Giles still ahead of the game

WHEN Spain lost their manager, you could hear many pundits suggesting that this mightn’t necessarily be a bad thing, that these players are top, top, top men who have been up there for so long they can probably manage themselves. So this bad thing might actually turn out to be a good thing.

One voice though, was dissenting from this uplifting narrative — John Giles on Newstalk was firm in his belief that this bad thing would not, in fact, turn out to be a good thing.

Bad, he insisted, was not good. And when, eventually, I saw the shootout between Spain and Russia, I was totally unsurprised to see that he was right. It brought me back to the day when Bill O’Herlihy suggested that a certain midfield partnership might work as well as any other for Ireland, even though they weren’t all that good, leading Giles (pictured below) to explain that you could indeed play those lads all the time, if you believed there was no difference between good players and bad players.

But there is a difference, you see. Knowing the difference between good and bad is not as easy as it sounds — I guess John Giles just made it sound easy, until he was taken out of the RTE panel by an act of executive delinquency which must have seemed at the time like one of those bad things which might actually turn out to be a good thing.

It wasn’t.

DUE to a long-standing commitment — open heart surgery or something, it doesn’t really matter in the light of what I am about to tell you — I found myself recording RTE’s coverage of Spain v Russia on Sky Plus.

So I was watching it later, watching it in full, just like it was in “real time”, liking the fact that it was going into extra-time, because anything that makes any part of this World Cup last a bit longer, is inherently good.

I had been thinking too, that it was time for the tournament to have a match with extra time and penalties, and this one was starting to look like a serious candidate — it had the classic formula of the superior side slightly off their game, up against a team who will be delighted to take it to penalties.

And so it came to pass, with Russia now looking like the favourites for the shoot-out, given that they’d wanted it more.

And then the recording ended.

Imagine my surprise, as I sat there looking forward to the first penalty shootout of Russia 2018, only to have somehow forgotten Rule One to be borne in mind when you are recording a knockout game — that you must always record the next programme as well, in case your game runs over the allotted time.

Yes, imagine my surprise...

It is there on Page One of the Match Tapers Rule Book, and it is not just Rule One, it is also Rule Two, Rule Three and Rule Four. You must always record the next programme, because otherwise you may find yourself sitting there like one of those people who have witnessed some awful event, telling the reporter that it would never cross your mind that such a terrible thing could happen on such a glorious day. Imagine… my… surprise. Imagine, too, the surprise of Nathan Murphy from Off The Ball who shared this on Twitter: “Avoided score of Uruguay v Portugal all evening. Sit down to watch highlights, continuity announcer says: ‘On the day Messi and Ronaldo are knocked out of the World Cup, here’s today’s highlights.’ WTF!”

We need to address the sufferings of people like Nathan and me, because it is now believed that inadvertently finding out the score of a match that you have taped, or being otherwise thwarted in your quest to watch a game “on delay”, are among the biggest causes of private grief and indeed of public grief in our culture.

We need to make it socially unacceptable to be recklessly communicating a scoreline while a “big” match (which is any match really) is in progress — even careless body language can be devastating.

We need a public information campaign, and in cases of malicious “sharing”, we need on-the-spot fines.

To be out in the world these days, and to avoid hearing the result of a football match, is an achievement of such significance, it should be recognised at the People of the Year awards.

But to get to the sanctuary of your own home — and then to have it destroyed for you in some peculiar way that you never saw coming…. men have been broken by such things.

‘We need a public information campaign, and in cases of malicious sharing we need on-the-spot fines’