Days of Heaven (19 page)

Anything which seemed to upset the natural order, boded well.

The saps were rising.

The
BBC
had picked ‘Nessun Dorma’ as its signature tune for Italia 90, a stroke of executive genius which would be almost unimaginable in the
BBC
of today.

You would hear it said by its detractors that for decades, the
BBC
tended to be over-staffed with cravat-wearing characters who had one decent idea back in 1968 and then
popped out for a drink, and hadn’t been seen in the office since. Mind you, that one idea would have been something like ... ‘What about sending old Attenborough up the jungle for a
while, and seeing what happens?’ Or, ‘As regards Association Football, say, an hour of highlights on Saturday night when the working classes have relaxed themselves with a few
ales?’ The idea of having Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’ as the theme song for Italia 90 could only have come from that
BBC
tradition of leisurely
enlightenment. Perhaps with a touch of alcoholic enlightenment on the side.

In retrospect, we can see that it was perhaps the last hurrah of that tradition, before the Corporation became inhabited by smaller minds and smaller men. Today it would be argued that the song
is too upmarket or that the young people couldn’t relate to it, or there’s nothing in it for women, or some such bollocks.

Of course it captivated viewers from the start and sent Pavarotti to Number 2 in the
UK
charts (‘World in Motion’ was at Number 1). And more than this, it
gave the impression that it was Pavarotti who had caught a break here, that his art was being honoured by its association with the great art of football, and not the other way round — an
impression which Pavarotti, to his credit, appeared to endorse.

So the
BBC
opening sequence had the fat man singing, along with pictures of the opera and of nymphettes dancing around the globe and then the true art, images of Pele
punching the air to celebrate his goal in the World Cup Final in 1970, and of Johan Cruyff giving some unfortunate full-back twisted blood, and of Maradona hurdling a tackle, and ... and
there’s Ronnie Whelan, after scoring against the
USSR
.

We were there, appearing in the same movie as those guys. It had been confirmed by the
BBC
itself.

The sequence finished with the famous celebration by Marco Tardelli, scorer of the third goal for Italy in their 3-1 win over Germany in the Final of 1982. Running towards the touchline, his
arms spread wide, shaking his head from side to side as if to savour all the incandescence of the moment, he is a vision of male ecstasy out of the Renaissance. The same Tardelli is now Assistant
Manager of the Republic of Ireland.

Des Lynam was the
BBC
anchorman, still representing its urbane traditions in his own way, before he moved to
ITV
and — as always happened by
some mysterious law of
TV
nature — lost his aura overnight by the mere fact of moving from the Corporation to the ‘commercial’ outfit.

The fever was upon us now.

Italy beat Austria 1-0 in the Stadio Olimpico on the Saturday night, generating an atmosphere in Rome which they would try to maintain throughout the tournament, a succession of luminous
football nights which would convince the world that all World Cups should be held in Italy.

We did not need any convincing.

The winning goal was scored late in the game by the substitute, one Salvatore (Totò) Schillaci. He had not started the game, yet he looked like a star, with all these stereotypical
Italian qualities of
brio
and
braggadoccio
.

And we were playing in this thing, on Monday.

We kept hearing of men who, swept away with the excitement, abandoned all their responsibilities and borrowed money under false pretences from the Credit Union to go to Italy. And it was always
the Credit Union, not American Express or Mastercard — Paddy had yet to discover the magic of plastic. One can only surmise that the Credit Unions of Ireland at the time were staffed with
unworldly people, who were unable to make the connection between this wave of borrowing and the amount of money a man might need to get to Italy and to drink wildly for about ten days. And perhaps
even to come back.

We learned something then, about the extent of the black economy. And about the resourcefulness of the people when their country needed them.

In Roddy Doyle’s novel
The Van
, the unemployed Jimmy Rabbitte Snr and his best friend Bimbo become entrepreneurs during Italia 90, when Bimbo buys a broken-down chip van. There
would be a great demand for fish and chips and batterburgers and chips and spice burgers and chips and breast of chicken and chips and curry sauce at this time. And Italia 90 would be a constant
source of drunken banter with all the Italian-Irish chip-shop proprietors.

People who had no money, found money. They would sell a leather jacket. They would bring a bunch of albums to Freebird Records on Grafton Street or to the Basement Record and Tape Exchange on
Bachelors Walk. They would sell a tumble drier or a cow.

But there was also a growing belief at home that if you went to Italy for the World Cup, you might miss it.

W
e got it into our heads that there should be a buffet, with cold cuts.

This being the occasion of Ireland’s first ever appearance in the World Cup, we felt that something special was needed, some gesture on our part, some effort to eat. Maybe we were trying
to maintain a façade of civilisation in an increasingly primitive environment, but we probably just liked saying ‘cold cuts’, after hearing it in some movie. And it sounded a bit
more Mediterranean than ham. Given the intensity of the night’s promise, it had a pleasantly ludicrous ring to it: ‘cold cuts’.

The plan was, Arthur Mathews and I would go to Liam’s flat, the old place on Crosthwaite Park, and there we would partake of cold cuts, but mostly of cold beer and then we would watch
whatever awaited us down there in Cagliari. Which we guessed might remove any appetite we had for cold cuts, for ham, salami, chorizo, German sausage, or food of any kind.

We guessed right.

But to prepare our palates for it, Arthur and I began the build-up in the Purty Kitchen in Dun Laoghaire, where the afternoon match was being shown on the television — the big screen was
up on the next floor, awaiting the evening crowd.

The afternoon match was Scotland v Costa Rica, which we suspected might provide us with just about the perfect pre-match entertainment, and which didn’t disappoint us in any way. In fact,
Scotland exceeded all our expectations by losing 0-1 to Costa Rica, a result that would help Costa Rica into the last 16. It was such a comfort to know that whatever happened to us in Cagliari,
there was always someone worse off than us, a nation of chronically unfortunate men who would be doomed forever to watch their team doing things like this, losing to Costa Rica and then beating
Holland, or maybe Brazil, but too late to do them any good. Or scoring a late winner in Bulgaria to put someone else through.

The Fear was growing inside of us, but the combination of the drink and the Scots was helping us to cope. We loved those guys, for what they were giving us — a comic opera that had been
running forever, and that will never close.

But we didn’t want to be joining them in it, on this night.

We were sick with The Fear as we walked to the other side of Dun Laoghaire to partake of the buffet. Or not as the case may be.

It was an admirable spread, in many ways, and many compliments were given to Liam but I can’t recall actually eating any of it. I was growing increasingly disillusioned with eating in
general, at the time. Though I noted that Liam had added a bowl of these things called cherry tomatoes, which were only starting to become popular in Ireland at that time — he confessed that
the aspect of the cherry tomato which most appealed to him was that it required no cooking of any kind, to be enjoyed. The celebrity chef had yet to become a significant figure in our society.

RTÉ
didn’t have ‘Nessun Dorma’ but they were getting a feel for the ferocity of the people’s passion.

Football men have always said that the litmus test of football’s true popularity in Ireland is when
GAA
fixtures are cancelled because they clash with a big
football match. Now concerts in Dublin by the likes of Mick Jagger and Prince were being cancelled, and
RTÉ
seemed to ‘get’ it, capturing the
country’s mania for football by filming school kids all over the country, singing ‘Give It A Lash, Jack’ and ‘Olé Olé Olé’. For those of us who
had sat in the International that day, waiting for Bulgaria to beat Scotland, or who had heard Éamonn MacThomáis declaring that Brian Boru was the only fella who could beat them
Danes, this was a charming development. But we knew that the little ones couldn’t possibly understand the true gravity of the situation, as we watched them singing their songs with just a few
minutes to go until kick-off.

Down at the
RDS
, a huge crowd was watching it on a suitably huge screen, and drinking a lot of lager. There was no doubt now that this was the biggest communal event
since the visit of the Pope, or perhaps even the Eucharistic Congress of 1932, except now we had this thing called free will.

And the Leaving Cert was starting the following day. A few hundred yards away from Crosthwaite Park, Dion Fanning was watching Giles and Dunphy making their closing remarks, knowing that
whatever the outcome, he would be going to an exam hall the following day for the first English paper, no doubt quipping good-naturedly that if he wasn’t defeated by the English this evening,
he would certainly be defeated in the morning.

Fanning, who last appeared in our narrative as a nine-year-old tearing up that picture of the hated referee Nazare, is now a friend and a colleague of Liam Mackey’s in the press box. But
on the opening night of Italia 90 he had an even heavier burden to carry than the rest of us — on the morning after, no-one was going to ask us to discuss the character of Othello or to
furnish written evidence that we had been reading
Pride and Prejudice
in the approved fashion.
Juno and the Paycock
was also on that year, though there is probably a tad more pleasure
to be had getting drunk with the cast on Broadway, than composing an essay on O’Casey’s use of Hiberno-English in an exam hall.

Yes, there is always someone worse off than yourself.

But it didn’t feel like that when Gary Lineker scored for England after only eight minutes, somehow knocking a cross from Chris Waddle past Packie and finishing it with himself and Mick
McCarthy in a heap in the net.

That was the coldest cut of all.

It was a horrible goal, scored in horrible weather, rain and thunder which we originally thought would have no effect on us: conditions were not good for football, but since we knew that Ireland
had no intention of playing football anyway, we thought that if anything this would be to our advantage.

Now, it just reinforced our grief, thinking of how it would surely crush the spirits of the lads on the park and of course our brethren behind the cages on the terraces who had gone to Cagliari
to show their Christian goodness and superiority to the ’ooligans. And who, we imagined, would now have had to listen to their hideous triumphalism, their cries of ‘No Surrender to the
IRA
’ and other finely crafted satirical barbs.

And yet when that goal went in, there was what Norman Mailer has called the strange sense of relief you feel when everything has turned to total catastrophe. Once the thing that is giving you
The Fear has happened, and happened so soon, you know at least that you need no longer fear it.

But it didn’t look good.

We could no longer cheat reality, as we had cheated it in Stuttgart. Packie couldn’t keep the English out forever, and the ugliness of the goal seemed to suggest that the baleful gods were
giving them something back for the miseries of Euro 88.

If there was any luck going around we felt it was the Irish that needed it, not an England team with John Barnes and Lineker and Gazza himself. So when the gods started doling it out to Gary
Lineker, giving him perhaps the only goal of his career which he effectively chested into the net from several yards out, we wondered just how ugly this was going to get. And we knew we needed to
score, at least once. Which confronted us with one of the more painful realities of Jack’s system, the fact that it wasn’t really about us scoring, it was about the other team not
scoring.

High on the improbability of it all, we had been making the best of it and celebrating this idea of putting ’em under pressure, celebrating it indeed with a full studio production by Larry
Mullen Junior. But even the lager-maddened throng at the
RDS
could not entirely escape the reality that some day we might need a goal, very badly. And that the best of way
of scoring a goal, usually, is by playing something that resembles football.