The Jack Charlton Stand? It’s the least we can do

YOU’LL often see those Facebook posts, the ones romanticising the old days; the days before smartphones and Netflix, when you went out to play in the morning and only came home when you were hungry, no-one interested in where you’d spent the last 12 hours.

For those who were there it’s a badge of honour, proof they were made of sterner stuff than today’s mollycoddled cupcakes.

But here’s what they don’t tell you: those were incredibly boring times. We had nothing. We were only out playing because there was nothing to do inside. We would have killed for an XBOX, or even just a telly with more than two channels.

And no time was more boring than the 1980s. Yes, I can look back with rose-tinters at the epic games of football down our avenue, or the day we found an entire pig carcass in a farmer’s field - but for the most part it was long, dull days reading comics I’d read hundreds of times before, wondering if I’d ever be bored enough to consider doing my homework.

The reason we played so much football, had those epic games, was because it wasn’t really on television; you’d get the FA Cup Final, the European Cup Final, and a few Division One matches if you had ‘the channels’.

Ireland games? I genuinely can’t remember any pre-1988. Granted, I was only a nipper, too young to recall Eoin Hand’s tenure, but sitting down to watch the national team wasn’t something you did. Then Jack arrived. And everything changed.

We Irish love a bandwagon and this was one that everyone, and I mean everyone, clambered aboard. I remember my uncle, a GAA man, instructing us to watch the closing minutes of Bulgaria Scotland, stressing the importance of the occasion, the magnitude of the moment.

I remember our neighbour, a Cork man - who maybe didn’t even have the two channels - watching the England game in our house, and almost going through the ceiling when Houghton scored. I remember entire families decked out in ‘Jackie’s Army’ t-shirts, men and women of all ages, of all backgrounds - who’d previously thought footballs were for picking up and kicking over the bar - descending upon their local public houses to gather round specially-erected big screens for the Italia ‘90 games.

I remember being brought to one of those public houses for the Romania game, a dark, sweaty, smokey bear-pit, standing-room only as the nation held its breath and I was held aloft, one more body in a flailing mass of arms and legs.

It’s no exaggeration to say it was a revolution, a countrywide movement. During that six-year period each and every Ireland game - including friendlies - was a national event, a time when everyone sat down at the altar of the Boys of Green and prayed for salvation. And there at the helm was Big Jack, the messiah.

Now possessed of a more critical eye, I look back and wonder about the style of football, why men who played for Manchester United, Liverpool and Celtic were reduced to kicking and rushing when pulling on the green jersey.

But we were upstarts, outsiders, the poor, impoverished Irish. It was fitting we played in such an agricultural manner, that our style of play upset the aristocratic superpowers of world football. Sashaying our way onto the international stage, painting pretty patterns on the fields of Europe, wouldn’t have been very Irish. Far better to boot down the door and start shouting the odds from the off.

It wasn’t just his tactical approach to the game which made Jack different. He too was a renegade, an outsider, just like us. Bullish, brusque, a permanent twinkle in his eye, he was the least English Englishman we’d ever known.

Who else could have written themselves into the annals of English sport in the way Jack did, cross the channel, and do the exact same thing over here? His achievements didn’t lead to a knighthood, a commemorative statue or the naming of any stands in his honour in England. And while we don’t do knighthoods the others are surely within our remit. Wouldn’t a trip to the ‘Aviva’ be all that more pleasurable if you passed a statue of Big Jack on the way in to find your seat in the Jack Charlton Stand? I certainly think so.