‘I was floating’ – Craigan recalls night NI shocked Spain

“David Healy turned to me and said, ‘I just have this feeling, it’s really weird’. Little did we know what was going to unfold.”

Scheduled as a final tune-up for the home side before their Euro 2028 opener against Croatia next weekend, Northern Ireland are viewed as long shots to provide Spain with anything other than a morale-boosting victory in Palma on Saturday night.

Their odds of an upset in the Son Moix Stadium, however, are surely shorter than the night Xavi, Raul and Co. pitched up in Belfast for a Euro 2008 qualifier 18 years ago only to be undone by David Healy’s hat-trick in a 3-2 defeat.

Prior to the stunning result at Windsor Park, and off the back of a damaging 3-0 home defeat against Iceland just four days prior, optimism among Northern Ireland fans could hardly have been in shorter supply.

“We were nervous going in,” remembers former Northern Ireland defender Stephen Craigan.

“We thought if they got themselves in front, off the back of a big defeat for us, it would be a long night.

“Nobody expected anything of us. People just wanted us to be competitive. We just wanted to be competitive ourselves.

“You think of their front three, David Villa, Fernando Torres and Raul, if you’d have said to any of our back four that we’d be going up against those players and we were going to beat them, logically, you’d have thought ‘no, that doesn’t work’.

“That’s what football gives you, that one-off opportunity as an underdog to over-perform. Then it’s incredible what can happen.”