Days of Heaven (20 page)

Which we did not do.

It can even be argued that Jack invented a new code, a sort of Compromise Rules game which perfectly combined aspects of Gaelic football with a smattering of Association Football, again
demonstrating Jack’s almost spooky compatibility with Paddy, how two dreams met. Aided by the back-pass rule which, in 1990, still allowed the ball to be kicked back to the keeper and the
keeper to pick it up with his hands and to kick it up the park at his leisure, just like a Gaelic player, Jack had absolutely no problem with the notion that Packie Bonner might be our
‘playmaker’ — receiving the ball from the defenders and booting it as far away from his own goal as possible, hopefully towards an Irish player. But that wasn’t important
— as long as it was up the other end, according to Jack, the other crowd wouldn’t be scoring.

But how were we to score?

Just as Jack’s brutal experiment seemed to be going down in the mud and the blood of Cagliari, just as we were facing the truth, asking ourselves how in the name of God we were going to
get anything out of this game with Packie hoofing the ball up the park to no-one in particular, the answer came — from Packie hoofing the ball up the park to no-one in particular.

In this case the recipient happened to be a member of his own team, Kevin Sheedy, who mis-controlled it towards Steve McMahon of England, just on the edge of his own area. It would be a goal as
horrible in its creation as the England goal, since it was essentially made by a player on each side losing the ball, and all as a consequence of Packie’s massive punt. Yet in execution it
was beautiful.

In one instinctive and decisive movement, Sheedy had stolen it from McMahon and swept it with his educated left foot into the bottom right-hand corner of the net.

All of Ireland, and all Irish people all around the world, went mad with joy.

In Crosthwaite Park, we jumped around the room, roaring savagely.

At the
RDS
they would be seen erupting in drunken ecstasy, both in still photographs and in
RTÉ
pictures which captured this instant
transformation from sombreness to crazy jubilation.

People who did not know one another hugged and kissed. Men told other men that they loved them.

Arthur appeared to be prostrate, in a quasi-Islamic posture, as if giving thanks to a personal God. At some point in the mêlée, my cigarette was extinguished and it was only when
smoke was later seen billowing from the couch that we realised where the lit end had gone. Not that we cared about burning couches. Even if it was the one that Bono had sat on, telling old showband
stories.

On the pitch, the reaction of Steve Staunton seemed especially demented, perhaps the Dundalk man in him responding with that extra bit of fervour to the blow which had been struck against the
old enemy.

But there was still about 20 minutes to go. I can’t recall any thought in our heads other than the thought of hanging on somehow. If the result stayed as it was, we would
‘win’. It was not for us to be playing for an actual win at this stage, it was down to England to chase the victory which was the least expected of them by their unhappy followers and
their demented newspapermen.

We were looking for a different sort of victory. One that would be celebrated with as much fervour as the Miracle of Stuttgart, though the dynamic was somewhat different. In Stuttgart we had
been hanging on somehow for almost the entire match, whereas in Cagliari we had created a new narrative, one of redemption, of rescuing ourselves from the darkest fate imaginable. In Stuttgart the
Fear that England might score had been total and undiluted until the final whistle; in Cagliari that particular Fear had gone early doors and we had moved into a new realm of dread from which we
were rescued so fabulously by the Sheedy goal.

And now, of course, there was 20 minutes of a whole new form of dread to be endured. I recall dreading Gazza most of all, Gazza who seemed to be the only man in Sardinia on that night with any
real interest in playing football and who was clearly capable of it too, which was especially worrying.

But we got away with it. And we felt that we were in good standing again with the baleful gods when the replay showed that Alan McLoughlin had been in an off-side position and that our goal
might have been disallowed. Twelve years later, as he neared the end of his career with Forest Green Rovers, McLoughlin would tell Jon Henderson of
The Observer
that he knew he was offside:
‘I quickly wheeled away to the right, and it was only after I’d run about ten yards, when I saw the linesman had kept his flag down, that I knew I’d got away with it.’

Fifty-thousand replays later, he was still clearly offside. But the goal would still stand.

How many times has the average Irish person seen the replay of that goal? From the kick-out by Bonner to the joust between Sheedy and MacMahon, to the ball flashing past Peter Shilton and then
the players messily celebrating and the Green Army going berserk on the terraces it takes about 20 seconds. How many hours of our lives have we spent looking at that 20 seconds, indulging in what
recovering alcoholics describe as ‘euphoric recall?’

It is an apt description in the circumstances, as so many of us happened to be drunk at the time.

So we are euphorically recalling the goal and we are also recalling being drunk and the whole country apparently being drunk along with us.

Dion Fanning, remarkably, was sober on the night, presumably due to that slight complication of the Leaving starting the following morning. So he has a clear memory of getting into his car after
the match with his brother Evan and driving from Dun Laoghaire into Dublin, blowing the horn.

He believes he was the first person in Dun Laoghaire, maybe the first person in Dublin to start blowing the horn, or at least he didn’t hear anyone else blowing the horn until he started
doing it himself. Maybe this was the horn we heard in Crosthwaite Park, one of many unfamiliar noises, the irresistible sound of people taking to the streets, the sound of
fiesta
.

Dion says the journey into town was unlike any we had known in this Republic, where men tended to blow their horns in delight only on their way to a wedding reception, fired up by the thrilling
prospect of drinking for the rest of the day with a cast-iron excuse. With horns blaring and flags waving we might have been in some country where the people are unashamedly demonstrative, maybe
somewhere in Latin America. But for the absence of indiscriminate gunfire, we might have been in Cameroon.

Such a night ...

And there was the promise of more, with qualification from Group F now looking almost certain. Having come through this terrifying trial, we could only see good things happening
in our next match against Egypt on Sunday. And we felt it reasonable to assume that Egypt would be beaten by Holland in their opening match the following night and then beaten by England in the
third match, what with England needing the points after what we’d done to them tonight.

As we slumped in Crosthwaite Park, elated and utterly exhausted, euphoric recall was heaped upon euphoric recall, the images of this night already assuming the status of sacred icons.

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.