Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  And now, through some strange alignment of the planets — or at least the planet football — after decades of this guilt and shame, something happened which would be of benefit to all sides. A serious effort was being made to recruit the likes of Townsend and Houghton and Aldridge, McCarthy and Cascarino, ye gods, the sons and grandsons of emigrants, as swiftly and as legally as possible to the Irish football team.

  In Ireland we called it payback for emigration, conveniently ignoring the fact that we probably weren’t entitled to any payback. And for these players the association with the Republic would be enormously beneficial to their careers.

  Football, which has always been more important than most things in life, had worked a sort of national miracle which politics couldn’t, which religion most certainly couldn’t — a re-unification of Ireland, the best we were ever going to get.

  The arrival of the ‘English’ players gave the diaspora in general a powerful connection to this team of Jack’s, not to mention giving Jack a team which could qualify for the tournaments which had previously eluded it. Dermot Bolger witnessed this at Euro 88, in his play In High Germany: ‘The crowd joined in, every one of them, from Dublin and Cork, from London and Stockholm. And suddenly I knew this was the only country I still owned, those eleven figures in green shirts, that menagerie of accents pleading with God.’

  As for Jack’s own Englishness, for us it had become either an amusing irony or just another fast one we had pulled on them, taking on the ‘gruff Yorkshireman’ who had once applied for the England job and not even received the courtesy of a reply.

  Again, we told ourselves what we wanted to hear, that this was the sort of Englishman we could take orders from, a rough-hewn individual, a plain fellow whose tastes were not unlike our own, though he was also about as English as you can be, in the sense of having an unambiguous devotion to Queen and country.

  Bigger things were happening for us, with a nation re-discovering a part of itself that had been missing, presumed dead. Discovering these weird new phenomena such as luck, and winning, and being part of something that matters.

  Having said all that ... having taken from England the great game of football and taken back the sons that she had nurtured for us and beaten her 1-0 in the opening match of the European Championship, a match which England could have won 5-1, or even 7-2, we did not feel any need to be magnanimous in victory.

  The film-maker Alan Parker, when he was over in Dublin making The Commitments would be deeply disappointed by the wild rejoicing in the saloons of Ireland when anything remotely bad happened to the England football team. Here was the Englishman, Parker, giving opportunities to talented Irish youngsters, making Ireland look and sound better than it actually was, and generally doing us a big favour. And this is how we showed our appreciation. ‘But we support you’, he would say plaintively.

  Indeed, apart from the more obdurate members of the National Front, most England fans would show a benign attitude to the Republic in the big tournaments, even willing them to win, as long as England weren’t involved. Which some of us would automatically see as just patronising and just another demonstration of their lack of awareness of the bitter enmity which is supposed to exist between us.

  And I do not exclude myself from any of this carry-on. I was able to maintain these apparently contradictory positions, with no feelings of remorse.

  At the time I was Anglophile in most things, as were most of the people I knew. We immersed ourselves in English sport and English television and English rock ’n’ roll for most of our lives, because we obviously found it better than whatever we were getting at home and yet, how we laughed at Ten Great England Defeats, one of Arthur Mathews’ more sublime offerings for Hot Press. (Incidentally for the historical record, I should correct the impression that Arthur was a frequent contributor to Hot Press. For a long time he was essentially regarded as a lay-out man who just turned out an article from time to time as the mood took him. Here we had one of the best comedy writers in the world, who was only doing it in his spare time — perhaps another sign there of Paddy not pushing himself.)

  Christmas would see a new edition of Arthur’s ‘The Border Fascist’, a terrifyingly funny and note-perfect version of a provincial paper, with headlines like ‘Belturbet Man Executed in Malaysia’, and an ad for hearing aids in Cootehill: ‘Are You Fucking Deaf?’ And there was the comic strip, ‘Charles J. Haughey’s Believe It Or Not’.

  But the Ten Great England Defeats is what concerns us here. It was the sort of piece that could only have been done by an aficionado, the sort of chap with a suitcase under the bed full of old Drogheda Utd match programmes, someone who knew his football history and who knew England enough to be able to measure out its misery over a period of about 50 years.

  There was the catastrophic 1-0 defeat to the United States in the 1950 World Cup ... the 3-2 defeat to Germany in 1970, in the terrible heat of the World Cup quarter-final in Mexico ... the 1-1 draw with Poland at Wembley, which counts as a defeat because it meant England didn’t qualify for the 1974 World Cup ... the 2-1 defeat by Argentina in the 1986 World Cup — a scoreline which I heard announced by the captain on a flight from Cork to Dublin, as ‘Maradona 2, England 1’, to a raucous cheer from all on board. The 1-0 defeat by the Irish in Stuttgart was of course at Number One.

  To some extent it is beyond reasoned analysis how those of us who had derived so many of life’s pleasures from English sources — Jane McNicholas, the mother of my child, was from England — could be indulging ourselves in this sort of crack. But we will try, anyway, to figure it out.

  For once, we can say that this is not a phenomenon that is peculiar to Paddy. Almost all who have had dealings with England seem to take this wild delight in England defeats in any sport. The Australians in particular are able to actually inflict many of these defeats on the cricket pitch, but then it might be argued that Paddy is involved here too, as large numbers of the Aussies can be regarded as Irish in many ways: Paddy-with-the-sun-on-his-back.

  So there is something universal about this, which suggests it has its roots in psychology as much as in history. Long after the Brits had got the hell out of these countries, England was still fulfilling this role of the cartoon baddie, the hated father figure, the ogre in whose demise we take great delight, mocking him as he is undone yet again by the little guy.

  And the old football hooliganism wasn’t doing them any favours either.

  So everyone had an axe to grind with Johnny England, though in our case, there may even be a benign interpretation. It was perhaps our way of taking the heat out of the conflict, of reducing it from a war to something more like a pantomime. Because of course there was still a war going on, although the ‘armed struggle’ had become so obviously pointless and grotesque, most Irish people were moving away from it anyway, and would not be coming back.

  The young Irish in London in the late 1980s were discovering other ways of keeping in touch with their roots, not least by following The Pogues, who were putting together an inspirational body of work which would re-define Irish musical culture and make it better. You could never listen to the Wolfe Tones again after hearing Rum, Sodomy & the Lash — yes, in the spirit of the times, it seemed right for that magical album to borrow its title from a line of Churchill’s.

  The enthusiasm with which we still celebrated these great England defeats may be seen in the context of an end to the war, rather than its perpetuation. After all that had happened, it would probably have been unnatural just to ‘draw a line under it’, as they say, and to ‘move on’, and behave like perfect gentlemen. So now we were turning it into a form of entertainment, knowing that there would be an almost endless supply of material, not just from the England football team, but from the accompanying circus of TV commentators and patriotic pundits such as Jimmy Hill and horrible tabloid hacks, monstering their own boys for our delectation.

  And there was something deeply funny about the England team of that era, from any perspecti
ve. England was always expecting something that just couldn’t be delivered and wouldn’t be delivered, resulting in a succession of pratfalls which were increasingly hilarious for the ‘neutrals’. For the English themselves, their apparently endless suffering since 1966 and their inability to manage these great expectations had broken them down to such an extent, it had degenerated into something that was manic and hysterical and ultimately quite barking. In fact, their poor manager Bobby Robson would be maddened in every sense of the word during Euro 88 and the Italia 90 campaign which was still ahead of him.

  That would be the same Sir Bobby who eventually became the supremo of ... the Republic of Ireland. Which tells us that either he had forgiven us or we had forgiven him. Or that there wasn’t much badness in it, in the first place.

  We had had our fun and eventually, we really were ready to move on.

  ——

  On the morning after Ireland’s victory in Stuttgart I arrived back in Heathrow having flown through the night from New York — the plane was delayed for hours in JFK, leaving me with no alternative but to begin the celebrations on the ground with a few more cold beers, then show what seemed to me like admirable restraint in the air — while I smoked a few hundred cigarettes as usual I don’t recall being very, very drunk, but then there was such a strange combination of sensations going on: the lack of sleep, the defeat of England, and the beer already on board, I was probably experiencing some disorder of the senses that I had never gone through before.

  I do recall being merry enough to indulge in a bit of banter with a newspaper vendor at Heathrow about what Paddy had done to him the previous day. But he didn’t want to play.

  It seemed to be of vital importance to read as many English papers as possible, to savour their shame and their savagery towards their own boys. So while I waited for the flight back to Dublin, I devoured them all, broadsheet and tabloid. Christ, it was fine stuff. The prevailing theme was that England had not just lost disgracefully, they had lost to a team which was generally characterised as a rag-bag of plodders and journeymen, thrown together by Big Jack in the course of some desperate trawl through the lower regions of the English leagues.

  And Packie Bonner, who played in Scotland, was largely a stranger to them, too, just some geezer who would be going back to the obscurity from whence he came, but who had played like the devil himself, the way that the crazed keeper Tomascevski had played for Poland on another night of sin, a long time ago.

  Had they any idea how much we were enjoying this? Evidently not, but then they didn’t really care about us. They were just using our supposed awfulness as yet another weapon with which to batter Bobby Robson and his pampered superstars such as Kenny Sansom, Gary Stevens and Neil Webb. They had Loadsamoney and we had none, but what good was it to them?

  By now Christy Moore would be finishing off the writing of his new ballad, ‘Joxer Goes To Stuttgart’, and the story was still unfolding. We would face the Soviet Union on Wednesday and Holland the following Saturday. But we did not want to step out of this England reverie yet. We would still have a couple of days to get ourselves up for the Soviets and what Jack called ‘Wor Dutch’, and we had no idea if the lads could get it up again for those challenges.

  Let us not forget that there were only eight teams in this Euro 88, that there was a heightened sense of belonging to an elite, or at least belonging to a group which contained an elite. There was nowhere to turn in that competition without encountering some deeply intimidating prospect, some potential trauma of epochal proportions.

  But since the most terrifying one had passed, what was the worst that could happen to us now? That we would get turned over by the Russians or Wor Dutch? Well, there could be some suffering on the way there, as it was now becoming clear to me, with the papers read, that England had been all over us to such an extent that most men who had lived through it would never be the same again.

  Soon I would be hearing of men drinking savagely all the way through that match, drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, beseeching the gods to stop the pain. If Gary Lineker and John Barnes could do that to us, what could Ruud Gullit and Marco Van Basten do?

  So rarefied was this competition, that even after winning the first match, we might still not even qualify from the group. After all our hard work breaking the hearts of the English, would it make no difference in the end on the old scoreboard? After all that, would we be flying home from Germany on the same day as those poor unfortunate men?

  Right now we could live with that. We had not entirely lost sight of the facts of football life, so we knew that we just weren’t as good as Wor Dutch, that we mightn’t be quite on the same page as the Russians, who had actually beaten Wor Dutch 1-0, and after what England had done to us, and what we had gotten away with, we wondered in quiet moments if we were any good at all — for Paddy, even as he received the love and the admiration of a grateful world, the old demons would still be gnawing away at him.

  One recalled a moment of spontaneous hilarity at Lansdowne during the match against Bulgaria in the qualifiers, when Mick McCarthy had embarked on something of an unlikely solo run and a shout had gone up from the stand, ‘Show them your class, Mick!’

  And it wasn’t just the crowd that laughed. Mick himself no doubt saw the funny side of it, the truth in it.

  Ah, yes, at some deep level, we knew our place.

  And then as the Republic duly went up against the Soviet Union (or ‘the might of the Soviet Union’ to give them their full title) the strangest thing of all happened.

  We got good.

  That night in Hanover will always be encapsulated in the image of McCarthy’s long throw-in to Ronnie Whelan and Ronnie’s volley to the top corner of the net, and his fist-pumping celebration.

  For Jack it would have been almost the perfect goal, virtually no fannying around at any point of the proceedings, though if Mick had managed to throw it straight into the net, with maybe a tiny deflection to make it legal, all the better.

  Yet the effort from Ronnie was glorious, reminding us that no-one ever laughed when Ronnie went on a solo run, no-one ever shouted ‘Show them your class!’ Ronnie was all class, a first-rate player with the best club side in the world, one of those awkward little facts which upset the preferred tabloid narrative of the rag-bag of plodders and journeymen.

  Liam Brady would have added to the confusion except he had been injured in the run-up to Euro 88 and would probably not have made it anyway due to a suspension for a red card against Bulgaria.

  Jack would later say that he was delighted with Liam in that match, that ‘the penny had finally dropped with Liam’, that Liam had now put aside all that shit he used to do for Juventus, and was playing as Jack wanted him to play, taking the ball from the front players, rather than taking it from the defence and building it from there. And generally fannying around. But even though Liam had seen the light, it was generally felt that Jack wasn’t entirely gutted when Liam couldn’t make it, after all he had contributed to the cause, and the things that he had seen.

  And this performance against the Soviet Union would crystallise a conflict which would grow deeper as time went by.

  We were now starting to accept that we had always had these players of the highest class, but that Jack had forged them into a unit that could compete and win and not be afraid of anyone. But in doing that, perhaps he would deny them the freedom to move to a higher level, maybe even to play like Wor Dutch, who had never made any distinction between the desire to play good football and the desire to win, who believed, in fact, that you couldn’t have one without the other and who had been vindicated in this belief, many times.

  The Republic played good football against the Soviet Union that night. But we didn’t win. Yes, we were good, but they still equalised with a soft goal with fifteen minutes to go. And we should have had a penalty when Galvin was fouled by the fabled keeper Dasayev.

  For a moment there, we were back in hell again, back in the days when Stapleton
would be scoring against France and against Belgium, and having it ruled out for no reason. Back in the days of Brussels in the pouring rain and Bulgarian prostitutes.

  But God, we were good that night in Hanover. And why wouldn’t we be good, with Ronnie on the park and Kevin Sheedy and Chris Hughton and Tony Galvin, and Aldo knocking them in, or not, as the case may be? Houghton could play a bit, and Kevin Moran would not be found wanting in any situation, in sport or in life itself.

  This indeed, was becoming apparent, too, about the Boys In Green — they were not just good, they were also ‘good lads’, as the football man would have it. They were generally bright guys, they had a bit of character, they gave the impression they had not been created in some test-tube in a football laboratory, but that they had lived a bit — in the case of Big Paul, maybe they had lived a bit too much. Which still didn’t stop him making an enormous contribution.

  Paul had a header cleared off the line in the group decider against Wor Dutch in Gelsenkirchen. And he played in midfield, as distinct from the centre-half role in which he would appear to be playing the opposition entirely on his own, anticipating everything and stopping it without ever apparently feeling the need to fall back on the more old-fashioned football tricks, such as running.

  But the Republic on the whole were not good that day, and Wor Dutch were not much better. I watched it at home in the flat in Dun Laoghaire on a small television — I would never watch a match on such a small television again. My friend George Byrne had gone to Germany, and he would recall sitting outside the ground after the match, being consoled by a Dutch couple. Again and again the crazy ricochet from Kieft which sent the ball looping and spinning past Packie, kept running in his head, along with this tormenting mantra: ‘Seven minutes ... seven minutes ...’ Mercifully he was unaware that the baleful gods had thrown in another sickener, what with Van Basten being in an offside position and unquestionably interfering with play, for Kieft’s ridiculous goal.