Shear hell: Welsh fans in Dublin feeling sheepish after defeat

The Welsh won the singing competition, but the Irish won the game on a famous night in Cardiff, to ensure that Martin O'Neill's team continue their rocky road to Russia – for another month at least.

Witnessed at first hand by a relatively small travelling contingent, a 56th-minute goal by James McClean was enough to spark wild celebrations in thousands of pubs and livingrooms across Ireland. In the silence of northwest Wales, they must have heard the shouting in Dublin.

Pity the poor Welsh Society in Ireland, which had encouraged its members to gather for the game in the Woolshed Baa and Grill, a popular sports bar in Dublin’s Parnell Street.

Not many braved it. Perhaps it was pre-match nerves, or maybe the venue’s name evoked the slanderous tradition of jokes about Welshmen and sheep. In any case, only a committed handful in red jerseys turned up.

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Among their fearless few was Philip Roberts from Ruthin, a chef who came to Ireland for his future wife's graduation 21 years ago and has been living here since, but is still heroically refusing to go native. Similarly committed, although only nine years an exile, was his friend Dylan Edwards.

The society has about 180 members in Ireland, including some of the Dublin Welsh Men's Choir, which serenaded Vincent Browne into retirement recently. They were scheduled for another TV appearance later on Monday night, on Claire Byrne Live. So that might have curtailed the turnout for the football.

Quietly confident

But despite being heavily outnumbered, the Woolshed Welsh were quietly confident beforehand. If not quite dragons, they definitely weren't sheep. Edwards thought their team would win 2-1. "Three-one", suggested Roberts, even before the fire-breathing performance of the home fans in Cardiff, singing Land of our Fathers a capella, in a choral show of force.

The Irish in the pub were doing their own bit (non-singing) to influence the outcome. During a tense first half, veteran supporter Pat Dunne from Firhouse claimed to have "sacrificed chickens" in a voodoo ceremony beforehand.

A little disappointingly, he was only joking. But as a survivor of the days when Irish supporters intimidated visiting teams with the “Dalymount Roar”, he would have been hardcore enough to do it if he thought it might work.

The Celtic cousins were not the only ones sweating beer on the outcomes of the night's matches. Despite wearing a green jersey that would have camouflaged him perfectly, Tomislav Matanovic from Croatia stood out in the crowd thanks an item of eccentric headgear that turned out to be his national team's water polo cap (the sport is big in the Balkans).

Fellow Croats

A barman in another Dublin pub, Bruxelles, he and his fellow Croats (and barmen) Moreno Milenkovic and Dragan Maracic had moved to the other side of the counter – and the Liffey – for the night and had taken over a section of the pub whose TVs were dedicated to the Ukraine-Croatia match.

They needed a win too, and were hoping for a famous double for their countries of birth and adoption, even after tense, scoreless first halves in both games.

The beer was flowing in inverse proportion to the goals here and in many other games all over Europe for most of the night. But then James McClean struck another goal for the ages, to send the Woolshed, apart from a handful of Welshmen, into paroxysms of joy.