Town striker Daryl Murphy believes his performance in Wednesday's 1-0 victory over Italy was his best for the Republic of Ireland. The win saw Ireland through to the last 16 of Euro 2016 where they will face hosts France in Lyon on Sunday (ITV from 1pm, KO 2pm).
Murphy started and played the first 70 minutes as he won his 22nd full cap and despite not managing to break his international duck was delighted with his display.
"It was definitely my best performance,” he said at a press conference at Ireland's Versailles base earlier today.
"The fact that it was such a big game, I needed to produce and be on my A game. The manager had faith in me to start me and I knew what I needed to do, and I thought I did as well as I could. I held the ball up as well as I could – they’re very good defenders, so it was a hard game.”
The 33-year-old, who looks set to keep his place against the French, feels his side were unfortunate not to win spotkicks in both the Italy and Belgium matches but realises the officials have a difficult role.
"We’ve had a few decisions that we thought might have been penalties, but they’re gone, you get on with it. You can’t change the referee’s mind,” he added.
"We’d like a strong referee [on Sunday], which I’m sure we’ll have. Just to be fair with both teams, that’s all you can ask. They’ve a tough job, it’s hard to get everything right, but I think we’ll be alright.”
The Irish support will be very much outnumbered in Lyon but Murphy says that can put additional pressure on the home side.
"It’s like that for any away team if you keep the home team quiet for a while, if you’re not conceding, they’re not playing too well," the Waterford-born frontman continued.
"The home team want to attack, the fans want to be impressed, especially from the home nation, they’re going to want their team to be right at it from the start.
"If we’re at it and causing them problems, we all know how fans are. They can quickly be silenced, and it’s something we can do.”
Murphy says Thierry Henry's famous match-winning handball in the World Cup play-off between the two sides in 2009 isn't something which has been the subject of much discussion.
"We’ve not thought about it,” he said. "It’s been mentioned but we can’t go into a game thinking about that.
"We know what we need to do, we need to focus on what we can do to hurt them – play as well as we played the other night, prepare as well as we can. Everything has to be spot on for us going into the game. We can’t have any distractions.”
Meanwhile, Murphy's proud mum, Karen, was interviewed by local Waterford radio station WLRFM on Thursday morning following the Italy game.