AFTER A game in which the two teams were surprisingly evenly matched, it was even harder to say whether the scenes of celebration were wilder inside the Shamrock Rovers dressingroom or outside where the ground’s biggest crowd in 21 years, carried the stragglers shoulder-high to join their team mates.

For manager Michael O’Neill, the immediate emotion, he said, “was relief rather joy. I’m sure I’ll enjoy this all an awful lot tomorrow but right now, if I’m 100 per cent honest, I’m mostly relieved.”

The faces on the fans who interrupted his improvised post press conference strongly suggested, however, they were hurtling through the seven stages of coping with success.

O’Neill paid tribute to Craig Sives, the one player, he reckoned, who had taken last night’s game by the scruff of the neck and to Gary Twigg who made a key contribution even on an off night.

All of his players, he acknowledged however, had written what he said he hoped might be “the first chapter in a new history of this football club”.

“From a personal point of view I’m delighted,” he said. “I came here last year and was surprised we went so close to winning the title at the first attempt but that had the effect of raising expectations and I’m glad that we’ve met those over the course of this year.

“We didn’t play so well this evening, I had hoped to come here and see the lads turn in a bit of a performance but in the end we’ve only really played for 10 minutes each side of the break.

“It was difficult mentally for the lads, though. We showed out there tonight how many of our players hadn’t been in this position before but they came through it and they’ll be better for it next time.”

One man who had been through it was Dan Murray, the team captain who has sat out the last few weeks of the season because of injury. “It was ridiculously nerve racking,” he said.

“It’s much harder to watch those things than to play in them but we’ve fallen over the line here tonight and that’s all we had to do. Hopefully, now, it will be the beginning of something really big.”

Bohemians, on the other hand, will have little to think about this morning bar the many places in which minor slip ups contributed to their big fall.

Just a couple of goals separated the two sides at the end and Bohemians might rue, in particular, the two conceded in Tallaght in August after their hosts had been reduced to 10 men.

“We went into tonight believing Bray were going to cause an upset,” said striker Rafaelle Cretaro. “There had been that many twists in the whole thing this year I still thought there was room for one more and if we’d taken our chances in the first half, maybe it could have been a different story.”