Image of the captain in torment won’t soon fade

Damian Stack looks at some of the stories making backpage news over the past seven days

WHAT’S seen cannot be unseen. An image can last a lifetime, if powerful enough it can last decades or centuries or more. Memories can fade and blur and become confused and conflated. Images have staying power.

It says something about the power of sport that it produces so many iconic images. Muhammad Ali standing proud and tall, his opponent crumpled on the deck. Maradona and the hand of God. Tommie Smith and the black power salute.

Just last summer we had the image of Robbie Brady celebrating his goal against Italy with his family and girlfriend. One photo in particular captured the world’s imagination.

The composition was extraordinary, if surely somewhat serendipitous. Brady is in the middle, embracing his girlfriend, his brother looking down, tears in his eyes, a swirling, vivid portrayal of the human condition.

Little wonder it was immediately compared to a Caravaggio. That’s sport for you. It brings out the best and the worst in us. In good times and bad it reveals us for what we are, for good or ill.

Last Friday night in Lansdowne Road certainly did. There was passion and fury, violence and recrimination. There was a terrible price to pay for all that with Seamus Coleman’s horrific injury.

It all happened so fast it took a while for the full horror to become apparent. For sure it looked a bad challenge, for sure the referee seemed justified in his decision to flash red straight away. All the same, watching on TV, it wasn’t at all that obvious how bad it a tackle it was or how hurt the Irish captain turned out to be.

The full horror of the situation only became apparent when Shane Long went to console his captain. With Coleman in obvious agony, Long cradled the Donegal man’s head in his hands.

With that we went from Caravaggio to Michelangelo. It was another one of those instantly iconic images. Reminiscent to us of the Pieta – and no we’re not comparing Coleman to Jesus Christ (or Long to his mother for that matter either).

You had the agony and the effort, fleeting, inadequate and humane as it was, to provide compassion and comfort. Like we said, sport brings out the best and the worst in us. That’s the nature of humanity and its essential duality.

The good battles with the bad. Nobody is truly one thing or the other. Even Neil Taylor, the supposed villain of the piece, revealed a depth of character. As soon as the deed was done he immediately regretted it – who amongst us can’t identify with that?

The sympathy he expressed to Coleman was immediate and it was heart-felt. It wasn’t the type of sympathy which so many footballers offer to their victims in the cause of gaining leniency for themselves from the referee. At that stage he had nothing to gain.

Later we learned of Taylor’s turmoil and guilt. When the Welsh players returned to the dressing room after the match they found Taylor lain prostrate on the dressing room floor full of remorse.

Rightly so you might say and you’d be right. Taylor went far beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour on a football pitch. The long suspension winging its way to him is richly deserved.

There was an understandably hostile reaction when Wales boss Chris Coleman, after the match, trotted out the well worn cliché that Taylor “isn’t the type of player”. Some have argued – with a fair degree of justification – that by his actions Taylor proved himself to be exactly that type of player and, maybe, he has.

Maybe now it’s up to him to prove it was a moment of madness. Maybe now it’s up to him to prove those weren’t crocodile tears he was shedding for the Irish captain. That, of course, is not to say he deserves to be held up as some sort of a hate figure.

One moment of madness shouldn’t define anybody, there has to be a capacity for forgiveness and reform of character. Unless, of course, there’s recidivism. Then we can condemn and castigate, until then it’s simply posturing designed to make us feel good about ourselves. It’s so rarely that clear cut. Life is much, much too messy for that. Coleman was right when he said some Irish players didn’t exactly have halos on the heads coming off the pitch on Friday evening.

Glenn Whelan certainly left an elbow in on-Joe Allen. Long caught Ashley-Williams with a stamp. Nothing to compare to what Taylor and Gareth Bale would later do in seeming retaliation, but enough to remind us that moral and self righteous indignation is best avoided. After all to err is human, to forgive divine.