David Sneyd reports from Prague

JENNIFER PARROTT WOKE up at 6am in Prague with a knot in her stomach.

The nerves had kicked in before she even wiped the sleep from her eyes.

“I don’t know which way I feel. I’ve been praying, just praying and praying and praying,” she says.

Her son – Troy, of course – is part of the team that carries the hopes of a country tonight when the Republic of Ireland face Czechia in a World Cup play-off.

“Do you know what it’s like? It’s like a dream. That’s what it feels like. It doesn’t feel real. Does that make sense?” she says.

Troy’s hat-trick in Budapest has had that effect on an entire nation.

Jennifer did what she always does in the morning and texted her son.

“I always say good morning and he texts me back. But I don’t want to ring him and ask him questions, I don’t want him to get more nervous. I just want him to work and do what he always does, work and play his football,” Jennifer says.

I know today is a big day but I want it a little bit more normal for him. As if he’s going to play a normal match. I’m nervous myself and I don’t want to make him nervous.

“I always text him saying, ‘best of luck today, son, and may God keep you safe on the pitch and all your team’. The match is a bit later on so I let him have a little bit of a lie in and then he texted back ‘Thanks mother’.

“Sometimes I feel like there’s a bit of pressure on them.

As I said, it doesn’t matter who scores the goal today, it’s the win. You just don’t know what’s going to happen, do you? That’s the thing. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Sitting alongside her own mam, Troy’s nana, Josie, Jennifer recalls Troy wearing his Spider-Man costume as a kid and climbing trees.

“As soon as he put that on him he was like a lunatic,” she says.

Football, however, “sort of disciplined him”.

“Football was his life, I’m not joking.

“He was really disciplined on the pitch. When he was younger, if he did something wrong on me, I’d tell him, ‘I’m telling your manager that you’re carrying on.” He’d stop straight away. He just loves football.

“And do you know what, I have to say, he loves playing for his country, he loves Ireland. I just love when he comes out on the pitch and you hear that national anthem. It’s great.”

Jennifer reckons it could be written in the stars for Ireland to qualify for a first World Cup since 2002. “That’s the year he was born. Maybe it’s fate,” she says, before Josie is quick to have her say.

“I’m the one who told you that!”

“You were, Ma, you’re right. And did you go on a pub crawl during that World Cup too?” Jennifer teases, referencing how Josie revealed she visited some of the local pubs in Dublin during Troy’s hat-trick heroics in Budapest.

All the family, including Troy’s brothers, sister, cousins, aunties, uncles, and his girlfriend, were “overwhelmed by the scenes in Prague last night. “We couldn’t get into some pubs, there were queues,” Jennifer says. “We were telling them we were Troy Parrott’s family and we had to show our passports to get in.”

The family have five tickets for the match which means some have had to book spots in a pub to make sure they can watch.

“When I watch him on TV I do have my head in my top with the nerves. I do be up and down, cleaning around the house so I can’t really look at it, you know. I distract myself,” Jennifer says.

Josie adds: “Except when you’re watching in my house, then it’s ‘my son, my son, come on my son, my son, my son’. That’s all you get out of her.”

There will be a country at home watching on the TV thinking the very same thing tonight.

“The fans have been brilliant, they’ve been lovely and encouraging,” Jennifer says. “It’s great and it feels like the games are getting bigger and bigger all the time.”

Written by David Sneyd and posted on TheJournal.ie