A young lad who makes us all proud to be Irish
IT’S a goal we’ll be watching for years. Irish children not yet born, much like Robbie Brady himself back in 1988, will come to know every slow-mo second of that score whenever our happiest moments are recalled for decades to come.
Half a century from now, the grandchildren of that little girl in the green ear defenders, spotted in her mum’s arms on the stand in Lille last Wednesday, will have seen it a dozen times in reruns of Reeling In The Years 2016.
It will be the footage that plucks a moment of sheer joy from an otherwise worrisome, tense and angry year.
What future generations might miss, though, are the peripheral gems that made the whole night sparkle.
They might not see that lump-in-the-throat moment when the game ended and young Robbie ran straight into the arms of his family in the crowd. He didn’t have to pause or search, he knew exactly where they’d be – where they’ve always been, on his side, in his corner, willing him on with the sheer might of pride and blood and love and place. They might not get to see his partner Kerrie, the mother of their baby daughter, hug him like she would never let him go.
They might miss the moment when his big brother, his face soaked in tears, grabbed him in a fierce embrace, spoke the words the whole country wanted to say, and kissed his cheek.
And future generations, watching with nostalgia, might not quite get the buzz of hearing a full-throated Irish accent – the same accent we’ve been so proud to hear singing to the French police and charming the locals and serenading nuns and babies on trains – voicing something a little less familiar than amiable acceptance: wellearned triumph.
Roy Keane, who came dangerously close to smiling in Lille on Wednesday night (something that deserves a wall plaque and a place in the annals all by itself), previously said he’d rather have a great team than great fans.
On Wednesday night, even he might have realised that it’s not just possible to have both, they’re actually co-dependent – for the Green Army, the fans and the players share the same gene pool and the same energy source.
Something almost superhuman kept those young men going through the saunalike conditions in Lille for more than 90 minutes, and it is hard to deny that the fans’ world-acclaimed joie de vivre and good humour was a force of nature.
Before the match, Martin O’Neill had promised that they would do it ‘for the fans’, and later he revealed that the talk in the dressing room had all been of the power surge that the supporters’ enthusiasm transmitted to the men on the pitch.
Sport is meant to be about entertainment, in the end, and when your fans are part of the joy you create, then they are as crucial to the team’s success as any coach or manager.
Too many of the teams in the Euros have nothing to be proud of, and indeed much to worry them, when their supporters gather in the stands. The brawls and the violence that have marred several of the matches can only have drained their teams’ store of confidence and national pride; the Irish lads, by contrast, have been buoyed by a bunch of fans who reminded the world what sportsmanship looks and sounds like.
Robbie Brady claimed to be stuck for words, in that interview minutes after the game ended, but then he’s a Dubliner, part of a tribe who could spend hours telling you how speechless they are... without ever once repeating themselves.
HE is part of a generation of young Irish whose parents weathered the boom and the bust and have instilled in them a resilience, a confidence and an exuberant sense of the possible. After the Belgium match, their tails should have been down and their spirits low, but this generation have learned that with optimism, determination and a few decent tunes, you can always pick yourself up again and take on the world.
Depending on your point of view, after all, a missed chance is an inspiration, not a setback; if you can get so close once, you can do it again... which, when you stop and think about it, is not a bad message for the lot of us.