1 think of it as opera and it makes sense. Think of something out of Verdi, some grand and strange last act. Think again of the Azadi, the bruised sky of dusk and every hand raised to the skies, every voice chanting answer to the imam's call to prayer.

Think of the final lines, the stage disappearing under belches of smoke, flames burning all over the ground. Think of all the portents, the ghosts, the auguries, the warnings. It was opera. Not football.

Mick McCarthy as hero. His destiny, of course, to be decided in this strange place. All the ghosts which came to him on Thursday night. An echo of previous tragedy. The game almost done. A corner. A sweeper comes upfield like a fireman after a three-bell alarm. Meaty header. Goal. For an instant we could have been on that field in Macedonia again. History plays out twice. First time as tragedy, second time as Farsi.

And the press conference that followed. We haven't seen such chaos since the first Macedonian disaster. Irish journalists having to fight their way in. So little said. McCarthy's mood not yet fully formed.

Just realising that character is, in fact, fate.

And Banquo's ghost. How many battles have Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy fought shoulder to shoulder?

They know the price of each other's absence now. What a touch by the gods, giving us Keane to guide us up the mountain, then withdrawing him when, quite literally, the air was thinnest. Without Keane in the breach, the unbeaten record went, the Iranians pressed us into retreat. We were boys.

The record went and the professional heart was dented. No doubt. When the hugging was done and they made their way back to the dressing-room it was big Ian Evans who burst in and shouted it out.

"We've lost the bollocking unbeaten record."

There was a silence. Then. "For fuck sake, Taff." And after that Mick Byrne couldn't be stopped singing. It ain't over till the physio sings.

It was opera, this qualification campaign. In 12 acts. One man marching towards his destiny. His disciples around him. And the stage for the last act was dressed perfectly.

An opera in 12 parts. A story lived but not yet told. Little pieces of it just beginning to coalesce.

2 We poured out of the Esteghlal hotel like a rabble. It had been one long week. Fascinated by the culture, challenged by the logistics, amazed by the traffic, charmed by the people.

Mainly, though, it was a wait, a long chronicling of anticipation.

Love the place, love the place, we said, but if you do yourself just one favour today, take a dump before you leave for the match. Those holes in the ground. You don't want to know.

3 He's sitting alone here in the airport. Long legs stretched out, Roddy Doyle book in his hand, smile never off his lips. Eight years ago he had a night like this, 12 years ago too, but . . .

"I was younger then. I was jumping around, slapping everyone, kissing everyone. Now I'm just sitting back enjoying things. I'm so pleased for the young lads, for Mick. This buries the ghost of the old team, this buries it. We move on now, Irish football will be great now for many years to come.

"I'm just sitting here looking back, thinking how lucky I am to have lived through a perfect time in Irish football. It's a great thing."

Niall Quinn made his deal early and kept quiet about it. Every day a medical report on the big man's condition found its way into the press. By Wednesday when the team trained in the Azadi for the first time the signs seemed bad. Niall was wearing his pained face. The back was no better. We bought it.

But the fix was in, the deal was done. Quinn himself knew four days before the first game in Lansdowne Road that the Azadi wasn't a place where he would be starting. The deal was 90 minutes in Lansdowne and if the team takes a lead away with it you sit on the bench. Run the battery down. And if we can get 20 out of you in Tehran we'll do it. If not, no worries. You have served and served well.

Things changed a little. Roy went out and there was talk about an experience deficit. But Mick McCarthy came on Tuesday and said no, the deal was still good. If the team needed a dig-out with a target man at the end, well be ready. Otherwise you'll be sitting on the bench beside Alan Kelly and the two of you will be talking your way through the longest game you've ever seen.

"Peter Reid (his manager at Sunderland) was brilliant. He rang me in Dublin on Sunday night. I hadn't answered the phone all day just in case, but he caught me and he said: 'I know what you are like, do what you have to do. See you when you get back.' That's class."

4 All week long they spoke about him. Even when consciously trying not to. Roy Keane. Roy. Keano. He is the framing device for all achievements. This will be an achievement without Roy. All the greater, then.

There are rumours too. Roy is getting a hard time in the papers at home. The players will refuse to publicly discuss Roy. The PLC at Manchester United leaned on Roy. Roy never bothered to apply for an Iranian visa. Roy didn't fancy the trip.

So on. Nobody ever tires of talking about Roy Keane.

Yet it is worthwhile. This team hardly makes it onto Roy's Christmas card list. He is so solitary that one wonders if he has any such list. Yet his will runs right through this team. They fear him, love him, loathe him, mainly they voyage around him.

Next summer they'll get to spend four or five weeks with him.

5 The first hint of what life can be like here. We are stopped in our coach at a gateway outside the Azadi Stadium. It is three hours or more till kick off and it looks just now as if we will be spending it all here. The men in uniforms aren't interested in our laminated media badges, our VIP coach pass, our Iranian guide. They just aren't interested in letting our coach in. No reasons given.

We sit and sit. Outside the bus there are angry exchanges. The uniforms just shrug. Finally our guide gets off. He is mortified, embarrassed in front of new friends. He starts demanding their names. One by one, you and you and you. Writing them down. It's fascinating.

You think of the team hotel which backs onto a massive prison. A wall runs up the mountain in a great forbidding loop defining the outer limits of the prison. Most of the prisoners are kept underground. Their crimes are sometimes inexplicable.

Being at war with god. Depraved dancing. Non-Muslim thought.

Mick McCarthy and Ian Evans were driven around here by a luxuriantly-moustached man whom they christened Des Lynam. Des spent a week underground in the prison next door. Just a week, but when he came out he wasn't a professor anymore, he was a taxi driver. Just one argument with the wrong person.

We look out at our bespectacled guide arguing on the dusty concrete. Hope he knows what he's doing.

Minutes later the bus pulls away. We're in.

6 "Yeah. Mick, he came to me and he said I was going on. He wanted me to run around, he wanted me to keep going, he said for me to work my bollocks off. So that's what I did."

Your grandparents lived in Garristown. Never gave them a lot of thought. Once you played in an FA Youth Cup game for Crystal Palace and a little guy with a keen eye came to see you. Brian Kerr he was called. A few words. Planted a seed. Still you are an English kid, maybe they'll come calling too.

Now you are Clinton Morrison, Irish international and you are sitting in Tehran looking at a grandfather singing. You're singing too, because this song filched from the kiddies programme that grandpops watches with the lights of his life has become the unofficial signature tune. Everytime you see Mick Byrne, the grandfather in question, it starts "welcome, welcome, to the big blue house". And Mick has a little shuffling dance like the bear in the big blue house and the two of you do it together.

Were you nervous tonight? Never. Not with Mick Byrne starting the jokes and the singing. Not with the lads. You've fitted in here like a foot into an old boot.

"I'm just so glad," you are saying. "I'm going to go back to Palace and soak it up and have a laugh at anyone who's not going to the World Cup. Good to be Irish, innit?"

7 Look at these faces. Look at them in repose sitting around the gleaming lobby of Tehran Airport waiting to go home. You will never see them like this again. You may never see them together again.

Look at the quiet ones. Steve Finnan on his own. Richard Dunne, thoughtful. Gareth Farrelly, Andy O'Brien, Rory Delap. Faces which beam back at Mick McCarthy's but whose eyes carry clouds of wonder.

Take a piece of paper. Play Fantasy Mick McCarthy. You love these kids. Seldom have you met a player you didn't like. Something in your blood. They do it for you, you want to be there for them. Now on your piece of paper you can write 23 names. The first three will be Given, Kiely and Kelly. You have 20 left.

Be conventional. Take four strikers, eight midfielders and eight defenders, conscious, of course, that some guys can switch. Strikers are easy, you have them around you now. Niall Quinn, Clinton Morrison, Robbie Keane and Dave Connolly.

Midfield. You'll be handing tickets to Roy Keane, Jason McAteer Mark Kinsella, Matt Holland, Kevin Kilbane, Damien Duff, that's six certainties. We'll come back.

In defence you have so many names. Kenny Cunningham, Steve Staunton, Steve Carr, Ian Harte, Gary Breen, Gary Kelly and probably Steve Finnan are all certainties.

Now you have the hard choices. Two midfield places to fill, one defender wanted. Look over at Rory Delap, all the trips he's made and never played a minute. Could you do it to him? Leave him behind?

Young Steven Reid, left sided, most promising player in Division One, he's the future, do you go over and tell him that you hope he'll get another chance? Mark Kennedy is on the phone. You took him under your wing when he was a kid straight over from Dublin. You love the kid to bits but he's harum scarum and well you have Lee Carsley to consider, consummate professional, reminds you of yourself a little bit, squeezing everything out of himself. And there's Stephen McPhail, so long blossoming, but if he could just be given the space and time his creativity would change games.

Leave it, move onto defence. One name. Gary Doherty you can use at either end and with Big Niall suffering with his back that could be his ticket. But tell Richard Dunne thanks for Lisbon and Amsterdam and all that and enjoy watching it on the box? And what about Andy O'Brien, every review from Newcastle just raves more about the guy. By May if you leave him out you'll be crucified.

Look at these faces. This is the best moment, the purest moment, perhaps. They've qualified. Tomorrow they begin a new game and some of these faces will be showing nothing but disappointment next summer.

8 In the dressing-room beforehand things were quiet. Everyone with their own thoughts. Weird room. Three park benches stuck in the middle. School corridor lockers all around. Space enough to hear yourself think, though.

Arriving at the ground had been a boneshaker. Even the barracking of the night before hadn't prepared one adequately. The firecrackers and apple butts and other bric a brac which hit the pitch during warm-up time. Do you want to go out there now?

Really? Mick McCarthy speaks. He talks of the campaign, the team, sticking together, tonight is their night, having come so far.

Ian Evans speaks. His loud voice almost echoing. Thoughts about the match. Logistics. Do this. Do that.

Don't forget the other.

Then Stan. In his Dundalk/Liverpool accent he talks about the game. You look at him. How many years have you known Stan? How many trips have you been on with him? How many laughs, tears etc. And here he is, top of his game again, telling it like it is, captain of Ireland in Tehran tonight.

You say a few words yourself. You speak about all the time you've played, about going to the 1988 European champions and to Italia '90 and how it made you as a person. If you go out there tonight, you say, if you go out there and get the job done, your lives will never be the same again. Even people like Robbie sitting there, whatever you have achieved in the game, to qualify and go to a World Cup, it changes your life. This will be the dividing line.

Silence returns.

Thanks Niall, somebody says.

9 In the tunnel leading into the stadium the riot gear is all laid out neatly and the policemen have brought their lunches with them in those little khaki-coloured canvas bags we all used for bringing our things to school in the 1970s. It is almost three hours till kick-off; the noise inside the stadium is incredible.

We come up through the tunnel and the place erupts. Western journalists! We are marched halfway round the pitch as the crowd sink into loud dementia. When we reach the stairs that lead to the press room it looks like a thick bramble of hands. They reach through the railings on each side, patting your back, shaking your hand, but mainly predicting a three-nil victory. Out of loyalty to the team we nod eagerly and say "three-zero, yeah yeah". What we want to say is "yeah, put a tenner on it".

10 They are a different bunch this Irish team, younger, richer and more remote. A team that doesn't like eye contact. A team that hasn't opened itself up yet. They seem at odds with the world. They hang together and hang tough with everyone else.

On away trips they don't mill about the lobby drinking coffee and chatting like their predecessors did, they are holed up in their rooms playing with their gameboys, working their remote controls. Collectively they radiate surliness whereas their predecessors gave off a sense of excitement and easy glamour.

Hopefully the adventure of a World Cup will bring out the wide-eyed innocence in them.

"I didn't enjoy it," says Jason McAteer, "not at all. We had a chef with us but there was only so much he could do. I couldn't sleep at nights. I was with Kenny (Cunningham) and get him talking and you'll nod off quick enough but this I couldn't. Nerves. Boredom. That feeling of responsibility that you didn't used to get. Couldn't hack it."

"I just waited and waited for training every day" says Steve Finnan, "sat in the room. Chatted. Read. Just killing time all week. It was long. We're footballers and we're not really used to weeks like this."

Joe Walsh knows what's what. Creating home from home is about knowing what's important. Kettle. Tea bags. Fig Rolls. On Tuesday evening in Tehran Joe was entertaining 17 for tea and biscuits.

It ain't all about hanging tough.

11 The final whistle. All hell and all heaven break lose. The Iranians have a huge banner at one end of the ground, it is almost as wide as the pitch and it reads simply 3-0. This banner is on fire now, swoosh, up it goes.

Hundreds of smaller fires are all around, riot police are everywhere, players are hugging, things are being thrown at them. Time to work.

The Azadi isn't communications heaven but they do more for us than Lansdowne Road ever does. They have Internet machines and email facilities and a custom-built press conference room. Some of us have to literally fight our way into the press conference but that's another story.

We compare quotes from players and management. Everything is for sharing on these trips. We work as a big co-operative and there are heroes of the filing and heroes of the technology and no room for rivalry.

Ray Treacy rounds us onto the media bus like a narky collie. We speed away. The road to the airport is covered in ice. Ice on such a pleasant night? No, it's glass. Miles and miles of fragmented glass. The driver explains that the post-match traffic through here was slow and the disappointed hordes ran through in groups smashing every piece of glass in every car. And now there are miles of glass and we are peering out the windows, noses pressed dumbly to the glass wondering when the first stone will come or when we'll hear the first gush from our shredded tires.

Wouldn't be a bad little story if there was a place to file from at the airport. Not bad at all.

12 Sport is about the next thing, about moving on. There's the World Cup draw, the warm-up programme, the worry over where the team will be based, what the squad will be. You don't look back.

Yet there is something about Iran this last week that it is hard to leave behind, just a wistful thought that for a people who awoke one morning to revolution and went to bed that night under a dark fundamentalist sky, to a people who lost a generation in the war with Iraq, who have had their turn being used, demonised and sanctioned by the world, to a new generation of Iranians trying to express themselves and liberate themselves, well perhaps the fun and fiesta and pride of the World Cup would have been a freshening breeze.

They crave outside contact, friendship, communication, change.

In a taxi in Tehran, stuck in traffic down a sidestreet, two young women talk. They are laughing infectiously. Suddenly one lifts the cloth from her head and for a split second you see her hair. It's died vivid red. And the veil is back in place and as we inch forward all that's left is the trail of their laughter.

Another day, another car and across the road in front of us walks a girl, twentyish but her garb stops short of her ankles and there shockingly is an inch of female flesh running down to where the leather of her shoe begins. Every male eye follows her. She walks with the style of a Parisian model.

Sport is about moving on, though. The ticket to the big dance is in our greasy palms. It's our greasy till to fumble in. Another World Cup bookends the fat old Celtic Tiger years and boys reared in the time of plenty go off to represent us. The Irish team will moan about all those who didn't believe in them and they'll grow fat at the corporate pork barrel suddenly prised open for them.

Yet we'll crank up the machine again, doling out the hype and the superlatives until sometime next summer on a faraway field a moment of wonder will bring the old passion flooding back and we'll see these kids as giants and this past week as just their causeway.