Two young supporters of the Irish soccer team had a lucky escape in New York on Sunday night when they fell onto subway tracks at Times Square after watching the Ireland – Croatia game in the city.
The incident was documented by 22-year-old Raphael Orlove, an onlooker who took several photographs and later blogged about the incident.
"I was coming down the platform at around 7.45pm," said Mr Orlove, speaking to the Irish Times yesterday.
"I don't know if I first saw the crowd of people who were looking across the tracks or if I first saw the figures of two people lifting a body up onto the platform, and then sort of jumping and getting pulled up themselves," he said.
The couple were rescued by two bystanders who Mr Orlove said "ignored all safety recommendations and jumped in after them".
Mr Orlove's photographs show a young girl wearing a green top lying on the platform with her eyes closed and blood on her face. An Irish tricolor is draped over one of her arms. Another girl, dressed in an orange top, is kneeling beside her.
"They said they were from Yonkers, they had American accents," Mr Orlove said.
Another woman, pictured in a wheelchair, recounted what had happened to Mr Orlove.
"The woman in the wheelchair told me she'd seen everything. She said they were horsing around and then they fell in," he added.
Mr Orlove, an editorial assistant for the 'tips', news and culture website Jalopnik.com – on which his photographs first appeared – also spoke to the young man who had fallen onto the tracks.
"He was really out of it, his feet were really dirty and he was trying to put his flip flops back on," he said, adding, "He said they had both fallen in and she had hit her head."
The incident happened on the Uptown platform of the 2 and 3 subway trains, which terminate in the Bronx, just south of Yonkers. According to Mr Orlove, the next train to arrive on the tracks came approximately eight minutes after the couple was rescued.
The young man is understood to have sustained no major injuries and was later reportedly seen washing the grime from the subway tracks off his feet in the bathroom of a pub on McLean Avenue in the Bronx.
The young woman is understood to have been taken to Bellevue Hospital in the city by paramedics from the New York Fire Department who attended the scene along with two members of the NYPD.