by Declan Lynch
‘What do you think of us?’, we openly ask, when foreigners come to Ireland, and they seem to understand that we don’t really want an honest answer. We don’t really want them to provide us with a detailed assessment of our good points and our bad points, we just want them to say, ‘You’re great’.
Which they usually do, the way that you’d humour a child. We know they’re only telling us what we want to hear, but we don’t mind that. And we don’t exactly respect ourselves for this, but then we are not asking to be respected. We are only asking to be liked.
At Euro 88, we had been liked. At least we assumed we had been liked and very well liked, because we had done everything in our power to achieve this happy state. We had behaved ourselves so well, we had brought scenes of great joy to the terraces, with our green wigs and our bodhráns and our gas characters; we had been able to hold our drink.
At least that’s how we saw it, so we trusted that’s how everyone else saw it. Certainly a few English broadsheets weighed in with their usual generosity towards us and their loathing of their own kind, the hooligans who can’t behave themselves like good old Paddy.
So there was some sort of official confirmation that we had been liked. So great was our need in this regard, we found it hard to imagine that the citizens of other countries might have gone through that tournament without thinking much about Paddy at all — that they might indeed go through their entire lives without thinking about the Irish, let alone forming a view as to our likeability, until they are asked a direct question — do you like us? — to which there can only be the one answer.
There would be a particularly poignant example of this acute self-consciousness towards the end of the Charlton years, when we had qualified for the 1994 World Cup and there was much speculation about the possible venues for the Republic’s matches. It was widely suggested by well-respected commentators (well-liked at any rate) that the Irish were so popular all around the world, and especially in America, that they were bound to end up playing in one of the great Irish-American cities such as Chicago or Boston.
Essentially, it was being proposed that FIFA, the football’s world governing body, would rig the draw for our benefit because we’re such great fellows and they like us so much. In our imagination, we could see the top brass of FIFA addressing this matter of overwhelming importance, discussing at length how best to arrange the tournament so that Paddy gets all that Irish-American support. We were ‘the best supporters in the world’, after all, so it wasn’t just that they liked us — that was a given — hell, they needed us.
So it was utterly inexplicable, and bordering on the perverse, to discover that we were just thrown into the draw along with all the other countries, and that we would be forced to play in frigging Orlando, in the blazing heat, against Mexico. You would almost think that we were just another team, that we were not the most-liked. And as for respect, you would have more respect for a dog than to be dragging him from New York to Orlando and back again — yes, the Irish did get to play in New York, in front of their own people, but that could also be construed as a gift to the Italians, so it didn’t count. It was down to the hot-house of Orlando and back again to New York for the third match against Norway.
You would hardly wish such a thing on someone you hated, let alone on the best supporters in the world.
Mind you, we would have gratefully accepted all these perceived slights, and a lot more, after the slaughter in Seville back at the end of 1988.
To maintain at least some of the morale that we had gained in Germany, we could reflect on the undoubted fact that in Seville, we had been without four very important players — Houghton, Sheedy, Whelan and McGrath.
We had also given Steve Staunton his first cap, with Kevin Moran in front of him in midfield and David O’Leary beside him at centre-half — yes, Jack was desperate enough on the night, to play O’Leary — all these things, by any standard, constituted a perfectly valid excuse.
So we still had hope.
But that, too, is a dangerous place for Paddy. We have sat looking into enough glasses of whiskey to know that hope is never too far away from ruin, in the order of things. Hope and ruin, the old reliables.
Indeed the fact that the group also contained Northern Ireland seemed to exacerbate this sense that everything was still in the balance, that it could all go either way. We had no consciousness of anything but bad things emanating from our relationship with Northern Ireland and we assumed that this would be no different.
Appropriately, after three games in the group, we had only two points, one of them garnered against Norn Iron in a match in Windsor Park which most of us have forgotten entirely — every aspect of it, down to the last detail, has been entirely expunged from our memories.
Most people to whom I have spoken still have vivid and horrendous recollections of the match in Windsor Park in 1993 which sent the Republic to the 1994 World Cup, but in the case of the scoreless draw back in 1988, when there was still a war going on, denial set in almost immediately, leading quickly to total amnesia.
There was also a scoreless draw with Hungary, in Budapest, in March 1989, which again raised the issue of our self-esteem. Because despite having supped the fine wine of Euro 88, we could not see ourselves as the sort of people who might be disappointed with one point instead of three. After all, Hungary, as the Mighty Magyars back in the 1950s, had featured in one of the Ten Great England Defeats. So we would naturally have a healthy respect for them. Or perhaps an unhealthy respect: for sure, they weren’t the Mighty Magyars any more, but from where we were looking, they still looked mighty enough.
Hungary was the first international team I ever saw in the flesh, playing at Dalymount on a Sunday afternoon back in the late 1960s. I recall that the stars of Hungarian football at that time were Ferenc Bene and Florian Albert, who exuded class, and that they won with a late goal, as was only to be expected. In general, they seemed to be much, much better at football than we were.
My memories of such matches are clouded by the fact that I never saw Ireland scoring a goal. When it looked like they might score, everyone would stand up, mad with anticipation and since I was only a child, my view would be entirely blocked. I could only listen, either for the orgasmic roar or the sigh of disappointment. So I never saw Ireland scoring a goal, but I heard them scoring a few.
Never enough, it seemed.
Twenty years later, even against a football nation which was clearly in decline, a draw in Hungary would seem reasonable — after all, they were in decline from such heights and we were rising from such depths, maybe we were just meeting them in the middle.
It was also somewhat troubling that we had scored no goals in the first three matches of the group, though this could also be rationalised — we had been away from home, against a very good team, a useful enough team, and Northern Ireland.
And having played the first three games away, even if we hadn’t been impressive, we were still alive. Normally, at this stage, we would have expected to be dead.
So there was a sense that the worst was over us, if you discount the lingering spectre of Northern Ireland still waiting for us in the last match of the group — ah, we had many, many miles to go, on this journey.
Even the idea of playing the first three matches away from home was a new concept for us, hopefully another example of Jack’s original thinking, which would yield the same success as his most original thinking of all, which was to play football without actually playing football as such. At least, not as anyone else was playing it in the civilised world.
We were still not free of this ingrained sense of foreboding, even though we could finish second in the Group and still qualify automatically.
Assuming that Spain would win the Group and Northern Ireland would get beaten often enough to do them down and Malta would get beaten by everyone, it was effectively between ourselves and Hungary, the not-so-mighty Magyars.
Not the most awe-inspiring task.
Still we
feared the worst.
Still we feared ruin.
It takes more than just a few good football results to get over that ancient feeling, so we feared all the things we have always feared, until the day that Spain came to Lansdowne.
I went to that match with George Byrne, the controversial rock journalist. We would later see deep significance in the fact that the last match we had attended together was the final agony of the Eoin Hand era, a famously wretched 4-1 defeat at home to Denmark in 1985. And we had even missed seeing the Republic’s goal. We were only arriving into the stand at the moment that Frank Stapleton headed the first goal of the match, early doors.
The rest would be a débâcle, with the stadium full of mad Danes wearing Viking helmets with horns celebrating the best team they would ever have, bound for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico while we looked on forlornly, excluded from life’s banquet.
It was but a small consolation that we hadn’t paid in to that match, because I had been given two free tickets by the PR company putting together the match programme, who used an article of mine from Hot Press, a piece in the Foul Play column on the fabled RTÉ football commentator Philip Greene. They also gave me £25, as I recall, along with the two tickets, and we were undoubtedly drinking that money in the International Bar later that evening when the well-known folklorist and professional Dubliner Éamonn MacThomáis walked in and declared in his usual heart-of-the-rowel style, ‘Ah, Brian Boru was the only fella who could beat them Danes!’
At that moment, we knew we were in hell, that we were at the point known to alcoholics as rock bottom — and still we had a lot of drinking to do on that night and in the nights to come.
——
So it seemed meaningful that four years later, in April 1989, George and I were marching on Lansdowne in a much different frame of mind. It might be a portent of the worst kind, our presence ensuring some similarly nightmarish outcome, or it might be a good omen, a reward for all we had suffered in the days when the likes of us were the only people still following the Republic — and we were getting in free, with our beer money thrown in.
Was it too much to expect that on this day, against Spain who had butchered us in Seville, there might be something akin to what the psycho-babblers call ‘closure’?
On the whole, Paddy doesn’t do closure. But we came very close to it, on the day we beat Spain 1-0 at Lansdowne. You could hardly even call it a football match, this exhibition of barely-controlled savagery on the part of the Republic. And the Spaniards wouldn’t call it a football match either: ‘This was not a football match, it was not even close’, their striker, Emilio Butragueno, known as The Vulture, would later protest. ‘The Irish players were too harsh.’
And he hadn’t mentioned the crowd, who themselves had been a tad harsh.
There were about 50,000 in Lansdowne that day because thousands could still stand at matches, pressed up against the wire, screaming at Johnny Spaniard. It was just a few weeks after the Hillsborough Disaster. Soon, there would be no more of this standing at Lansdowne Road or at any other football ground.
Not that Lansdowne was a football ground, in truth. For the visit of Johnny Spaniard, with all his poise and his superb technique, Lansdowne was a rugby pitch. It was so rough, no-one could have played football on it, even if they tried. Not even Johnny Spaniard. ‘It was very difficult to play in these circumstances’, The Vulture remarked, apparently not fully aware that this was precisely the idea and that Jack had been known to compliment the groundsman on his performance on such days.
I was close to the wire that day and I could see that The Vulture and his illustrious colleagues were struggling. Whenever a Spaniard came to take a throw-in he would be horribly abused by the mob behind the wire, a mob which was starting to get the smell of fear from their refined visitors and another smell which was driving them on to greater obscenities — the smell of victory.
Ireland scored after 17 minutes.
It turned out to be an own-goal by the celebrated Michel, from a cross by Houghton. Another kind break there, for Jack, who even lucked in to the correct pronunciation of the Spaniard’s name in the post-match press conference. ‘Mitchell’ he called him, to the guffaws of the reporters who assumed in their cosmopolitan way that it must be pronounced ‘Michelle’. It turned out that ‘Mitchell’ was right.
During the game some of us thought that Stapleton had scored it, a sweet irony for myself and George, though in effect we didn’t see this one either, our view blocked by the crowd heaving all around us. In fact Stapo scoring would have been somewhat problematic for Jack himself, who seemed to be making it his business to liquidate Paddy’s heroes of old, such as Brady and O’Leary and Stapleton, perhaps to show Paddy who was in charge, perhaps because he genuinely hated the football they played.
So Stapleton was still giving Jack a pain in the arse but he had his uses. Which is more than could be said for The Vulture, the predator who was supposed to devour us, but who was himself taken off during the second-half, sending the crowd into a new level of frenzy. I can still feel the animalistic energy of that day, that heightened sense that if we won this match, we were going to a better place, for a long time, and if we couldn’t win it, we were utterly screwed, for a long time. A sense that all we had gained in the madness of Euro 88 was now on the line.
I remember Staunton in particular because he was on our side of the pitch. In these all-seater days, you get a proper perspective on the match, but in the last days of the old regime, from where we were standing, it seemed to be all about Staunton, stopping everything that came his way, charging and chasing and harassing.
For a lot of the folks on those terraces, this was the defining match of the Charlton years, and nothing would be quite the same again. The multitudes with their Olé Olé-ing and their que-sera-sera-ing would now be signing themselves up for full membership of a club to which they had never really belonged and which they would never rightly understand.
Football itself would never be the same again — in fact John Aldridge wasn’t playing against Spain because he was still traumatised after Hillsborough.
And just as football seemed to be dying in its ancient heartlands, for Ireland, football seemed to be promising the world.
There was a routine 2-0 home win against Malta (ah, how blithely we dismiss these little people). Though even then, I recall writing a piece in the Sunday Independent which mentioned a thing called PMT, or ‘pre-Maltese tension’. We got over that, and on a sunny Sunday in June 1989, there was an extraordinarily happy day for Ireland when we beat Hungary 2-0, a game distinguished by a particularly fine opening goal from Paul McGrath. Even Paddy, with all his perfectly justified fatalism, was starting to believe that he was about to qualify for the World Cup for the first time.
I watched that one from the Press Box, perhaps feeling that I wasn’t needed any more, down in the pit — and soon, there wouldn’t even be a pit.
In fact as the Group progressed, my viewing arrangements seemed to reflect the broader trends. Having stood with the howling mob against Spain, I then found myself in the relative serenity of the main stand for the Hungary match. For the home match against Northern Ireland, a 3-0 win which was realised almost contemptuously after a nervous first half, I had moved my operation to the Purty Loft in Dun Laoghaire, drinking pints of lager all day and watching it on a big screen. And for the ceremonial defeat of Malta in their Ta’ Qali stadium, I had moved to an even bigger screen in a banqueting room in Sachs Hotel, where Hot Press had organised a party, attended by various rock personalities, most notably Mr Joe Elliott of Def Leppard. Though I should add that Joe was not just some celebrity cheering all the wrong things at the wrong time, but a football man of impeccable pedigree, a fiercely committed Sheffield Utd fan — and like most Englishmen, he wished us well.
Hot Press, too, was entitled to have a bit of a do, in view of its outstanding loyalty to the game in this country, exemplified by the Foul Play column and the growing reputation on t
he field of play of the grand old club Hot Press Moenchengladbach. The fact that a party was being thrown with the result not absolutely one hundred per cent certain tells its own story of the breakthroughs we were all making.
But the gods were still throwing odd little barriers in the way of our pursuit of happiness.
Fog descended on Dublin Airport in the days before the match, with fans becoming increasingly anxious that they might not get off the island in time. And anxiety naturally leads to the consumption of alcohol in very large quantities — especially if you’re hanging around an airport for a long time and you’re wearing a green, white and gold curly wig and your name is Paddy. Happiness also has that effect, as does sadness and all the hobgoblins to which we are prey. But this time it was the anxiety that was sucking up the booze.
On RTÉ News, as the crisis deepened, a woman was seen weeping bitterly.
Having had their sport with us, those baleful gods lifted the fog on Wednesday morning, allowing just enough time for everyone to get out there and to see us beating Malta 2-0. Even if some of them only got there for the second half, Paddy would, after all, have his day in the sun.
Beyond in Malta, at the Ta’ Qali National Stadium in Valletta, the gentlemen of the press would be filing their triumphalist reports, perhaps recalling a less happy time, when one of their number was not so sure of the outcome.
He had been one of several journalists who had partaken of a long and leisurely lunch on the day that the Republic were playing Malta in a European Championship qualifier. Perhaps the local wine was fortified, because this particular reporter seemed to be still feeling the effects later that evening, during and after the match — his colleagues heard him muttering angrily on the bus back to the hotel, that it was a disgrace that Ireland had sunk so low they couldn’t even beat these eejits from Malta. Yet they had beaten Malta, albeit narrowly, with a late goal from Stapleton, which had apparently gone unnoticed by the reporter.
