FAI GIVE UP ON O’NEILL
Only our national football team can produce such countrywide craziness, writes
THERE is no doubt many football people were tremendously excited by the story of Martin O’Neill and whether he might take the Stoke job, and where Roy Keane might find himself after all this. But I’m not sure if it was all that exciting for people in general, for non-football people — for normal people, if you like.
I’m only guessing here, because of course I don’t know many of these people. But I had a strong sense that they weren’t too enthralled by it all, that they were prepared to accept whatever came to pass with equanimity. That they were sitting this one out.
And I feel that in their football-deprived way, nevertheless they were perhaps closer to the truth, in an objective sense. But there’s a paradox here, whereby, at the moment, it doesn’t seem to matter who manages this particular Republic team, and yet it always matters, simply because the Ireland football team always matters.
Even when it doesn’t seem to matter much — we won’t be playing a seriously competitive match for a long time — that too matters. There are some who seek the great truths of life by engaging in the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment, prayer and meditation and so forth. In Ireland, we tend to look to the football team.
Our official national sports of gaelic games, by their nature, do not involve other countries, so while we are the best in the world at them, we accept that this may be true but that it is somewhat meaningless — well, some of us do, anyway.
Down through the years the rugby guys have given us a few big days out, but we also understand that where they’re coming from, those guys would probably be doing quite well for themselves anyway. And since the Six Nations only lasts for a few weeks, we realise no great commitment is demanded from us there. That our devotion is only true, up to a point.
Our horse-racing triumphs are magnificent, though like the gaelic games, it is increasingly the case that Irish people are virtually the only ones who work in the racing game any more, in the UK as well as in Ireland. When the first 15 jockeys to win at Cheltenham these days are all talking with Irish accents, and are quite likely to be sitting on Irish horses trained in Ireland, you start to wonder if the truth of this has changed too, if we should be getting so excited about beating the Brits on their track. Which itself is full of Irish people, some of them arriving in helicopters.
Our golfers are probably closest to the football team in terms of their exposure to the full blast of international opposition and of course they are a credit to us. But it is such an individualistic sport it can’t quite raise the same level of crosscommunity craziness that we find when the Republic of Ireland is going for a big one.
So yes, it just seems to matter more, when the football team is involved. Somehow we know that whatever happens, the truth — or some form of it — will be revealed to us in all of its splendour or all of its harshness. And we don’t get much of that, to be fair, in other areas of Irish life.
We have this heightened sense of its importance too, because we know the best thing that ever happened in modern Ireland was Italia 90. And the worst thing — leaving aside all the usual bad things which we expect to happen anyway — was Saipan.
In peacetime, we had never been so high, or so low, and the football team did that — and there was nothing phony about it. This was real elation that lasted a long time, and this was real devastation that also lasted a long time, perhaps a longer time than the elation, if truth be told.
It has been coming in smaller doses of late, the elation of beating Wales followed soon afterwards by the devastation of being beaten in the way we were beaten, by Denmark. And while it was no Saipan, it will hang around in our systems for a long time too, like some disastrous night on the beer.
Yet there was truth in it, and we have come to trust the truth that we find in this place.
We realise that the sort of things we need, are not be found entirely in the persons of Martin O’Neill or Roy Keane or any other manager, that if just one of our few really good players, Seamus Coleman, is gone, most likely we are all gone.
So we need luck, we need all the breaks we can possibly get, and instead with Coleman we got a really bad one. We recall that one of the wonders of Italia 90 was not just that Jack had a team with better players than the ones we have now, he was a lucky, lucky man to be drawn against Romania in the last 16 and not Germany, and he was even luckier to be given a ride to Euro 88 by that ludicrous result for Scotland in Bulgaria.
Normal people probably understand the random nature of such things in a way that football people find hard to accept — so I hear anyway.
Then again Wales got unlucky too, with their one great player, Gareth Bale, getting injured, putting them out of it and giving us back a bit of the luck we lost with Coleman — but not enough of it, clearly.
Deep down, we know that the ideal state of being for Ireland is a kind of antiSaipan, in which everything that can possibly go right for us, goes right — all the time. And we get those breaks too — oh, and a few brilliant young players to come out of nowhere would help.
We know that even if Martin O’Neill had never been anywhere near Stoke, we would still need all these things. And yet there is also a strange consolation in knowing it, that only the truth can bring.
‘We know the ideal state of being is a kind of anti-Saipan’