It will be quite some time until Jonathan Walters has to buy his next pint in Ireland.
The Stoke City forward is beloved by the entire nation after his brace in the Aviva last month secured Euro 2016 qualification for the Republic.
And Walters is grateful to have been given the chance by Martin O’Neill despite struggling for gametime at the start of last season for his club.
“It’s been a good couple of years,” Walters said on Off The Ball. “The manager and Roy, they’ve shown a lot of faith in me.
“When you go to this time last year, I didn’t start the season at Stoke. I wasn’t starting the games and yet I came away on internationals and I played every game.
“I wasn’t playing in the club and it’s always difficult if you’re not playing, fitness isn’t there. I was thankful for that because I wasn’t playing the games for Stoke.”
The odds were stacked against Ireland to qualify for France next summer after finding themselves in a tricky qualifying group and being unseeded for the play-offs but Walters insists that doubt never crept into the camp.
“We all still believed,” he said. “We knew Scotland had to go to Georgia which we found out ourselves is not an easy place to go and a couple of Scottish players wrote us off after that game and said ‘there’s three teams in qualification [and] Ireland may think they’ve got a chance but they haven’t and that spurred a few players on. But the belief was always there.”
The Irish squad will be hoping for a more fruitful tournament than Euro 2012 which saw them finish rock bottom of a difficult group under Giovanni Trapattoni and, from the sounds of it, the team didn’t exactly enjoy their trip to Poland.
“I think going into the last one, well I think it was a type of Italian way to do it. That’s how the Italy team would do and those players may be used to it from a very young age,” he said.
“We were locked away in a hotel, we were away for a long time before the camp, during the camp and by the end of it, some lads that weren’t involved, weren’t getting any game-time, they were just thinking at the end of it ‘I can’t wait for this to end, I want to get home.'”
Fingers crossed that the Irish team don’t get to go home until they get at least four games under their belt in France.
