Can we really go through all this playoff agony again?
The joys and suffering of a lifetime in the Green Army
IT was Genoa. Italia ’90. The World Cup quarter-finals. Packie Bonner had saved a penalty from Romania’s Daniel Timofte and David O’Leary was walking up to take the decisive penalty when RTÉ’s commentator George Hamilton uttered his immortal words: ‘A nation holds its breath.’
Funnily enough, I don’t remember holding my breath. Instead, I fell to my knees in my living room, beseeching the television: ‘Let anyone but O’Leary take it!’ Then a primeval scream emanated from me as O’Leary scored.
A similar cry came from my older brother, who fell on top of me as we engaged in what sounded like the primal screaming therapy pioneered by the Atlantis Commune, known as ‘The Screamers’, whose shrieking once traumatised locals in Burtonport, Co. Donegal, in the 1970s.
I don’t know what past traumas the Atlantis Commune were purging with their screaming, but I know what ghosts my brother and I were exorcising.
Winter evenings in Dalymount, with Ray Treacy hanging out of goalkeepers’ jerseys at every corner when we came so close to breakthrough victories. Dodgy refereeing decisions always favouring bigger nations. The killer Belgium goal, minutes from time, when Eoin Hand was set to achieve the impossible dream of getting us to the World Cup finals in 1982. My memory of standing among Irish fans in the suffocating heat of Gelsenkirchen, as emotionally and physically drained as the Irish players running themselves into the ground, when we lost out on a semi-final place at Euro ’88 because of a mishit Dutch goal that was clearly offside.
So we screamed in 1990 because moments of unadulterated joy don’t come too often for Irish soccer fans. When they do, they should be savoured, because often we need the warmth of such golden memories to sustain us for years afterwards in what John Millington Synge coined as ‘the dark nights after Samhain’.
DURING the years when the Irish economy boomed and Irish soccer collapsed, we found little joy in the play-off purgatory we endured. A play-off defeat to Holland in 1995 signalled the end of Jack Charlton’s reign; defeat to Belgium in 1997 signalled the end of any non-grey hair I had left; and defeat to Turkey in 1999 signalled the demise of that lumbering genius, Tony Cascarino, who achieved the unique feat of retiring from international soccer at the final whistle and then getting a red card two minutes into his retirement.
For every generation of young fans, play-offs have been a rite of passage. We did manage to slay Iran in 2001, with disgruntled Iranian fans setting fire to their own stadium; Estonia in 2011, who committed hari-kari by capitulating at home where they ended the game four goals and two men down; and, most recently, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2015, resulting in a joyous ramble through France by Irish fans.
I stood in Pigalle in Paris last summer as thousands of goodhumoured Irish fans brought a level of comic surrealism to the street. Even the French police laughed when a local, bewildered, middle-aged man in a string vest discovered that Irish fans had granted him Papal status, greeting his every appearance on his tiny balcony with cheers generally only heard in St Peter’s Square.
I enjoyed the mayhem but feared what might happen if this boisterous Green Army try to bring their unique jovial anarchy to Moscow, Sochi or Kaliningrad if we qualify for next year’s World Cup.
Yet, no matter what concerns I have for Irish fans if we get there, I’ll be glued to the play-off matches against Denmark tomorrow and on Tuesday because both games will count as those rare occasions when, to quote Hamilton, a nation holds its breath. And a vast number of Irish people, at home and abroad, will share one of the few collective experiences we still enjoy as a nation.
In the 1970s, Ireland stopped for The Late Late Show, with families still arguing over the issues raised on it for days afterwards. Such collective national experiences are rare now, with television itself becoming irrelevant to a new generation wedded to smartphones. Delight: O’Leary is hugged by teammates after 1990 penalty
But great sporting moments still transcend all generational and technological divisions because sport retains the uncanny ability to bring us together to share a collective hope. And never more so than during a knife-edge World Cup play-off.
T. S. Elliot famously wrote: ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.’ Well, like many people afflicted since childhood by the incurable ailment of being an Irish soccer supporter, I can measure out my life with World Cup and European Championship play-offs. And the route to our showdown with Denmark was as torturously convoluted as most play-off journeys are.
Our first was in Paris in November 1965: families hunched around radios as a scrawny Eamon Dunphy made his debut when we played Spain in Paris for a place in the 1966 World Cup Finals.
I remember sitting in a Finglas kitchen, aged six, intoxicated and addicted, living out every kick until, in the 80th minute, Philip Greene announced that Spain had scored and Ireland’s play-off dreams were over.
A few years later, I experienced my first Ireland international on the dangerous Dalymount terraces, where – if Ireland scored – you were lifted off your feet in the surge of elation, only ever coming to rest five or six steps further down the steep terraces.
When O’Leary scored in 1990, I recall my infant son screaming in my late wife’s arms, thinking his father and uncle had gone insane.
It’s hard to believe that 27 years have passed: a blur of disappointments and occasional brilliant triumphs.
MY son’s play-off rite of passage occurred against Iran, weeks after he thought I’d gone insane again in 2001, when Jason McAteer’s wonder goal against Holland put us into the first World Cup play-off we ever won. But on that occasion, my son joined in my scream because, even at 12, he’d already seen sufficient Irish disappointments to know that that victory was a moment he would remember all his life.
In 2009, he was 20 and kneeling on my living-room floor, with his younger brother and one of Ireland’s most distinguished poets – all three of them crawling around to try and catch flickering pictures from Paris when my television Scart lead broke midway through the France play-off and I could only get a picture by holding our television in my hands and tilting it from side to side. Yet despite the faulty reception, they still saw what the referee missed: Thierry Henry cheating Ireland out of the 2010 World Cup finals.
Life moves on. When Ireland walk out against Denmark tomorrow night, some other child will enjoy their rite of passage, attending a first play-off with a parent, but this time my sons and I will be watching separately, on screens in three different countries.
But in many ways, it will be the same collective experience as when we attended games together. Maybe we’ll have to exchange elated or despairing remarks by text or FaceTime, but like Irish families everywhere – whether at home together or scattered abroad – we will still be sharing the same dream of victory, and we will once again be part of a nation holding its breath.