The Backa Topola Tunnel: Ireland Beat Israel 4-1 on Aggregate, but the Real Story Happened in Fifteen Minutes Nobody Filmed

The Backa Topola Tunnel: Ireland Beat Israel 4-1 on Aggregate, but the Real Story Happened in Fifteen Minutes Nobody Filmed

Minute 47. No roar. Backa Topola — a small town in northern Serbia, chosen as the "home" ground for a match whose home team nobody dared to name. Dor Peretz put the ball into Ireland's net immediately after the interval, and I sat in front of a screen in Marseille, hearing something stranger than a cheer: the silence of a match that had been torn in two from inside the tunnel.

Fifteen minutes earlier, at the mouth of the dressing-room corridor, an Israeli player was accused of spitting at Ireland's coaching staff. Nobody confirmed it on camera. Nobody denied it in words. There was only one bare fact: when the second half began, Ireland — who had won the first leg 3-0 — walked out as if someone had pulled their plug. "Griezmann turned his back without a shout — and I heard the whole stadium split in two." This time the one turning his back was not Griezmann. It was an entire tunnel.

I have covered European football for twenty-eight years, I have sat at eight World Cups and eight Olympic Games, but I have rarely seen a match where the result on the pitch mattered so little. Ireland won the tie 4-1 on aggregate. A clean number. A number nobody in Backa Topola that night will remember.

Context: a match with no home

This was a UEFA Nations League group fixture between Ireland and Israel. As sport, it was unremarkable: Ireland are a competitive mid-tier European national team, Israel sit a notch below. In the first leg, Ireland won 3-0 — a result so dominant that the return leg was almost a formality.

But the return leg was not played in Ireland. It was not played in Israel. It was played in Backa Topola, Serbia — a neutral venue, far from both countries. The reason: pressure from the "Stop the Match" campaign, an advocacy movement calling for a boycott of the fixture on political grounds. The organisers were forced to relocate to guarantee security.

As a reporter who has covered matches in places nobody wants to go, I recognised this immediately: when a fixture is moved from its home ground for political reasons, it loses the one thing that matters most — atmosphere. No home stand, no anthem sung by a crowd, no pressure from the twelfth man. Only a neutral stadium, a few hundred spectators, and an atmosphere I can only describe as "a hospital waiting room before surgery".

And that was exactly the fertile ground for what came next.

Before kick-off, Ireland's players chose not to sing the national anthem. It was an act of protest — silence instead of words. In a country where the anthem is part of a sacred ritual, that silence spoke louder than any slogan. Both teams wore black armbands to commemorate victims — each side commemorating its own. This is the detail most reports skipped, and I will return to it later.

Captain Caoimhin Kelleher led Ireland's players through the pre-match protocol. Head coach Heimir Hallgrimsson — the Icelander who once led his own national team — stood on the touchline with the face of a man who knew this match no longer belonged to him.

On the pitch: a penalty and a fifteen-minute void

Professionally, this is all I can state with certainty.

In the 39th minute, Ireland were awarded a penalty. Troy Parrott stepped up and scored — putting Ireland 1-0 ahead. It was the only goal Ireland manufactured, and it came from a set piece. No goals from open play. That tells you something: in a match where emotions ran at maximum, Ireland could only find the net through a pre-structured moment — a penalty.

Then half-time arrived. And the tunnel became the centre of the story.

According to reporting from The Irish Times, at the tunnel mouth during the interval an Israeli player was accused of spitting at Ireland's coaching staff. Ireland's fitness coach Damien Doyle was directly involved. That places the incident in the staff zone, not the playing zone.

Minute 47 — two minutes into the second half — Dor Peretz equalised for Israel.

Let me state clearly what the data cannot. In football, a well-documented pattern exists: goals conceded immediately after the interval are usually not a tactical problem but a concentration problem. A team that enters the break with a scrambled mind walks out with a back line out of sync for the first few minutes. And in those minutes, the opponent scores.

I have no xG data, no PPDA figures, no tactical number to prove this. But I have eyes. And my eyes say Peretz's goal was the consequence of something that does not live in a tactics manual.

I call it "tunnel syndrome". A team dragged into a conflict that does not belong to football loses what I call "the muscle memory of focus". They do not forget how to play. They forget how to stay in the game.

This is a kind of goal I have seen many times in my career. It never shows up on a tactical board. It shows up in the moment a defender turns his head to look at a teammate instead of the ball, in the moment a midfielder passes out of habit instead of observation. Ireland did not collapse structurally. Ireland collapsed in attention.

The truth lies with those who did not play

This is where I want to linger, because it is the part most reports skip.

Before the match, Ireland's first-choice goalkeeper — Gavin Bazunu — refused to play. Not through injury. Because he did not want to take the field in this context. And Finn Azaz, a rising midfielder, also sat out, for a reason recorded as "psychological burden over the past two weeks".

Read that again. A professional footballer, at the peak of his career, not playing because of psychological burden.

This is a milestone I believe will be cited for years. In twenty-eight years of covering football, I have seen players miss matches through injury, suspension, contracts, fallings-out with managers. I have never seen a national team lose its first-choice goalkeeper and a young midfielder for purely psychological reasons in a competitive fixture.

And here is what no scoreline can reflect: Ireland took the field in Backa Topola without their best goalkeeper. They won the tie, but the cost was paid by those who did not play.

When Hallgrimsson said afterwards, "I don't want any national team to go through what we have endured" — that sentence carried the weight of a justification. He was legitimising the absences of those who did not play, before the public and before the governing body.

And there was another telling detail: Hallgrimsson publicly praised his players for having "restrained themselves". To someone who has sat in press conferences for three decades, that praise had a second meaning. He was not only complimenting. He was positioning Ireland as the restrained party — a pre-emptive sanction defence, a legal posture assembled before UEFA's Disciplinary Committee even opened a file.

The paradox of the black armbands

Now I come to the detail I consider most important, and the most overlooked.

Both teams wore black armbands. Each side commemorated its own victims.

In a story told as "an Israeli player spat at Ireland's coaching staff", this detail is buried. But it says something the headline cannot: both sides carried their own grief into this match. Both sides believed they were commemorating, not provoking.

I am not here to judge who is right or wrong. I am a sports journalist, not a judge. But I can say this: when two teams wear mourning armbands and their match still becomes a fight, the problem is not the armband. The problem is that both walked in with an open wound.

And here is my counter-intuitive point: the spitting allegation — the centre of every headline — may never be proven. Incidents in the tunnel at half-time are the hardest events in football to evidence. No camera frames the dressing-room entrance with sufficient clarity. No referee is there. No spectator is there.

UEFA has referred the matter to its Disciplinary Committee. But over years of watching UEFA disciplinary cases, I have learned one thing: when the only evidence is testimony, the sanction is usually a fine. And a fine does not heal a wound.

Meanwhile, one event has been far more clearly confirmed: two Israeli journalists were banned by UEFA after a scuffle at the press conference. That was on-site disciplinary action, and it shows UEFA acted — it did not sit still. Notably, on-site sanctions tend to appear only when organisers judge that a situation risks slipping out of control.

How the story got told

Here I must speak as a working reporter. The Backa Topola story was not born on grass. It was born on social media.

A government-level social media account publicly attacked Ireland's players for not singing the anthem, calling it "moral blindness", and drew a historical comparison to 2026. That is an extreme comparison, and it did not come from a journalist — it came from a party with an interest in the story.

That is why I always separate "event" from "narrative". The event — the spitting allegation, the tunnel scuffle, the ban on two journalists — was reported by The Irish Times, a quality outlet. The narrative — moral blindness, the 2026 comparison — came from an account with a clear political motive. The two do not carry equal weight.

When I read a football story that travels through multiple media layers like this — from Ireland, to international agencies, then into Vietnamese — I always ask: which part of the story was eroded along the way? And I have found that the part eroded first is always the most complex. The black armbands of both sides. The grief of both sides. The fact that nobody in this match was a perfect villain.

What was really lost

When Hallgrimsson publicly called on UEFA to "separate these two teams in the next tournaments", he was asking for something with no precedent at this level.

Think about it. A manager asking European football's governing body to change its draw so two teams never meet again. That is no longer about one match. That is about an entire system.

And in one sense, he was right. The Backa Topola match showed that when football is laid over a political fracture, it does not heal the fracture — it deepens it. A neutral venue is not neutral. Mourning armbands do not soothe. A silent anthem makes nobody listen.

I recall a small detail. In Marseille, where I live, an Uruguayan friend once taught me to sing canelón — an old Uruguayan song — in a café near the port. He died in 2026. And I wrote about Griezmann in France versus Uruguay at Nizhny Novgorod in 2026, about his face without a shout, about two griefs meeting inside one goal.

I tell this for a reason. Football is one of the few places where two griefs can meet without anyone winning. But in Backa Topola, two griefs did not meet. They only stood facing each other.

"An empty stadium, seat 12A still there — the ball did not roll, but time scored by itself." In Backa Topola, no seat was empty. The whole stadium was. And time scored in the 47th minute.

Where the risk lies

If I had to rank the real risks of this story, I would not put Peretz's goal first.

The biggest risk is disciplinary. An Israeli player faces individual sanction. Two football associations face fines and possibly match restrictions. And above all, UEFA faces a question it has never had to answer: how do you stage a fixture between two national teams whose governments are attacking each other on social media?

The second risk is player welfare. Bazunu and Azaz opened a door football is not ready to walk through. If a player can refuse to play because of psychological burden in a competitive fixture, federations will have to build support mechanisms they do not yet have. And if they do not, that door will open the other way — towards unexplained withdrawals.

The third risk is security. A tunnel scuffle, a press-conference altercation, a neutral venue in a third country — three warning layers in a single fixture. If these two teams meet again without separation measures, next time it will not just be spitting.

And there is a fourth risk few mention: the money. When a "home" fixture is relocated to a third country, the host association loses matchday revenue — tickets, hospitality, commercial activity around the ground. Nobody published a figure, but I know from my reporting experience that it is not small.

What I carry away from Backa Topola

I have written about football for twenty-eight years. I have seen matches decided by a 90th-minute goal, by a goalkeeper's error, by a referee's call. I have never seen a match decided by fifteen minutes inside a tunnel.

Ireland won 4-1 on aggregate. On the scoreboard, a comfortable win. But when I look back at this match, I remember no goal. I remember a goalkeeper who did not play. I remember a midfielder who sat out due to "psychological burden". I remember two black armbands facing each other.

"A goal without a shout is worth more than a hundred minutes of shouting." In Backa Topola, nobody shouted. And I think that is the most frightening part.

"At 44, I finally understand: sport does not end at the whistle — it keeps rolling inside people's hearts."

UEFA's Disciplinary Committee will meet. A sanction may come, or it may not. But one thing I am certain of: when Gavin Bazunu refused to play, he scored a goal no scoreboard recorded. And when UEFA has to weigh "separating these two teams", European football has admitted something it always denies: that there are fractures a ball cannot fill.

The question I carry back to Marseille is not who will be punished. It is: if a football match is no longer a place where two griefs can meet, then what is it?