Days of Heaven

by Declan Lynch

  One image above all was engraved on our consciousness and would become the next cover of Hot Press. It was the expression on Packie’s face as he launched that huge kick in the general direction of Sheedy, the gritted teeth, a look of ferocious determination that we would not be beaten, that we would get ourselves out of this by sheer force of will.

  Twice now, in major finals, we had come through this horrible ordeal and we were still standing, with Packie again the symbol of the resistance to England, either keeping them out in Stuttgart, or leading the charge in Sardinia.

  If someone had come in at that moment and told us that this wasn’t the right way to play football, that we were virtually bringing the game into disrepute with our brutalist style, we would have laughed. And we would have laughed scornfully at that critic who didn’t seem to get it, who didn’t understand that after all we’d been through, the result was the only thing that counted.

  This is what success, or at least the absence of failure, was doing to us. And maybe this was our first glimpse of the spirit of the fat years that were to follow, this hard-headedness, this utter indifference about what you had to do, if you wanted to get ahead.

  To hell with them all, we thought. We were claiming our little slice of happiness now, and not only were we not ashamed of the way we were playing, we revelled in it.

  We revelled in it at least until Sunday.

  I was still revelling in it the following day, when the intensity of the hangover took me out of the house on Sinnott Terrace and around the corner to the Cumberland Inn for the cure.

  It is one of those surreal scenes which remains with me from that time of high surrealism, sitting in the Cumberland Inn in Dun Laoghaire at noon, drinking a pint of lager while the television showed a video of the match from the night before.

  Drinking at noon, in the company of other happy drinkers and not feeling bad about it.

  Drinking at noon and feeling that I was not alone, but taking part in some great national drink-a-thon, in which I was just playing my small-but-necessary part. And actually feeling better about everything, the morning after.

  Later, I had to go to the Burlington Hotel to interview Philomena Begley for the Sunday Independent. So it was all getting a bit otherworldly. And stranger still, Jane and Roseanne and I were not just living in a house, we were living in a house with a phone in it. I have a distinct memory of ringing people up, just to tell them that I was talking to them on a phone that wasn’t coin-operated.

  And most bizarrely, the man who owned the house had been casually mentioning that he might be interested in selling it to us. For about £70,000, which seemed like an awful lot of money for a really small terraced house, even if it was in Dun Laoghaire. But we had gone to the local EBS anyway, just to talk about it, to see if it could be done. Apparently it could, though it was probably too big a step to contemplate when you’re still getting used to the novelty of having a home-phone installed. But sitting there in the EBS manager’s office, talking telephone numbers, was something we probably needed to do anyway, a rite of passage.

  Again, I need to stress how deeply unnatural it felt to be even thinking of borrowing a large five-figure sum to buy a house, a procedure which, in a few years’ time, would be regarded by most couples as a routine transaction, just to pay for the extension. In the fullness of time, a couple would be quite happy to borrow about half-a-million to buy a house just like the one in Sinnott Terrace, which we would eventually decide not to buy for 70 grand.

  Not that such trivialities were uppermost in my mind, coming down after Cagliari and getting up again for Philomena Begley.

  Credit was flowing all over the place, with the Credit Union now becoming a national joke in the best possible way, advancing a few quid here and a few quid there for vital life-saving operations, an extraordinarily high percentage of which would be taking place on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, with follow-up procedures on the mainland of Italy itself. It was estimated at one stage that an evacuation of 30,000 people was taking place, that the Paddies were arriving in Italy from all over the world, many of them seeking specialist treatments which were only to be had in the finest facilities in Cagliari and Palermo, in Genoa and Rome.

  Haughey would eventually be arriving on the government jet, apparently not minding any more that we were all living above our means. Not that he had minded much in the first place. But perhaps for the first time there was a sense that it wasn’t just people like Haughey who could enjoy themselves on someone else’s dime, that Paddy the postman and Paddy the bus conductor and Paddy who didn’t actually work at all, could open a line of credit just to go off on the tear. And not feel bad about it.

  Because there was a growing understanding of something that the rich had always known, that enjoying yourself is not necessarily a waste of time and money. That having a laugh is good for the soul, and that if enough people are doing it at the same time, it is good for the country. And if you need a mortgage to play your part, so be it.

  No more would it be considered sinful to be borrowing money for reasons that would once have been regarded as unorthodox, or even downright peculiar. We were starting to realise there was such a thing as an ‘intangible benefit’, that a dose of money could give a boost to your morale or to your sense of belonging that even poor Paddy was entitled to, enjoying the sheer fun of having a few quid in his pocket and of going off to Italy — yes, we were showering ourselves with intangible benefits, albeit at the relatively modest levels permitted at the time by the most prudent financial institutions.

  Paddy had always had a profligate streak, but unlike the rich, he could not rightly indulge it without also being visited by feelings of guilt and shame. So this wasn’t just about the willingness to get ourselves into a bit of debt, for something that might be regarded as frivolous. It was perhaps the moment when Paddy felt good enough about himself to declare that he would decide what was frivolous, and what was not. He, and not the Bank of Ireland or even the good old Credit Union, would make that judgment call. Maybe we were learning how to live a bit.

  Now we just had to learn how to afford it.

  ——

  But first I had to interview Philomena Begley, an oddly poignant occasion in the circumstances. Philomena was one of those legends of Irish entertainment who had become about as successful as you can be, in Ireland. She was a first-rate country singer who had recorded some really classy duets with Ray Lynam, in the style of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. And yet even the most accomplished of those showband musicians would somehow never have the confidence to write their own material, to assert themselves as artists the way that the rockers would. They did not dare to ask for too much, perhaps out of fear that it would all be taken away from them, for their impertinence. Why would they need to be making it in Britain or in America, in the places that mattered, when they had a fine house in the midlands with ornamental guitars on the gate and enough time on their hands to be playing golf four times a week?

  So on such a day, when everything seemed possible for the Republic of Ireland, it was like remembering old times to be talking to one of those who had always settled for less. And I had the advantage of viewing her through this shimmering haze of alcohol in which I, and most of my countrymen and many of my countrywomen, too, were becoming enveloped.

  It was an advantage, at least, as long as we were winning, or not getting beaten by England. But it was about to get a tad more complicated, because Egypt would unexpectedly draw 1-1 with Holland.

  And it would get more complicated still, in Palermo.

  ——

  How bad were we, in Palermo, against Egypt? It is hard to quantify, because we weren’t doing much that was essentially different to what we usually did. We got a scoreless draw, which would normally do us, but we needed something a bit more than that to calm the nerves.

  It was now becoming clear that Jack’s methods worked best when the other team was trying to play football and we were trying to stop them —
because usually we would succeed. And ideally we would both get the result that we needed and we would move on.

  We would succeed because the system was all about the avoidance of risk, but also because most of the players were pretty good, and some of them were exceptional. In fact, George Byrne and I would get through a fair few slow evenings in the International comparing the Republic first eleven to the England first eleven, and invariably arriving at the conclusion that the Republic was better, not just as a unit, but man for man — the same could not be said of any Irish team before or since. Even Andy Townsend, who was preferred by Jack though he was clearly not in the same class as, say, Ronnie Whelan, would have been coveted by the England team of that time.

  So by convincing these good players to do all the things he wanted them to do when they didn’t have the ball, Jack’s team became damnably hard to beat. But when they did have the ball, as they did against Egypt, it seemed that they had forgotten what to do with it.

  Not that Jack was a vociferous opponent of good football — he was cuter than that in getting his way. For example, when the lads went a bit mad on that night in Hanover and started playing football against the Russians, Jack didn’t intervene and call a halt to it. He let it happen, because it was clearly working for him. But the players also knew that the moment it went wrong, Jack would be on their case.

  It tends to work like this — players will want to play if they are encouraged to play, if they feel that they’re allowed to make a mistake and still carry on playing creatively and constructively, but if they are not encouraged, if they know they will get hammered as soon as anything goes wrong, eventually they will just do what the boss tells them to do. By now, any of that footballing spirit had been drained out of the Republic, so that even a sudden eruption in the style of Hanover was no longer feasible. They had every other type of spirit, but not the type that creates a goal for you against an obdurate opponent such as Egypt.

  So how bad were we?

  Well, for the purposes of this book I did something that very few Irish people have ever done before — I actually looked again at Ireland’s matches in Italia 90, all the way through.

  And I did it completely sober.

  Dion Fanning happened to have the videos stashed away as souvenirs of the time, rather than for football reasons. For we know that this story is not really about football, as such, but there was a certain element of football involved in it, and it’s all still on tape.

  And it is bad, bad, bad stuff.

  So much of it reminds you of that old line about two bad teams having an off-day. Even the best bits, such as the goal against England or the other one we would score against Holland, seem to exemplify the barbarity of it all, the shameless punting of the ball up the park, in the hope of getting a lucky break and forcing it into the net somehow and then running round like men possessed, ‘Until our legs were worn down to stumps,’ as John Aldridge put it, killing the game.

  Football had been going through a bad time for several years leading up to Italia 90, and not just because of the ’ooligans. The European Cup Final of 1986 is remembered as an abomination, a rock-bottom moment when men realised that the game was in very deep trouble, with Barcelona trying to play a bit of football against Steaua Bucharest and eventually giving up, the both of them settling for extra time and penalties which, with a sinister inevitability, were won by Steaua.

  Later we learned that the team was the plaything of Nicu Ceauşescu, son of the dictator, and that the goalkeeper, Duckadam, who saved the penalties, had been given a present of a Porsche by a rich guy who was a fanatical supporter of Real Madrid, so delighted was he that they had beaten Madrid’s mortal enemies, Barcelona. According to legend, when they got back behind the Iron Curtain, Nicu demanded that Duckadam give him the car, and when the goalkeeper declined, his fingers were broken by Nicu’s enforcers.

  It is a legend that I don’t want to believe, and yet in the times that were in it, you could easily believe such things.

  It wasn’t just that teams were playing cynically for penalties because they weren’t capable of playing any other way, it seemed that they were playing this anti-football even when they were well able to play the game properly.

  There was always a touch of blackguardism in teams from the old Eastern bloc, and it had stopped them winning anything of consequence — though they were always producing footballers with superb technique, they somehow preferred to do it the cynical way, the wrong way.

  Now at last it seemed to be working for them, with Steaua’s graceless victory. And it was in this global context that the game itself was being scrutinised in a fundamental way, to see if it could be made more difficult for the cynics, if it could be reformed.

  At this dark time for the game, here came the Republic achieving ominous levels of success with the goalkeeper as playmaker, playing this strange and horrible football, which to the aficionados looked as cynical as anything out of Ceauşescu’s Romania — without the little flashes of class.

  We were doing it the wrong way — except to us, the best fans in the world, there was no wrong way to do this extraordinary thing that we were doing. Perhaps only Irish people truly understood where it was coming from, this hybrid of Gaelic football and Association football, this first truly successful Compromise Rules format. For years the GAA and the Australian Rules organisations had been trying to combine aspects of their two codes, creating a new game which seemed only to bring out the worst in all concerned, resulting in scenes of grotesque violence and chaos on an unprecedented scale.

  Now Jack had stumbled onto this new code, in which you didn’t have to change the shape of the ball, but like the Aussies trying to get accustomed to the round ball, the ‘soccer’ players would have to set aside a lot of what came naturally to them, in order to avail of the best of the Gaelic code — most notably, the incessant chasing and harrying, and the high, lobbing, dropping balls sent up the field by Packie. Helpfully, Packie had played a lot of Gaelic football in his youth And so had Niall Quinn, who would often be there at the other end to ‘pull’ on Packie’s dropping balls.

  Maybe we helped to change the game of football for good, because this would be the last World Cup before the introduction of three points for a win to discourage draws, and the new back-pass rule, which meant that the keeper would have far fewer opportunities to settle himself and take his time before launching it into the firmament.

  Looking back, FIFA never did bend the rules to have us play in Boston or Chicago or Rome, but maybe they changed the rules for all time, with us at least partly in mind.

  Maybe we drove them to it.

  ——

  If there was one game in which attitudes hardened irretrievably, it was in Palermo when we got together with Egypt to produce one of the worst games of professional football ever seen.

  It is perhaps a mark of my inexplicable complacency that I had opted to watch this one on the big screen upstairs in the Purty Kitchen, that Liam and Arthur and I hadn’t precisely replicated our arrangements of the previous Monday, up to and including the cold cuts and the cherry tomatoes and maybe even the couch going on fire.

  I can only say in my defence that there seemed to be good ju-ju in the Purty Loft for me, as it was there I had watched us slaughtering Norn Iron 3-0 in the qualifying group — or at least slaughtering them in the second half.

  And all around the country, all around the world indeed, wherever green is worn, they were gathering at such venues, the most celebrated of which was the Submarine Bar in Crumlin. So successful had the proprietors been in creating an Italia-90 atmosphere, that street traders had set up stalls outside the pub, selling hats and flags and favours. Extra security staff had to be hired to stop people climbing through the windows of the Conservatory Lounge. A full-sized goal was erected on the flat roof with flashing green, white and gold lights and a dummy goalkeeper who at one point was reported stolen — he had been smuggled into the ladies’ toilet, causing some drunken consternation
.

  It seemed that you’d be missing some vital part of the experience, if you didn’t watch at least one of the matches on a big screen somewhere, if you didn’t move beyond your circle of friends to embrace the wider community — we were all friends now. Though I have never much liked the big-screen deal, not just because of the foul memories of Palermo, but because the pubs are full of people who know nothing about football and who keep reacting in the wrong way to the wrong things: they will start roaring with anticipation, seeing a shot that can’t possibly result in the goal that they are preparing to hail and most damningly, they have even been known to cheer wildly to celebrate a goal that they think has been scored — even when it’s just about to hit the bar and rebound to safety.

  I am maddened by these people because they disturb my ancient rhythms, which are already disturbed enough by the tension and by the effects of alcohol. And you would hear things like this: the Egyptians won’t be able to cope with the long ball from Packie because they come from a sandy country, where the ball doesn’t bounce the same way — this was a popular pre-match analysis in the Purty Loft in the feverish moments before kick-off.

  The weather was beautiful in Dublin that day. There were flags and bunting and even kerbstones being painted green, white and orange — were we seeing a touch of Englishness here? It is said that in one Dublin church, the priest and the altar boys were dressed in green and white garments and as the Mass came to an end the priest addressed the people: ‘My friends, I’m sure that the hearts of every person in Ireland will be with our team and supporters this afternoon. Let me finish off this Mass by asking you to join in a special hymn.’ The priest then took a tricolour from underneath the pulpit, began waving it and singing and the whole congregation joined in: ‘Olé! Olé! Olé!’