Former Republic of Ireland footballer Stephen Ireland says he was "absolutely gobsmacked" by his wife's beauty on their wedding day.
The Premiership soccer star married his girlfriend of nine years, Jessica Lawlor, in Leicestershire earlier this month in a lavish ceremony and has said he was blown away by how beautiful she looked when she walked down the aisle.
"I was absolutely gobsmacked at how beautiful she looked," he told HELLO! magazine. "To see her in her wedding dress, with our families there and the choir, was really emotional."
Mind you his tears were nothing in comparison to the tiers on the wedding cake. The cover photo for the magazine shows the couple being dwarfed by their massive cake, embossed with their initials.
During a training session two weeks before their wedding day, Ireland shattered two bones in his left leg, but that didn't stop him from walking down the aisle.
"We had been waiting to get married for so long and I was getting better each day, so I thought, 'I can pull this off'. I just had to man up," he said.
Lawlor added, "When I saw Stephen I was really happy, emotional and excited to be getting married.
"No matter how much you see a person day to day there is something different on your wedding day - you see them in a different light. The choir started singing Whitney Houston's My Love Is Your Love and I just kind of lost it. I felt really overwhelmed."
The newlyweds said they are now looking forward to having more children - Ireland has a son and a daughter from a previous relationship and the couple have an 8-year-old son, Jacob, together.
The couple's relationship made international headlines several years ago after Ireland pretended his grandmother had died in order to get out of a crucial international match. His granny was in fact hale and hearty, but said he had made up the excuse in order to visit Jessica who was "lonely" back in Cork.
After the lie was exposed - when his gran read about her own death in the papers - he changed his story to say that it was in fact his other grandmother that had passed away. She was also very much alive and too read about her death in the papers. As the whole farce began to unravel, he later issued a full apology and said "I realise now that it was a massive mistake to say my grandmothers had died and I deeply regret it."
He later admitted that Jessica had miscarried and that had led him to "panic". It's not known if either granny made it to the wedding.
