WRITING THE
After ride of a lifetime it’s time to pass on baton
I MIGHT not have witnessed Mark Lawrenson’s quick-witted winner at Hampden Park 35 years ago but for an elastic band.
As I prepare to cover my last ever Ireland senior away international for the Irish Daily Star, the story of how a coach operator managed to get us safely to Glasgow for the Euro 88 qualifier has crossed my mind more than once this week.
It was my first ever away competitive Boys in Green game, as it was for many of the other 55 fans who crammed on to the bus on a freezing February morning in 1987.
The coach only boasted 55 seats so, luckily for us, one fan stormed off home after a heated row with his brother prior to the 4am departure.
Otherwise, a second person would have been forced to stand all the way to Glasgow.
The heating didn’t work so we muffled up with coats, hats and green and white scarves and took off for Scotland on that terrible main road towards the border.
A few miles the other side of Lisburn the bus shuddered to a halt.
The driver disappeared under the steering wheel and after a minute stood up to enquire ‘has anybody got an elastic band?’.
To even greater incredulity from the rest of us, a bloke sitting half way down the aisle replied in the affirmative.
The driver scuttled back under the steering wheel and by noon we were checking into our fine hotel on the western outskirts of Glasgie.
Fine apart from the fact that its staff stubbornly refused to serve even one pint of beer when we returned to celebrate the 1-0 victory over the Scots that was iconic in its significance for Irish football and crucial to reaching West Germany in 1988.
Entertainment
So we were even thirstier the following morning when we and several thousand more Irish fans descended on the city centre to celebrate. ‘It was the day we got drunk twice’ remarked one delicate sage 24 hours later.
Entertainment was more basic in those days.
A Sauchiehall Street musician charged us 5p for playing The Sash on his tin whistle but doubled the price for Amhran na bhFiann. No fool him.
At that time I was working for The Meath Weekender having cut my journalistic teeth with the Drogheda Local News.
By late 1991, I was with the Irish Daily Star and covering the League of Ireland and Jack
Charlton’s team followed later by Irish clubs in Europe, Ireland’s World Cups in 1994 and 2002, Euros in 2012 and ‘16, the Premier League, Irish players in Britain, Celtic and other European Championship and World Cup finals.
Yes, it has been the job from heaven for anybody who grew up in love with the beautiful game and also fortunate enough to like English at school.
This column was filed from my iPad yesterday morning through my Glasgow hotel’s wifi. Easy.
When I first travelled abroad to cover Ireland games three decades ago, this process was somewhat more challenging.
Reversing the charges to Dublin 4901228 from hotel rooms, hotel lobbies and football press boxes to then dictate our words to ever-patient copytakers was still often necessary, even if the early laptop technology was allowing us to send our stories via leads run into phone sockets in our rooms.
But even this was often a headache. Some sockets denied you access unless you dismantled it, many hotels wondering why knives were disappearing from their restaurants as frenzied hacks unscrewed the cover to then connect the lead.
Present
Wifi was still 15 years away while 3G phone connectivity didn’t hit here until the late 90s.
Covering Ireland’s 2-1 win over Albania in Tirana in 1993 proved hugely nervewracking for each of the 25 journalists present.
From your hotel room, you rang the hotel switchboard who then contacted the Tirana telephone exchange, whose mission was to attempt to connect a call to Dublin via London, Paris, Amsterdam or Zurich.
For four long hours not one hack could get through to Dublin to file their match preview, each of us with our room doors open with the intention of allowing everybody to use the one open line back to a newspaper office to get their stories across.
Luckily, I managed to strike telephonic oil so for the next three hours a procession of my colleagues formed an orderly queue to file to my very understanding copytakers in our Terenure offices, motorbike couriers racing to bring their copy to the Irish Press, Irish Independent and Irish Times.
When I checked out the following day — after sharing the same dining room as Big Jack, his players and FAI personnel for lunch — my telephone bill was almost $400.
Yes, the other lads willingly coughed up their share.
Workers
The few remaining dollar bills were used to stop Albanian telecom workers from disconnecting our telephone lines after the game: one-dollar bribes quickly turning to five and then 10.
Fortunately, our accounts department accepted that trying to produce receipts for expenses on trips to eastern Europe — only recently liberated from decades of Soviet tyranny — was not always possible.
Others were not as lucky.
One highly experienced colleague exploded with anger when pressed for them: ‘the Russian mafia is not accustomed to issuing receipts’, he snapped when pressed on the number of taxi journeys he had made.
If telecom communications