We were all in Jackie’s Army
SOCIALLY distanced it wasn’t. Packed in like sardines more like. Pints flowing. The craic registering 90. The television flickering in the corner. Ireland in the World Cup. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to a ten year old. What can we say, the nineties were different. This, by the way, isn’t the tale of a misspent youth. It’s simply what it was like to be a member of Jackie’s Army in 1994. Euro 88 and Italia 90 passed us by – we have no memory whatsoever of Stuttgart and only the vaguest recollection of something significant happening in 1990 – but this was it for us. Our chance to sign up with the blunt-talking northerner and his band of merry men. We simply weren’t going to miss being part of it.
Nowadays we wouldn’t dream of watching an important game in a pub if we could at all avoid it – it’s not easy to properly concentrate in a crowd – but back then it was about being part of something special and something special it was.
Eleven minutes in Ray Houghton controlled the ball and with his left boot dipped a shot over Gianluca Pagliuca and into the back of the Italian net. If Giants Stadium erupted in New Jersey, then we can tell you that the Elm bar in Duagh went absolutely bananas, pints flying through the air as people lept with joy bananas. That outburst of ecstasy followed by the remaining seventy nine minutes of near excruciating tension as everybody willed the clock to strike ninety, was probably our first experience of the power of sport to move people, and we have Jack Charlton to thank for that.
For a lot of Irish people of our generation – and a generation or two below us – Charlton’s Ireland was the gateway drug to a lifelong fascination with and passion for sport. Whatever about his potential impact on Anglo Irish relations, whatever about his role in helping kick-start an economically stagnant Ireland, that more than anything else was Charlton’s gift to this country. When we heard news of his passing last Saturday morning that’s what we remembered. Jack made a lot of people very happy indeed. What greater legacy could you ask for?