Days of Heaven (21 page)

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 Ceau
ş
escu, 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 Ceau
ş
escu’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!’

In his pre-match analysis, Eamon Dunphy had this vision: ‘This is for the whole country,’ he said, ‘And the team is a catalyst. The character of our people out there, the team
... they haven’t had one yellow card. And the way we’ve celebrated the whole thing is glorious and golden and it’s for every single person, all the kids, all the players,
everybody’s involved and everybody’s made a contribution.’

But it was the post-match analysis that would hit the spot.

‘Anyone who sends a team out to play like that should be ashamed of themselves’, he said. ‘We know about the upside of Jack. We know how hard these lads work. We know about
their courage. But football is a two-sided game, when you haven’t got the ball and when you have got the ball. When we got the ball we were cowardly, ducking out of taking responsibility.

‘I feel embarrassed for soccer, embarrassed for the country, embarrassed for all the good players, for our great tradition in soccer. This is nothing to do with the players who played
today. That’s a good side. I feel embarrassed and ashamed of that performance, and we should be.’ And he threw his pen down, as if throwing down the gauntlet.

It was a challenge which would not be refused in the days to come, but in the Purty Loft, most of us were too depressed to be analysing Dunphy’s analysis. In fact everything he said,
before and after, seemed accurately to reflect the feelings of the multitudes — we had plunged from a manic high to a manic low and a lot of us now had a lot of drink taken.