadtrip from Michael Marangos on Vimeo.
Superb. One of the great Irish football montages.
