It is time. At six o'clock local time, the Ireland football team will have the run of Paris as they take centre-stage at these European championships. It is time to play the game.

As the rain fell over Paris on Sunday afternoon, Martin O’Neill remembered the euphoria in the Ireland team dressing-room on the night that his team qualified. That champagne has been long drunk. The months of preparation have been slow-burning and repetitive: O’Neill may well feel he has answered more Jonny-Walters-injury-update questions than any man may reasonably be expected to in one life time.

The Republic are slightly removed from the rush of tumult of tournament and city in the suburban splendour of Versailles but this morning there will be no escaping quickening pulses. Sweden awaits.

Concrete dome

Zlatan awaits. Some 80,000 fans in the vast concrete dome in northern Paris and, perhaps, rain falling too, present as a vivid reminder of the sodden, unforgettable night against France, against Thierry Henry's devious intervention. Some seven years ago.

"Clearly I remember it but like any game you played before you have to forget about it," Robbie Keane said flintily of that night.

“This is a completely different situation and we are playing a different team. I am not one to dwell on the past and now I am just looking forward to the game.”

Still, part of the point of these major football championships is to see just how well football nations escape their past.

Ireland’s football lore will always be connected to Ray Houghton’s first European Championship goal, that loopy, still-falling header that beat Peter Shilton’s in 1988.

The big question now is whether someone can add to Ireland’s relatively short list of immortal summer goals.

On Sunday afternoon, Ibrahimovic trotted into the Stade de France with the air of Red Rum on Grand National days of old. He promised goals and glory and it was hard not to believe him. Keane is Ireland’s captain and, like Ibrahimovic, is 34 years old. He won’t start this evening but he backed himself in terms which would have the big Swede nodding approvingly when asked if he still had goals to add to the staggering tally of 67.

“Of course. There is no question about it. There are certainly goals left in me. I have been doing it since I was 17 years of age and will continue to do it and be consistent in it.

“I am fairly confident in my ability. And if there is a chance, hopefully I’ll take it.”

O’Neill blinked impassively through this. The Derry man has been consistently inscrutable in his team selections but seems certain to hold Keane in reserve.

But it’s a cloudier guess as to which centre-half pairing he goes for and whether he calls someone in from the cold for midfield. It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t have his team pencilled down but O’Neill gave the impression of someone who half intended spending Sunday night anxiously pacing the hotel garden entertaining eleventh-hour permutations.

Glimmering threat

“I think you have a team in mind. I don’t think there is any harm in deliberating about certain things but I have a team in mind.”

If the past week was about dutifully reminding the world that Sweden cannot be reduced to one player, the glimmering threat carried by Ibrahimovic is clearly at the forefront of O’Neill’s mind and he smiled at talk that the big man, for all his pyrotechnics, is slightly overrated.

“Well, 10 years ago that might have been the case. Lots of things can happen in that time. He is a top-class player; the best in Europe if not the world. He is Sweden’s talisman. And he will be hard to keep quiet for the course of the game.

“All world class players, regardless of how closely they are marked, are able to elude things during the course of the game and he is one of those players.”

Ibrahimovic will walk out onto the field tonight feeling he is at home from home: the sun king of Parisian football.

O’Neill’s and Ireland hope an Irish name will be the talk of Paris by midnight. “Not be fearful of them,” was how he described the ideal state of mind for his team when the night is flying by at a hundred miles an hour here in Saint-Denis.

“Doing your utmost in the match. And you never know.”

You never do.