Ireland fans few in number but big on enthusiasm despite team’s struggles

T here weren’t a great number of Ireland fans at Lord’s on Friday, but those that were there made themselves visible. The green shirts picked each other out in the crowd, nodded, waved and offered mutual support. A couple of them, puffing their way to the top of the Warner Stand before play, spotted a man in a splendid shamrock-print suit and altered course to share a rueful word with him. “We thought we’d better come today because it might be all over tomorrow.”

Not quite, but it was a day of unremitting flagellation. Throughout the first session, the Irish bowlers had nothing to keep them going but the memory of a single, day-old wicket. At least their supporters in the stands had Guinness.

The man in the splendid suit was Shay Livingstone. A keen pair of eyes could easily make him out from the opposite end of the ground. He is one half of a pair of Irish cricket superfans who can be seen at almost every one of their international matches. “It’s cost me hundreds of thousands,” he says, shaking his head. “But it’s just fun, jeez.”

A self-confessed cricket tragic since he was a schoolboy, Livingstone now makes his living as a sports agent in Cork, mostly representing rugby players (there are, as yet, no Irish cricketers earning enough for him to want to feel comfortable taking 10%). He was in Kingston for the 2007 World Cup game that “woke the country up to cricket”, when a team made up of postmen, electricians, and carpet salesmen unexpectedly beat Pakistan – and had to phone their employers to beg an extra few weeks to compete in the Super 8s. The fact that team weren’t “your quintessential English silver-spoon” brigade helped those back home warm to the game.

For a brief spell on Friday – roughly between 12.15pm and