If we can get past Denmark, your usual World Cup plans might need a rethink, lads...
IT’S hard to be enthused of a Tuesday. But this one is different. Tonight we play Denmark for a place in the World Cup finals in Russia next summer and I’m tingling. Not since 2002. Saipan and all that spilt and soured milk. It’s been too long.
So while today is primarily about the knuckle-gnawing at what might unfold at the Aviva, many fans are already dashing down the wing and daring to dream. Of Moscow in the summertime.
Veteran campaigners will have done the maths. As expected, the maths won’t have added up. Any which way you slice it, a week or two in the Russian capital or further afield (way further, possibly) would be expensive.
Last year’s sortie to France offers little in the way of guidance. A bit like hopping over the neighbour’s fence to watch a match on
Sky Sports in comparison.
But right now there’s a bunch of lads (not goys, definitely lads) somewhere planning the last word in budget road trips to Europe’s furthest outposts.
They know this grease monkey who has a D98 camper van out the back that just needs a bit of tender loving care, a few remoulds, a fanbelt and they’re sucking diesel.
They’ve checked the map. Yep, it’s a bit of a stretch. But an early start would be half the battle.
So it’s the ferry from Rosslare, then a Sunday drive from Roscoff to Berlin.
After that you take third exit off the roundabout for the Kremlin. The signposts are excellent.
But what if Ireland’s group scattered us to one of Russia’s bleaker extremities? Some place synonymous with Stalin’s gulags, for instance?
Or Vladivostok. A port city perched on the eastern reaches of the old Romanov empire?
Bring it on, they’ll say.
Boot to the floor. Well sorry to be a spoilsport, but I checked. That would be a 12,000km roadtrip. Or 142 hours with your arse glued to the seat of a converted Transit. Double that if you want to come home, which I’d suspect is in the masterplan. A rethink, perhaps.
First, though, all roads lead to D4 tonight. Belt up.
Hypocrisy tax would bring in billions
THE biggest career mistake U2 ever made was to be too bloody successful for too long. We don’t like that much around these parts. Mediocrity is much more to our liking. God knows, there’s no shortage of it about the place. That probably explains why there was so much undisguised glee when the ‘Paradise Papers’ fingered Bono for a smooth piece of perfectly legal, if ethically iffy, tax avoidance.
But aren’t all those moral nannies just hypocrites? Who among them doesn’t regularly sip skinny lattes in franchise coffee houses whose tax policy is all froth and no bean?
Or swoon over shiny digital toys manufactured by a mega corporation which has been said to owe Ireland €13bn in taxes?
How many of them are serial purchasers of dirt-cheap fashion they know is manufactured in Dickensian Third-World sweatshops?
What about those who support a political party that up until relatively recently had a very unorthodox method of bank withdrawals?
Then there’s my favourite: those slippery souls who didn’t pay their water charges because they knew there was safety in numbers?
Perhaps a tax on hypocrisy would soften their cough. It would bring in billions.
Spin machine lets down smart Leo
TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar is a smart chap. In politics, that’s not necessarily a bonus. It depends really on the sort of smarts you’re talking about.
Leo tweeted at the weekend to confirm, as he had controversially declared at the party’s national conference, that Irish homelessness figures aren’t out of kilter with international norms.
Maybe so, but we do have a crisis all the same.
Telling the voting public otherwise suggests this is a man whose political antennae picks up only fitful and fuzzy signals.
And that empathy is just another thing he expects his spin doctors to brief him on.