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Once Kevin O'Brien started swinging, England were out in the street

Punch-drunk England brought low in World Cup by Irishman who backs his ability to hit the ball as hard as he can
England Ireland World Cup
Trent Johnston is mobbed by team-mates after Ireland's magnificent World Cup victory over England. Photograph: Tom Shaw/Getty Images

I've no idea if Kevin O'Brien is religious or not but watching him at work against England was enough to make a man believe in miracles. Perhaps he said a little prayer to St Jude before he walked out to bat. Jude, after all, is the patron saint of lost and desperate causes. You can pick him out in pictures because, appropriately enough, he is always carrying a cudgel.

Ireland were 106 for four when O'Brien walked out to the wicket and there were just 166 balls left to score the 222 runs needed to complete the largest successful run chase in the history of the World Cup.

Graeme Swann was tying the team in tangles, in the thick of a spell that took three wickets for six runs in 14 balls. Good luck and, more likely, good night. Did O'Brien think Ireland could win the game?

No. He said so himself after the match as he sat grinning in front of a room of gobsmacked hacks. His explanation for one of the most startlingly violent innings in the history of cricket was deliciously simple: "I just back my own ability. If the ball's there to hit, I try to hit it as hard as I can."

That, it turned out, was very hard indeed. O'Brien started swinging like a pair of saloon doors and it was England's bowlers who were being given the bum's rush, thrown out headfirst into the street.

He struck six sixes, one of them the longest that has been struck in this tournament yet, sailing high into the night sky and landing 102 metres away in the concrete terraces, where it sucked 50 or so standing spectators together to try to take the catch that England couldn't.

There were a lot of honorary Irishmen here, almost as many as you'll find in New York on St Patrick's day. For a small crowd they made an awful lot of noise.

It would be wrong to put it all down to dumb luck. O'Brien took a calculated risk by starting the batting powerplay in the 31st over, though admittedly he did not have much of a stake to lose. The haymakers he threw in those five overs brought him three sixes and six fours. When the assault was over, England were punch-drunk.

But O'Brien did not get carried away. He had nous enough to look up at the scoreboard and see that his team needed 80 from 72 balls. At that point, he says, he realised that Ireland could win so long as they kept their cool. From then on he only hit one more four. Otherwise he contented himself with ones and twos.

This was not a fluke. Ireland played some of the best cricket this competition has seen, or is likely to see. They knew exactly what they were doing. Alex Cusack hit any bad balls to the ropes and otherwise just made sure O'Brien had as much of the strike as possible. When he fell, John Mooney took up the attack while O'Brien throttled back, playing it safe as the settled batsman.

For a man who spent last season playing club cricket for Railway Union in the Leinster Premier League, this could be a life-changing innings for O'Brien. He has just made a hell of an impression on a whole host of IPL talent scouts. It remains to be seen whether or not the result was enough to change the fate of the Associate teams, who are due to be excluded from the next World Cup. It is surely going to be a lot harder to kick them out after this. Ireland's victory put one over on the entire ICC, never mind England.

And what of England? The truth is that they cooked it. O'Brien turned up the heat to the point where Andrew Strauss and his side could not handle it. They may yet make the quarter-finals but not without changing the team. Even the top-order, the one part of the side who have shone in their three matches so far, were guilty of some shockingly soft dismissals.

Strauss made plenty of noise in his post-match press conference about the flat pitches they have been playing on but as O'Brien said: "I just knew that if I could stay there and I got a few boundaries away, we could get on top of the English bowlers as teams in this tournament have done. They didn't really know what they were up to with their bowling plans and we took advantage."

Under pressure their bowling was clueless and their fielding appalling, just as it had been against the Netherlands. Add to that a malfunctioning middle-order and – as Mike Selvey pointed out in his shrewd recent piece – you have a team who look a long way short of being title contenders. The curious part of it is that these are the very same aspects of their game that served them so well in the Ashes – the bowlers understood the pitches and had plans for the batsmen, the fielding was razor sharp.

In the last four days England have played their part in two of the greatest matches in the history of this competition. That, you would guess, will be small consolation.

As for Ireland, they intended to party "long and loud" into the night. The biggest dilemma they will face in the next few days is whether or not to get rid of those hideous haircuts. Superstitious it may be but they would be fools to change them now.

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