New Year delusion helps us forget the pain of the past
FORGETTING is at the heart of the New Year delusion. The serpentine stream of broken resolutions winding back 12 months are not recalled as the population lashes out a fresh list of good intentions. People forget what went before and are ready for new promises. As the bold ambitions shrivel up one by one throughout the year, the commitment of the first week of January is itself forgotten, until another year turns and the failure is, in turn, not remembered.
This forgetful circle feeds many industries as sales of gym membership, nicotine patches and runners swell every January.
This is a month for solemn vows dedicated to avoiding making the same mistake again. But the sapping pain of a hangover makes Pioneers out of every few New Year’s revellers.
Forgetting is central to the existence of sports fans, too. ‘Never again’ is a bitter vow that rings around Croke Park, Lansdowne Road and a thousand more pitches around Ireland every month of the year, sickened supporters having seen their team beaten once too often.
Just as the players always return, though, so do their followers. Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe, but it’s usually not, yet still they come back for more.
The thousands of fans who support the rugby and soccer teams will forget the traumas of 2012 and 2015 as they cheer on their men this year. Anyone who paid a fortune to watch Ireland humiliated at Euro 2012 could be excused for never inflating a large yellow banana again but be certain that many who travel to France this June made the miserable pilgrimage back from Poland four years earlier.
The faithful core of Irish rugby supporters who watched Argentina rip their team apart in October will not only be in the Aviva Stadium on February 7 for the first match in Ireland’s Six Nations defence against Wales, but plenty of them will be in Paris six days later.
Even if they recall the details of what happened in the Millennium Stadium, they will forget the oaths they swore as they squelched through the sticky streets of Cardiff after the match. Hope survives.
There will be stern edicts issued to Martin O’Neill as the weeks fly by between now and Ireland’s opening match at the Euros, against Sweden on June 13. Who dares to speak of Poznan and Gdansk? Plenty will, and they will order O’Neill to learn the lessons Giovanni Trapattoni could not. They will insist that the manager and his players remember what everyone else is happy to forget.
However, there is no practical use in O’Neill trying to avoid the mistakes made by another manager and another team.
There may be logistical details from the campaign four years ago that serve the current squad well (avoiding a hotel in the middle of the busy town, of the type Ireland were based in during their stay in Sopot on Poland’s Baltic coast, is a good start) but in every sporting respect, O’Neill is as well forgetting like everyone else, if he committed any of it to memory in the first place.
Joe Schmidt and other European coaches spent the weeks after the Rugby World Cup being told that their rugby is not capable of unsettling the best southern hemisphere teams.
The evidence of the tournament would appear to confirm that, and Schmidt will be advised, like his counterparts in the remaining Six Nations countries, to change how Ireland play their game.
Remember what happened in Cardiff, he will be told. But Schmidt is probably as well forgetting it. Even if he wanted to use every excruciating memory from defeat to Argentina in re-imagining Ireland’s game, the practicality of doing so is doubtful.
That is because of the importance of the Six Nations to income generation in this part of the world; fans pay steep prices for serious action, and any coach who turned the competition into a laboratory for helping to combat New Zealand and Australia in some notional World Cup showdown in four years’ time would not last long.
Every four years, agonies are suffered watching Ireland collapse at the quarter-final stage of the World Cup. For a few weeks afterwards introspection gives way to resignation and the game is condemned to hell in a handcart.
By the following spring, everyone has forgotten that and the Six Nations thrills again.
Maybe there is nothing wrong with that. Failure on a global stage is unpleasant, but if avoiding it involves sacrificing several Six Nations campaigns to completely change how the game is played in the climate of a European winter, perhaps that is too high a price to pay.
The Six Nations is what enchants rugby supporters and thousands of floating fans year after year, and they are willing to forget World Cup indignities to get excited anew the following spring. Forgetting is important. It makes sport possible, because without it the anger and pain of defeat, and the outrage caused by corrupt administrators would overwhelm everybody involved.
Instead, old sins are forgotten. Past humiliations give way to fresh anticipation, until the next disappointment. Then, the rosary of failures will grow longer, just like the chain of broken resolutions.
People will vow never again – until the next time.