You remember this photo of two Irish fans in Joe Molloy's post on the Spain match. Well, his Newstalk colleague Ger Gilroy was sitting beside him and made a video of the men (Ciaran Nolan on Twitter tells us their names are David and Leo Hennessy, two brothers from Marino) enjoying a long hug following the final whistle. Their devastation is very clear, but so is their emotional connection.
The Irish supporters have taken a kicking from some quarters for being drunks or for singing when they're beaten or for having no real connection to the team they're singing for. My own spin on Thursday 'Fields' was that it was some sort of mass keening for a tournament, and possibly a country, that's gone down the sewers. You can't look at this video clip and say the football doesn't mean anything to the supporters. Similarly, for the Irish male, that strangest of creatures, this was a release of emotion on a mass scale. Who knows why it takes 10 pints of Tyskie and a kicking from the World Champions to bring out such emotion, but you can't look at that youtube clip and say the emotion isn't real.
