In the end, Ireland were like a man who had carelessly shot himself in the face – twice – but somehow lived to tell the tale. Is he happy? In a way, no. But in a way, yes.
Only a fool would dismiss the debacle of the first 15 minutes. The hot sting of embarrassment was multiplied by the fact that we had spent all week promising ourselves we would not make the kind of mistakes we immediately proceeded to make.
But only the most determinedly miserable could refuse to be consoled by a rousing second-half fightback culminating in a late equaliser that at least keeps Ireland’s campaign alive beyond the first game. Sad as it is to admit, that is actual progress.
At full-time, Ireland’s players were not celebrating, but many of Hungary’s were not even standing. Their captain, Dominik Szoboszlai, had said before the match that a point in Dublin would be like “striking gold”. At the final whistle, he lay down on his back with his hands over his face. He looked like somebody who had just crawled out of a car crash.
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He stayed there, motionless, until his ex-Liverpool team-mate Caoimhin Kelleher arrived at a stroll from the other end of the pitch to pull him to his feet and give him a hug.
Hungary coach Marco Rossi didn’t look like he had struck gold afterwards, as he raged about a referee who had allowed the game to degenerate into a ‘wrestling match’. Rossi promised, somewhat menacingly, that the referee in Budapest would be quite different.
No doubt the German referee had been a key figure in the game, but Hungary had nobody to blame but themselves. The 52nd-minute red card for Roland Sallai was fully warranted. The Hungarian winger reacted angrily to the referee’s refusal to give him a free kick he thought he deserved, then launched an instant revenge attack on the Achilles’ tendon of Dara O’Shea.
If the referee seemed to whip out that red card with a certain enthusiasm, maybe it’s possible that he had become irritated by the systematic gamesmanship Hungary engaged in from the opening minutes – moaning, simulation and timewasting. Referees are human too.
Likewise, Sallai’s head-loss reflected Hungary’s wider loss of control of a match that had already shifted Ireland’s way. The momentum shift started when Evan Ferguson followed up his powerful run and shot in first-half injury time with the scrambling close-range finish that cut Hungary’s lead in half.
Clearly the expulsion of Hungary’s main counter-attacking threat completely changed the game. The visitors were now a bird with a broken wing. The only question was whether Ireland could finish them before they ran out of time.
The siege that followed felt almost like time travel, as though the Aviva was staging some spectacular Jurassic Park recreation of Charltonball for those too young to have experienced it the first time around. The crowd roared while an outer perimeter of Ireland players launched balls like mortar bombs into the box, where big men crashed desperately into each other as they fought for the bounces and knockdowns. “Killing us in every contact”, in Rossi’s words.
Ireland had 40 crosses, according to manager Heimir Hallgrímsson. Sadly, about 35 of them were quite bad. Too many times the ball looped in high and slow rather than fizzing in a destructive arc. When Jake O’Brien suddenly whipped over a couple of good hard deliveries from the right, the players in the middle seemed surprised and forgot to attack the ball.
Those long desperate minutes of striving were punctuated by occasional jolting seconds of horror when Ireland lost control. In these moments, the bird with a broken wing somehow flapped threateningly through their defensive disarray. Ireland had Kelleher to thank for keeping them alive.
Hallgrímsson waited more than 10 minutes after the red card to make his first two substitutions and it was 78 minutes before Ireland’s best dribbler, Mikey Johnston, came into a game that seemed to be crying out for his particular skillset.
Johnston helped create the equaliser with a rare flash of composure under pressure. A fraction of a delay on the edge of the box bought an extra half-second for Ryan Manning to measure his cross. As Evan Ferguson dragged Attila Szalai to the near post, Adam Idah made the right run at the right time to arrive unmarked.
So Ireland live to fight another day, but what a night it might have been if they’d lived up to their own billing from the start.
Two weeks ago, Hallgrímsson spelled out the core principles he wants the team to live by so that “at least you can criticise us on what we’re trying to do”. Defining the terms of success in such a specific and limited way has the advantage of neutralising certain kinds of criticism in advance, but it also makes it more embarrassing when the team fails on precisely those limited terms.
A team that was supposed to embody the virtues of physicality, organisation, focus and excellence on set-pieces was instead weak, sloppy, dozy and asleep on the only set-piece they had to defend in the game.
Afterwards, the Ireland manager refused to single out individuals for blame, but everyone had seen that the team’s most-experienced player, Matt Doherty, was central to the early chaos.
All week, Ireland’s coaching staff had warned that the space in front of Ireland’s back four was the critical danger area. Doherty sent a clearing header directly into that killing zone, but rather than react with urgency, he moved back towards the edge of the box at a gentle jog, ensuring Barnabas Varga was onside to receive Callum Styles’ quick forward pass.
Finn Azaz and Josh Cullen had given Styles too much room to play that ball and Nathan Collins had started the whole Hungarian move with a 15-yard pass out of play. Hallgrímsson lamented lost duels, but forgetting to push up with your defensive line is the kind of mistake Doherty should not still be making at 33.
Doherty was dawdling again 15 minutes later, when a harmless ball from the back bounced in behind Ireland’s defence. The left-back was unable to make up his mind about what to do with it and Bendeguz Bolla closed him down and forced a corner.
The Irish crowd booed Szoboszlai as he sauntered over to take it, already happily wasting time. Hungary’s captain responded with a fine delivery to the near post. Sallai ran towards the ball and powered it across Kelleher with a soaring header. But would Sallai have looked such a lord of the air in that moment if any Irish defender had tried to put in a meaningful challenge?
Collins had talked during the week about how Hallgrimsson “makes everything as easy as possible for us players to learn about and to get behind”. But there’s an irreducible simplicity about a corner kick to the near post. You can’t break the situation down any further into manageable tasks. You just have to get to the ball ahead of the other guy. Instead, Collins was passive, as Doherty had been passive; passive spectators of the game, like Ireland were going to be passive spectators of the 2026 World Cup.
At least that’s how it felt in that moment, watching the almost disbelieving joy of the celebrating Hungarians. And yet, the fightback that ensued showed that the Irish players had not been sleeping through every one of Hallgrímsson’s team talks.
The first goal came from a set-piece, Manning surprised the keeper with a wicked near-post shot when everyone expected a cross and Collins this time attacked a high ball with purpose. The physicality was there, the urgency, the direct attacks, the running, the fight.
After dropping two points at home, can Ireland still hope for second place? The next four matches are about getting six points from Armenia and trying to lay a glove on Portugal, but thankfully, Hungary lack the power and quality of Serbia and Greece, Ireland’s nearest rivals in the last two qualifying groups. We lost in Belgrade and in Athens, but it’s possible to imagine us going to Budapest in November and getting the result we need. It is, of course, crucial that we don’t begin the duel by shooting ourselves in the face.
