by Declan Lynch
And though there was this underlying sense of inevitability that we would end up in a penalty shoot-out, it did not lessen the Fear in any way.
You could never entirely trust those Romanians to go with the flow, not with Hagi lurking there, a deeply troubling presence.
As for us, we had sort of got out of the habit of winning football matches, in the accepted sense. In the Compromise Rules format which we were perfecting, we favoured this idea of getting a draw in such a way that it felt like a win. It was the smart response to that inherent design flaw of the system — that it was now very difficult for the other team to score goals, but it was just as difficult for us to score goals. In fact, if you reminded a lot of folks that we hadn’t actually won the games against England and Holland, they would have given you a funny look.
So with all the conviction that Jack had drummed into them, the lads had eventually imposed their will on the opposition, so that in Genoa, the Romanians ended up playing us at our own game — playing for the draw and getting it.
The great moments are known to all — Packie’s save and his leap into immortality, George Hamilton bellowing, ‘The nation holds its breath!’, the entire squad running to acclaim David O’Leary, RTÉ’s Bill O’Herlihy putting on a stupid hat with clapping hands on top, the TV pictures of the uncontrolled weeping of John Healy at the EU summit which was happening around the corner from the International in Dublin Castle, Healy the reporter who had written the most poignant lament for Paddy at his lowest moment in the 1950s, when no-one shouted stop.
Perhaps it was racing through Healy’s mind that the emigration which had torn the heart out of the country had somehow given us back a decent football team and brought us to this, forty years later.
In the International we had entered some demented realm of magic realism. I looked behind me at a wall of people going mad with joy and one of them just happened to be a guy who had grown up a short distance away from me in Athlone, a brilliant guitar player called Anthony Stapleton with whom I had played football on an under-12 team. We had been cheated out of a place in the final of a local tournament by bad refereeing, which was one of the first really horrible things that happened to me in my life and which possibly scars me still. And now here was Anthony in the International, the two of us roaring at one another.
And then he was gone.
There was something so strange about this, I would prefer not to dwell on it.
Strange too, that when O’Leary was announced as the next penalty taker, an inner voice told me that he would probably score, because I had this clear memory of him taking a few penalties for the Arsenal. It was only much later that I was told that O’Leary had never taken a penalty in his life.
I have no idea where that voice came from, telling me of O’Leary’s expertise in dead-ball situations, but I suspect it may have been the baleful gods taking pity on me, feeding me this false information to curb my anxiety. Or maybe it was just the drink.
And there was that image of Jack during the shoot-out, apparently in a state of total relaxation. Which could either mean that he was showing exemplary leadership as usual, exuding this sense of inner calm which would be transmitted to his men and make all the difference, or that he really was completely relaxed because the job was done — whether we won the penalties or lost the penalties, by not getting beaten at this stage of the tournament, it was now established as indisputable fact that we had not been disgraced.
Ah, he was so like us, in so many ways.
I remember him declining to say ‘An Bord Gáis’, which he insisted on calling ‘the gas board’. They could have told him to just pronounce it Un Board Gosh, and maybe they did, but Jack would prefer to do it the way he wanted it, the way which made him comfortable, rather than run even the smallest risk of embarrassment.
He was so like us, the way we shudder when we see one of our own on the BBC, fearing that they will embarrass themselves and embarrass us in front of our mammies and daddies, the Brits.
To avoid embarrassment — with Jack, as with Paddy, this was a holy thing.
Down, down we went to the basement lounge of the International, at that point of perfect happiness with the victory over Romania still vibrating inside us and the prospect of the quarterfinal against Italy in the Stadio Olimpico a serene and beautiful vision.
Standing at the bar, waiting for another drink, I was seized by the urge to slam my fist down on the counter, at the good of it all. I had never before slammed my fist on anything, either in joy or in sorrow — I was not a fist-slamming sort of guy — but there I was, slamming my fist on the counter.
Simon, who was busy filling pints, simply smiled.
There is a story from this time of a man — we’ll call him Kevin — in another bar, Fitzgerald’s of Sandycove. Kevin’s wife was at home in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her friend rang the pub to say that his wife had gone into labour, the contractions had started. ‘Tell her I’ll be up when the penos are finished,’ he said.
When Kevin eventually made it home, his wife was in an even more advanced state of pregnancy. He sat in an armchair, while his wife counted between contractions. Then, overcome by the day’s exertions, he fell fast asleep.
By the time his wife woke him up to drive her to the hospital, the streets were full of wild people, singing and dancing. Kevin had the window of the car rolled down and was shaking hands with other fans. People were dancing on the bonnet of the car.
‘For Christ’s sake will you get them lunatics off the car and get me to hospital’, his wife screamed at him.
Kevin was feeling a riot of emotion. Torn between his elation at the result and the distressing condition of his wife, he drove as best he could through the open-air madhouse which the city had become.
In the back his wife was now weeping with agony.
Observing the scenes of great joy through which they were moving, he tried to comfort her with soothing words like, ‘Where would you get it, eh?’
But her weeping only became more intense. At which point a large beery man, seeing her weeping, stuck his head through the window, and offered her these words of consolation: ‘Ah jaysus, Missus, I know how you feel, I shed a few tears meself earlier on.’
The psychologists would probably tell you that we didn’t have a chance against Italy.
They’d say that you have to be able to visualise yourself winning. You have to genuinely believe you can do it. And of course you have to want it and need it, with every fibre of your being. They would say that we had already got what we wanted. In fact, they would say that we had got more than we wanted, more than we could ever have visualised ourselves getting.
And they would probably be right. In the case of Jack, they would certainly be right.
Jack was just not the sort of fellow to indulge in flights of fancy: such things were not just foolish, they were unprofessional. In fact, the further we got in the competition, the greater the risk that he would find himself re-living the latter part of his playing career with Leeds, challenging for the game’s most glorious honours and castigating himself for getting into all that hassle: ‘How do we do it?’
Getting the job done ... achieving what you set out to achieve ... such an uncomplicated approach had got us to the last 16 of the World Cup. Getting to the quarter-final was just a supremely happy accident. And in truth, most of us would have had that attitude. Looking back at what was a very bad World Cup in general, in terms of the quality of the football, you might say that we weren’t greedy enough.
And maybe some of us learned our lesson and decided in the years to come that we could never be accused of that again.
But for now, we were sated. We didn’t want it all, because deep down, we felt that we already had it all.
Not that we didn’t want to beat Italy. In fact, so many wondrous things had been happening, we were prepared to entertain that fantasy, too. And even to imagine that the movie mightn’t end there, that we might end up playing England in the Wor
ld Cup Final, England who just happened to be in the other half of the draw.
So maybe we wanted it, but the shrinks would say that we didn’t want it enough. And we would all probably accept that we didn’t need it. As a small country, we had got so much out of this so far. We had satisfied all the football needs we ever had and a few more we never knew we had.
At this stage of the tournament the bigger countries started to need it more. Germany needed it: just to ensure a decent welcome home, they needed to win the World Cup. Argentina needed it, even though they had won it the last time. England needed it, but were never going to get it. Maybe even Cameroon needed it more than we did — the ageless Roger Milla with his four goals and his dancing at the corner-flag seemed capable of anything.
Italy most certainly needed it. And they must have looked benignly at our lads on their big day out, having an audience with the Pope. Not unfamiliar themselves with the traditions of Roman Catholicism, they would know that an audience with the Pope is something of a crowning glory, something you tend to get when you have already accomplished something, such, as, say, winning the World Cup.
Certainly the Italian team wouldn’t be heading over to the Vatican in this fashion without the trophy. And it may have crossed their minds that the Irish were doing it at this stage, because when the Pope had his audience the following week, they wouldn’t be around.
Perhaps it was this sense of an achievement being honoured which made us all take such a benign attitude to this audience with the Pope. Because lest we forget, in Ireland we had just spent most of the decade embroiled in a sort of a religious war, in which one side was vehemently opposed to the power still being wielded and abused by said Pope and his minions.
If you wanted to be pedantic about it, you could say that the ‘diaspora’, which was so well represented by Jack’s squad, had contained an awful lot of unfortunate women who had to leave Ireland to have their illegitimate children in England, spurned by a fearful nation which was taking its orders directly from Rome.
In fact, that would not be pedantic, it would just be true.
But the magic of Italia 90 was working here too, allowing us to leave aside our ideological differences and to look at this in the best possible light.
We would forgive the fact that the last time we saw John Paul II among the Irish, he was using Father Michael Cleary as his warm-up man. We would forget all the irreversible damage done to us by what could broadly be termed ‘Catholic teaching’. We would rise above our reasoned arguments and see this instead as an emotional rather than a religious event, acknowledging that ours had been a deeply Catholic country, in which many would see this as the ultimate honour, and they, too, have their story.
And we would observe that John Paul II had something which was lacking in most of Official Ireland, and Official Italy for that matter — a genuine love of football.
We would see the deep devotion of men such as physio Mick Byrne, for whom this would be a great and solemn ceremony.
We first encountered Mick back at the airport hotel, during that interview with Jack for Hot Press, the one in which Jack called for draconian measures to be taken in the light of the growing environmental scandal of fish-kills caused by slurry being emptied into rivers and lakes. But I had encountered Mick much earlier in my life, watching him scuttling across the muck of St Mel’s Park with his bag of tricks, to treat the injuries of Athlone Town players.
Even as The Town’s physio he cut a most striking figure, as he was clearly fitter than any of the players. And with his evident sincerity, his fierce loyalty to the cause of Ireland, he had now become a ‘character’ in the Charlton story, and a much-loved one. No-one in his right mind would begrudge Mick Byrne his precious moments in the presence of the Pope.
But according to legend, his experience at Italia 90 was not entirely an uplifting one. There is a story told in Andy Townsend’s autobiography, Andy’s Game (written with Paul Kimmage) of a scene which unfolded in the foyer of the hotel in Palermo where the Irish squad was staying before the Egypt match, a scene which allegedly unfolded as follows:
The hotel was quite a modest, family-run operation, and some of the players were becoming increasingly bored. So it happened that players such as Townsend and Tony Cascarino were lounging around the foyer of this hotel, with nothing to engage them except superb models of ships mounted on plinths, which the owner of the hotel had apparently assembled himself, using millions of matchsticks. These ships were the great work of his life.
Seeing the lads so bored, a passing Mick Byrne felt that they needed a bit of diversion. Putting on his best Cockney accent, he began to sing and perform a version of ‘The Lambeth Walk’ for them, there in the foyer. Which they were enjoying, up to a point. They said nothing about it, but they couldn’t help noticing that he was getting so involved in the performance, walking backwards and forwards, that he was getting dangerously close at times to the model ships.
Too close, indeed.
Catastrophically close, as he bumped into one of them, and the whole damn thing was overturned during a climactic moment of the song.
Despite the desperate efforts of Byrne to catch the falling object, the great ship was destroyed.
As he surveyed the wreckage, they say that Byrne’s face was a vision of utter mortification. And then the owner of the hotel, hearing the commotion, burst through the door, to see his beloved matchstick masterpiece lying in ruins. He was screaming in Italian. He was inconsolable. Mick Byrne could only keep repeating his apologies, crucified with shame.
For the footballers who had witnessed the accident, there was only one possible response to this developing crisis — helpless, uncontrollable laughter. In fact, they were laughing so hard, as a thorough professional it may have momentarily occurred to Mick Byrne that they might do themselves an injury here.
But he would have to deal with that another time, as the owner’s wife had now arrived and was equally apoplectic.
‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,’ Mick repeated, as abjectly apologetic as it is possible for any man to be, talking to a stranger in a foreign language.
But then apparently a change started to come over him, because so unforgiving were the owner and his wife, so relentless their wailing and gnashing of teeth, that after about five minutes of this they set something off in the too-noble heart of Mick Byrne. It seems they pushed him over the edge, into anger.
‘I no sorry with you any more,’ he said, a new note of defiance in his voice.
And he left them with this: ‘Fuck you, and fuck your boat.’
——
No psychologist could have relaxed the lads any better than Mick Byrne doing the Lambeth Walk. But it obviously hadn’t worked in Palermo.
We tried to tell ourselves that the total lack of expectation, the very fact that we didn’t need anything else from them, that they owed us nothing at this stage, would perversely bring the best out of the team on the Saturday night in Rome.
George Byrne was in the International on the Friday night when he got a call on the pay-phone from the Hot Press — there was a ticket available for Rome and the Stadio Olimpico, did he want to go? Thus George was at Busarus early next morning, getting the bus out to the airport. An elderly woman put her head around the door and spoke to the driver:
‘Is this the bus to Lough Derg?’ she asked.
As Father Trendy might have put it: ‘And you know, in a way ... it was’.
That lady may well have been the only living Irish person who was thinking about anything except Italy versus Ireland, though the actor Michael James Ford recalls that the Gate Theatre, perhaps taking its spirit of independence a step too far, stayed open that night for its production of Steven Berkoff’s Salome, with cast and crew preoccupied by events in Rome, and an audience with no Irish people in it, just a party of about 40 slightly bewildered American tourists.
But again the head-shrinkers would find it revealing that for many of us, this was going to be something
of a family occasion. I had decided to watch this at home, with Jane and Roseanne, who was now wearing a tiny green Ireland shirt. Looking back, it seems like one of those old photographs from the Second World War, in which the family gathers around the wireless to listen intently to some news of vast importance, concerning the fate of the nation and of the world. No doubt there was a feeling that this was an occasion of such magnitude in the history of Ireland, we would have to experience it together, as a family. It didn’t really occur to me at the time, that there was a tacit acknowledgment here, that the war was over. That literally, we were all going home. That the time had come to return from the front to our loved ones.
Because football, at least if it’s being done properly, is just not a form of family entertainment. The reasons are hard to define, but I guess there is just too much rage in it, too much inexplicable grief to be inflicting on the little ones.
It is not like rugby, where you can see the ladies of Munster at the airport bound for London or Paris to support the guys (always ‘the guys’, never the lads or the fellows, an iron-clad class distinction there) looking forward to a wonderful weekend away, wining and dining and maybe taking in a show. Rugby doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter to the multitudes and it doesn’t even matter a great deal to the aficionados, who are never down for too long after a defeat, because in the end they are all winners, all on the same side, with the upper middle classes, against the common good.
And as for the Official Irelanders who came to the party around the time of Jack, football matters in a way that they do not understand, these dilettantes, these bandwagon-jumpers, these corporate swine.
It is a thing of appalling intensity, a primal thing, at once both an individual and a tribal obsession. And somehow, along with all this borderline savagery, it is also beautiful. Albert Camus knew this, with his line that everything he knew most surely about morality and obligations he had learned from football, and Eamon Dunphy, who would often quote Camus, knew it too.
