Days of Heaven (5 page)

But it was quite a night, all the same.

The Boys In Green, as they were now increasingly known, were down in Windmill Lane Studios recording the track ‘The Boys In Green’, which would be their anthem for Germany, and which
was written by a gentleman of the press, the late Mick Carwood.

We should pause here and try to imagine an English football journalist contributing to the England cause in this fashion, and try though we might, we just can’t see
it.

His song was produced on that Sunday afternoon in Windmill Lane by Paul Brady and featured many of the Boys themselves, who sang heartily all the way through, observed by other gentlemen of the
press including myself, Mr George Byrne and Mr Eamon Carr.

I recall talking at length to Chris Hughton, about how he, a black man, had always regarded himself as Irish. He seemed patently sincere and he had nothing to prove in that regard anyway, since
he had been a black man playing for Ireland back in the days when we only had about five black men in the entire country — and by 1988 that number hadn’t increased to any noticeable
extent.

Indeed George Byrne happened to be on a trip to Detroit around that time, with friends, and the taxi-driver, learning they were from Ireland, asked them how many of ‘the brothers’
were in Ireland. And they started going through them ... ‘there’s Paul McGrath ... and Philo, of course, but he’s dead now ... and Kevin Sharkey ... and Dave Murphy ... and ...
and that guy who plays the guitar outside Bewleys ...’

The taxi-driver interjected. ‘That many, huh?’

But one of them was Paul McGrath, after all, who contained multitudes.

When the recording party repaired to the Dockers pub next door to Windmill, Eamon Carr and George Byrne and I found ourselves in the corner of the lounge, drinking with Paul and his companion,
John Anderson, of Newcastle Utd and Ireland. It was Eamon that Paul really wanted to talk to, Eamon being a
bona fide
Irish rock legend from his time with Horslips. I myself probably would
not have been sitting there if it wasn’t for the same Horslips and the life-changing effect that they had had on me and on a fair few others like me in ‘rural Ireland’, lonely
boys, out on the weekend.

We lived only for their all-too-infrequent visits. They were magical, extraordinary, these five men, who were able to demonstrate that you could be playing the dancehalls like a thousand other
Irish bands and yet somehow not be bad.

That you could write your own songs, and they would not be bad.

That you could put on a show and it would not be bad, but would have wondrous things like a proper
PA
system and a mixing desk and actual roadies darting around the
stage, plugging in guitars which, when played, would not be bad.

Eamon was one of my heroes, too.

And as the talk inevitably turned to Ireland and the state that she was in, Paul was getting stuck in to his own upbringing, how Ireland had treated him, and soon there was a fine and righteous
anger around that table.

I had only encountered Paul once before that, when I had been coming out of the International Bar and had almost run into him and a woman with whom he seemed to be arguing. You’d never
hear him giving interviews.

So this was the first time I realised what an articulate fellow he was, how well he seemed to understand the things that he had seen. And as the pint pots stacked up in the Dockers, he said that
he wanted to put all this stuff in a book, all this shocking stuff.

Thus, for a couple of hours one night long ago in the Dockers pub, I became Paul McGrath’s official biographer.

He meant it, and I meant it.

We meant it with all our hearts.

Our agreement was witnessed by a distinguished if controversial rock journalist and a genuine Irish rock legend, so it was sound.

On the way out the door, in a state of high excitement, Paul gave me his telephone number in Manchester, written on a scrap of paper.

I said I would make that call.

Of course I would make that call.

I never made that call. For days, for weeks afterwards, I would look at that number and know deep down that I could not make that call. Because even when we are starting to get lost in the fog
of alcohol, there is some voice that calls us back.

At some level that I didn’t really comprehend at the time, I still knew that when a man is out drinking and he starts making elaborate plans, and he makes a certain commitment, he
doesn’t necessarily mean it. Even if he says on the night: ‘I mean it’. Especially if he says on the night: ‘I mean it’.

And that voice which called me back was a good voice, a protective voice. Because of course the book that Paul and I would have produced at the time, given our mutual state of awareness about
the way we were, would have been a tad, shall we say, incomplete.

The autobiography he would eventually produce with Vincent Hogan would become one of the most successful Irish sports books of all time. It would tell the story of a man who was coming to accept
his powerlessness over alcohol. But that would be nearly twenty years later, when Paul was ready for it. In the run-up to Euro 88, he wasn’t ready for it. And I wasn’t ready for it.

Which was not something I knew for sure at the time, just an intuition that stopped me making that call.

I’m sure that Paul understood, in fact I know that he did, because I would go on to interview him for
Hot Press
at the zenith of the Charlton years.

It was still a rare thing for him to be interviewed, but he seemed to be in a good place that day in Bloom’s Hotel. He revealed that Jack used to call him ‘John’, perhaps
confusing him with John McGrath, who was the Southampton centre-half when Jack was a player. He joked about his knees. Indeed ...

He never mentioned that ghost biography, and neither did I. Since he had agreed to do the interview it seemed self-evident that he had lost no sleep over it.

But I wonder, I wonder ... if we’d had mobile phones back in 1988, or even a land-line in the flat, I wonder if I’d have made that call. And to what madness it might have led us.

There is something to be said after all, for the phone in the hall.

T
hey kept calling him a gruff Yorkshireman, but Jack Charlton wasn’t from Yorkshire at all, but from Northumberland. Famously, along with
Jack and his brother Bobby, the northeast mining town of Ashington had produced the Milburns, an illustrious football family related to the Charltons, and which included the celebrated Newcastle
Utd centre-forward Jackie Milburn, ‘Wor Jackie’.

The Charltons were much closer to that Geordie tradition than to the gruff Yorkshire mould into which Jack had been placed by so many of his new admirers.

It may be just that irresistible urge to embrace the cliché, but in Ireland, we think we’re better than that.

Not that Jack himself would give a monkey’s, but we pride ourselves on knowing more about England than England knows about us. Thus if, say, Roy Keane were to be routinely described in the
British media as a Kerryman, we would shake our heads sadly at this new nadir in tabloid vulgarity. Because we would know that these are not minor matters; that for a very long time, we have been
obsessed with these questions of who we are and what we are and where we’re coming from.

The first thing that Paddy says to Paddy when they meet on foreign soil, is ‘what part are you from?’ We have a deep understanding of these matters of identity as they relate to
ourselves, but beyond that, apparently we lose interest.

Our self-absorption is that of a teenager, as is natural for the citizens of a young country. And our self-esteem has never been the best. In fact, as I learned more about the nature of
addiction, I came across a definition which has a haunting resonance for anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them — big ego, low self-esteem is the classic combination, the essential duality
in the psyche of the alcoholic.

Big ego ... low self-esteem. Ah, yes, that would ring a few bells, for Paddy.

So right from the start, our love for Paul McGrath was no doubt partly rooted in this profound intuition, this sixth sense that he had the ‘weakness’ which so many of us have. And
that withal, he was magnificent.

And then it got a bit tricky, because even though the true story of Paul McGrath had not yet been told, we probably knew enough at that stage to realise that he was magnificent
despite
his Irishness, and all that had happened to him on this side of the Irish Sea. Deep down, we were guilty that we could do so little for such a vulnerable kid, that England at least could provide
him with a stage on which he could display his great gifts.

Though lest we forget, if Ireland had abused him, England in turn had abused Ireland. Always, there was the get-out clause.

We had had this uniquely twisted relationship with Johnny England for a very long time, until the wonders of the Charlton years forced us to move away somewhat from the comforting simplicities
of old and to realise that maybe, just maybe, we could handle the truth. Which, as was suggested by another Irishman who did rather well for himself in England, is ‘rarely pure and never
simple’.

We were in Germany now, with England beaten at their own game.

But how could we have done it without them? This defining moment in our island story had been granted to us, not by our Gaelic football and the amateur ethos of which we are so proud. Not by our
hurling, which is ‘the fastest team sport in the world’, and not by our handball, or anything else that might be played in the environs of Croke Park. It was all down to association
football, the game of the conqueror and the coloniser; and the man in charge, trying to correct some of our ancient inadequacies, was a ‘gruff Yorkshireman’.

Likewise, it was a bookie from Belfast, Barney Eastwood, who steered Barry McGuigan to the world title in boxing, again not one of our Gaelic games, but which kept us going anyway during
McGuigan’s glorious run.

In fact, Euro 88 came just a year after the astounding achievements of Stephen Roche, who came apparently out of nowhere (Dundrum actually) to win the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and
the World road race Championship, all in 1987.

Again, his efforts had owed virtually nothing to the traditions of the Gael, apart from the tradition of getting the hell out of here if you’re any good.

I had heard of Sean Kelly, because of a highly-regarded book about him by the sports writer David Walsh, but Roche meant nothing to me when, as
Hot Press
roving ambassador to the world of
sport, I arrived to interview him very early one morning, placing my absurdly large cassette recorder on the table in front of him, while he breakfasted in a hotel in the borough of Dun Laoghaire,
shortly before he and the rest of his fellow cyclists started the journey to Cork.

In fact, the extent of my knowledge can be gauged by my incredulity at his proposed schedule, this idea which he had casually voiced, whereby they would cycle
all the way
from Dublin to
Cork.

‘You mean ... you’ll actually cycle ... all the way?’

‘Well, if the wind is against us, we might drive to Portlaoise and just take it from there’, he said.

Good luck with that, I thought.

‘By the way, could you not have brought a bigger tape-recorder?’ he quipped, with that understated wit which would become so familiar to us all a year later.

For now, it was all just a bit baffling, especially at such an early hour.

And anyway it was only cycling, about which I was no more ignorant than any other Irish person, little knowing that soon we would be speaking sagely about the
peloton
and the
echelon
and forming considered opinions about the abilities of various
domestiques
. But I remember being impressed, as the photographer took the pictures, at the way Roche insisted on
getting all his sponsorship logos together before the snapper did his thing. Yes, the interview might have been a waste of time, but the picture would make it vaguely worth his while.

You could tell he’d been abroad, to be so attuned to the commercial realities of modern sport. That he had left Paddy behind on the Sally Gap in this regard. The Boys In Green, in these
early days, would be drinking all night with journalists, expecting nothing in return expect perhaps the vague prospect that one of them might write his autobiography, or spending the afternoon
singing in Windmill Lane for no great reward except perhaps its knock-on benefit for squad morale. The players singing ‘The Boys In Green’ on the
Late Late Show
, for all the
world like a bunch of well-meaning lads from the pub down the road who had got this thing together to pay for an operation for a sick child is one of the more poignant images of that time —
but a step up from the night when Gay Byrne announced, ‘I have just been handed a piece of paper here which says that Jack Charlton has been appointed manager of Ireland — whatever that
means’.