Kicker conspiracy

Back in that innocent age we called "June", when it looked like every group in the first round of the World Cup (the first round? Remember?) might end up in one of your actual lotteries, we pondered on the last time that happened: to wit, when Ireland and Holland finished joint second in Group F of the 1990 edition. More precisely, we wondered whether we were imagining things when we thought that said lottery had been televised. We were, after all, quite young, and were probably outside playing football at the time.

But the Après Match team were way ahead of us, and they dug out the footage at the beginning of the tournament as they gathered their showbiz pals to make one last plaintive plea for Ireland's rightful place in South Africa.

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Down to the hollow, and there we will wallow

So Giants Stadium is no more. Jason Clinkscales got onto the field after the Giants' last game there in December, filming it for posterity. Meanwhile, Adrian Russell has bid farewell to the ground by reminding those of you who need reminding of its greatest moment (not that we're biased or anything):

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Ireland, Ireland and parallax: two

The strange — and not-so-strange — case of Stephen Ireland. Part two of two. Part one here.

The sometimes viscerally strong feeling we can have towards a team and the copious attention it may attract don't necessarily lead to trustworthy conclusions. The commentary on the Stephen Ireland situation has, from the time of "Grannygate", been marked by an dearth of empathy. He was upbraided by most analysts for his part in the mess. Some, including Scannal contributors, have wondered aloud — disingenuously or stupidly, it's hard to tell — why he did what he did.

Where is the mystery, exactly? His girlfriend, having suffered a miscarriage while Ireland was with the national team in Slovakia, called an FAI official. Rather than tell a stranger over the phone exactly what had happened, she told him that one of Ireland's grandmothers had died. When a journalist discovered that this was untrue, Ireland said that it was actually his other granny who had snuffed it. It wasn't long before this was rumbled. But where was the sin? Here was a young couple — Ireland was barely twenty-one — undergoing a genuinely traumatic situation. He could have told Steve Staunton that his girlfriend had lied with good reason. That he did not, presumably born of a combination of a sense of honour and panic, was not just cause for the scorn and derision he received. Of course, one can only sympathise with Staunton — it can't have been fun to be so publicly embarrassed, especially at a time when he was under constant fire. But it has been discussed as if Ireland had forged a note from his mam to get off school early and then headed straight for the arcade. It has demeaned something more important than the composition of a poxy football team.


There's no need for bleeding hearts here. When I say "empathy", I don't mean going above and beyond: just the basic stuff. And it is basic, a skill we're supposed to pick up at some point on our progression to adulthood, as a facet of civility. Professional athletes may make it difficult for us, these fatted mooncalves, gated safely away from us mortals, with their youth and their offensive hubcaps, why in my day, players used to take the train to the grounds just like the fans, and you'd see them in the pub afterwards, 'cos they were normal in those days, not like today, I've been Michael Parkinson, you've been 'orrible, good night! They may be functionally similar to soap opera characters, little more than constellations of pixels imbued with whatever qualities the producers think will make us squeal with delight or displeasure. It may be difficult to see beyond all this, but that's no excuse. If you are to engage in this thing, it behoves you to do it properly, and doing it properly does not involve disengaging your brain before you start. There's passion and there's "passion". "Passion" doesn't cut it.


David Kelly's piece on Stephen Ireland is an anti-Star of Bethlehem: head away from it, magi. It is rooted in the common technique of the slighted fan of grabbing the nearest objects to hand and flinging them at the target, secure in a belief in the righteousness of the cause. As noted in part one, we are enjoined to draw conclusions from the fact that Ireland plays for "a club where accumulated wealth has corroded the value systems of so many" — as if City were unique in their wealth, as if it is inherently corrupting to the point where a player's association with the club is evidence enough for denouncement. As if, of course, some are blessed enough to float above the sea of fire, as Shay Given seemingly is. Shay is different somehow, perhaps because he is "a devout man of faith who prays every day", a "proud son of Tir [sic] Chonaill who splashes holy water in his goalmouth before every match". Perhaps it's the years he spent at Newcastle that make him more deserving of admiration than someone irrevocably touched by the Eastlands evil. But while there may be a certain intuitive appeal in locating football purgatory at St. James' Park, it's a crude method for determining who is worthy of praise or contempt.

Kelly attacks Ireland for "utterly lacking in emotional intelligence"; yet, astonishingly, he invokes the case of Roy Keane in Saipan in an attempt at contrast. Ireland possesses "not a fraction of the intelligence portrayed by Keane". What "intelligence" means in this context is unclear. But if we're talking emotional intelligence (Kelly did raise it, after all), having a vicious row with your manager days before the start of the World Cup because you just couldn't help yourself doth not a Bodhisattva make. (This applies equally to Mick McCarthy, by the way — I'm not taking sides after all these years...) But it's all okay, because "while Keane's greatness is acknowledged for all time, Egoman's endurance has yet to be proven over a sustained length of time". So, it's simple: ability times longevity equals license to behave stupidly. Glad to know it.


All this before reckoning with the odiousness of a comparison between a purely self-indulgent (on both sides) row and a situation arising from a serious personal crisis. And this is precisely the problem. Quick though purveyors of this kind of thing are, be they professional or amateur, to identify perceived deficiencies in others, this is a fundamentally self-serving exercise. Kelly describes Ireland in terms of narcissism and vanity because it is easy to do so. It is easier to believe that all players should belong to a narrow, screamingly modest behavioural and moral middle ground and regard those beyond these strictures as undesirable than it is to acknowledge the subtleties of reality, to not blindly trust first instinct, to recognise that players and spectators may see things differently and that that's okay, to acknowledge the human nature of what they choose to watch.

Choose is an important word here. "How is the Irish football community supposed to feel" about "the bland assertion that quitting the Irish set-up was 'the best decision I ever made'", asks Kelly. But what we so often see out of habit as entertainment and a means of self-validation exists to an extent beyond this vista. The ties that bind us on the outside to those on the inside are not the sole characteristic that makes sport sport. To ignore that — that's vanity. It's rich to declare, with "a yawning shrug of indifference", that you never loved her in the first place, anyway, when you're after filling her car's petrol tank with sugar. It's rich to chastise someone for egocentricity when you yourself are practically autocolonoscopic.

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Ireland, Ireland and parallax: one

The strange — and not-so-strange — case of Stephen Ireland. Part one of two. Part two here.

The makers of the otherwise fine RTE television programme Scannal occasionally play fast and loose with the definition of the show's title. The first edition of the new run (available for those in Ireland to view here until December 14) told the story of the "Grannygate" episode and Stephen Ireland's subsequent absence from the Irish national football team — hardly a "scandal" to sit alongside subjects of previous series, such as the death of Ann Lovett and the original GUBU affair.

Indeed, the show was slight, struggling to fill with substance its allotted twenty-five minutes. It was therefore an uncanny reflection. As the programme's accompanying bumph noted, Ireland has been the most discussed Irish footballer of the past two years. It could be said that the story came to some sort of resolution in August with the player declaring his international retirement in an interview with the Sunday Times. In truth, it effectively ended when it began; it barely moved subsequently. The talk on it has been little but idle post-Mass chatter.

It was still something, I suppose — enough for Ireland's retirement to generate a kind of catharsis for some. David Kelly of the Irish Independent, for instance, on September 5th — the day of the Cyprus-Ireland match, and six days after the publication of the Stephen Ireland interview — was sufficiently provoked to tear into the player. His piece was titled "Good Riddance", and it's fair to say that it reflected the views of a good proportion of Irish fans.


Kelly coins a new moniker for Stephen Ireland: Egoman. The thinking behind this is, it seems, threefold: firstly, to eliminate any confusion between the player's surname and country of origin; secondly, to demonstrate that Kelly once saw the Algonquin from a taxi window; thirdly, to sum up the player's egregiousness, as Kelly sees it:

For it is an image that perfectly captures a professional enveloped so certainly within the glow of a secure, lucrative new contract at a club where accumulated wealth has corroded the value systems of so many.

So many, / I had not thought secure, lucrative contracts had undone so many...

Have they, though? Damien Duff was, after all, one of Roman's first wave at Chelsea, and Lord alone knows how much Newcastle United were paying him, yet we unquestioningly regard him as a decent, upstanding sort. The thought of the sum of Robbie Keane's signing-on fees makes one wince; and let's not forget that while he was being all heroic and cartwheely in Ibaraki, he was drawing a salary of invisible money from Happy Pete's Dream Factory during the "If It Bleeds, It's Leeds" era. Roy Keane moved to what would soon become the world's richest club for an English record fee, and dressed as a leprechaun to hawk substandard crisps, yet there are still many in Ireland who would gladly do anything — anything — for him, if you catch my meaning.

(Of course, there are also those who still fantasise about ambushing him at Béal na mBláth. Both types are to be pitied and shunned.)

We need not even look so far for contrary argument. Kelly's article appears on page 19 of the Indo's sports section for that day. On pages 16 and 17, there
is a piece proclaiming happiness that Shay Given has finally been given the chance to win the medals that his stellar talent arguably deserves. He has been given this chance, let us remind ourselves, by moving to "a club where accumulated wealth has corroded the value systems of so many". The latter article, by the way, was written by David Kelly.


One of the contributors to Scannal, Alan Titley, makes a similar point to Kelly:

I think it may signify a change in attitude, in that from now on, players won't be so interested in playing for their country. That is to say that club loyalty is more important to them — in other words money — than any loyalty they have to the country.

It would be strange indeed if the inflation of the soccer bubble had not altered in some way the relationship between a player, his employer and his national team. Early international retirement certainly appears to be more common than it used to be, though in the absence of hard data, I can at best say that this is the perception. (Some historical notables quit their national team at their peaks: Gerd Müller, for example, and Johan Cruijff.)

We should be cautious here. It's tempting, when contemplating almost any matter in football these days, to roll one's eyes, tut and say "Money!" to no-one in particular. If we're not careful, it will soon become a rhetorical fallacy: reductio ad pecuniam, if you will. Other factors must surely be applicable too. Two oft-cited international opter-outers, Paul Scholes and Jamie Carragher, are also linked by the fact that they have remained at their respective clubs for their entire careers. Stephen Ireland may not have been at Manchester City for as long at the former pair have been at their clubs, nor is City his local club. But he has been at City since he was fifteen years old — eight years now. It's not that money can play no part in the decisions these players make, but let's give them some credit at least. If you spend long enough at one club, you might develop some kind of bond with them, a bond that might — just might — be even stronger than the simple exchange of money for services rendered.


One of the reasons for the impact of the Stephen Ireland case is that it strikes at the heart of the myth of international football; indeed, of international sport. We routinely make use of nationalistic, even militaristic, language when talking about the international game: players get called up for international duty; they play for their country, and there is no greater honour. Dulce et decorum est pro patria ludere and all that. Flags are faced, anthems sung, heads of state met, ancient grudges whetted.

The dirty little secret of international football is exactly how metaphorical all this is, how far it can be from the reality. When we used to sing that we were all part of Jackie's army, it wasn't meant to be taken literally. This is not some state position for which the holders must visit the Áras to receive their seals of office from the Prez (or equivalents thereof). This is the representative team of the national association. It is not the nation.*

Actually, this should be qualified somewhat. Of course, there is a link between identity with a nation and identity with a national team. This team is called the Republic of Ireland, after all, not the FAI Select XI; that in itself is an appropriation of something larger than sport. Titley makes the point that, "in the world we live in, where any kind of nationalism or identity is weakening in every way, the national team allows them to express their identity for that ninety minutes. And often people who would loathe everything to do with Ireland suddenly find that something else is stirred in them". And we can all think of occasions where the success or failure of a national team has transcended the mere palmarès: France's World Cup win in 1998, Brazil's mournful defeat in 1950, other countries having their history while Uruguay has its &c.


But this does not take away from the fact that this is a sports team. For the players, it may have all of the connotations it has for those of us on the outside (and we are on the outside). It may stir all of those feelings of attachment to the superset, as represented by the team name and the colours and the flags; or it may not. A national team has a head-start when it come to coherence, built as it is around a pre-existing identity, be it native or second-hand. But ultimately, it is a workplace. It's still a group of individuals, all with their own stories, all with their own motivations and mentalities, who have to figure out some way of operating together. It is dangerous to ascribe to this setup notions of patriotism, because when someone decides that it is not for them — as they are perfectly entitled to do — this would be treachery. There comes a point where sentimentality must stop and reality begin.

This is the absurd position Stephen Ireland has found himself in in the eyes of some: that to decline to play for the national team is a betrayal, a betrayal of the nation, in its way. This attitude lacks the understanding that how we see it is not necessarily the same as how it is. It's also an unwitting confirmation of the separation of team and state. That Stephen Ireland is dead to a lot of Irish fans is not a patriotic notion. It's about what he can do for us as opposed to what he can do as one of us (which he still is, by the way). It's all about how useful he can be, not what he is. It's a cold and unaffectionate way to see football — though, I suppose, not one that deviates too radically from the norm.



* For the record, I'm not one of your "oh, it's the Interlull, what a crashing bore, boo-flippin'-hoo" types. I love international football. Here's Exhibit A. Read more...

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France 1-1 Ireland (AET; France wi: In which the author is unable to bring himself to complete that scoreline

Image by toksuede on Flickr; spotted at / robbed from You'll Never Win Anything With Kids.

*
Firstly: fuck.

Secondly: the Thierry Henry thing. I'm going to steer clear of the tabs for the next few days, while judiciously picking my way through the broadsheets and having my finger poised by my radio's volume dial. (Can you imagine what Liveline will be like if they start on this topic? Kill me. Kill me now.) There is going to be such a lot of hysterical nonsense emitted about Henry's deed. We are firmly within the English football sphere of influence, for good and ill. It'll still be a shame if we replicate the worst, unbecoming, Fleet-Streety aspects of that culture, Henry's handball taking its place alongside Cristiano Ronaldo's wink.

Of course, Ronaldo's wink was utterly irrelevant to Wayne Rooney's red card (not that the message has got through to everybody). Henry's handball counted. Sweet Jesus, did it ever. But here's the dealio, campers, something you should have figured out a long time ago: this type of shit happens a lot — a lot — in sport. Sport disguises itself as life honed and concentrated, as a palace of justice in Lego, all instant judgements and inevitable punishments. It dissembles its true nature: that it's just like the rest of the universe. As a matter of course, players will skirt the fringes of legality, and will sometimes cross the line: our guys, their guys, everydamnone's eyes. You just have to hope that the arbiters can do their best. What Henry did was wrong. But to pick on this one incident as being somehow especially contemptible is to be wilfully blind to all the sport you've ever seen. And if we're to demand Henry's head on a spike, shouldn't we have done the same for, say, Damien Duff for his dive against Spain in 2002? (That Ian Harte missed the subsequent penalty is irrelevant, of course.) Remember Alan McLoughlin's guilty look towards the linesman in Cagliari in 1990?

While we're at it, a request: can we leave Platini and Blatter out of this? Blatter is everyone's favourite punchbag, usually with due cause. Platini also deserves some of the criticism he gets, though he has preposterously been turned into a Napoleonic bogeyman for our time by many in English football. The seeding issue stank somewhat, but bear in mind that the refereeing in both legs was consistently excellent and fair. From neither performance could a sane mind deduce interference from on high. Any fears of homerism in the second leg were unfounded. I did feel that more could have been done to curb the excessive physicality of Gallas' and, especially, Squillaci's aerial challenges. But a ref bent on nudging the big team towards victory would have given Anelka a penalty. (Not that I'm saying the ref was wrong, but did anyone else spot Given's right hand making contact with Anelka's shin?)

The anger is understandable. That doesn't mean it's right.

(And to those who are shocked that their favouritest player could have stooped so low: are we to think that his soul was pure just because his game was so enchanting at Arsenal? Give me a break.)

What should keep us awake at night are the chances. I struggle to recall them all right now without recourse to video; trauma has mushed the immediate memory of this game into two hours of terror, mixed with optimistic dread and that unclassifiable feeling you get when the other lot score. But there were chances, that much I do remember, and if you don't take your chances, blah blah fucking blah. If we need an emblem for the defeat part of this defeat, let it be that.

Because the defeat was not just a defeat. If we'd let ourselves admit it more often, we'd realise that the brutal frankness of the scoreline is rarely all there is to sport. Take Giovanni Trapattoni. I hesitate to say that the nature of the defeat — and the fact that he got us this close at all — are a vindication of his management; not because I think he has failed, but because it asks the question from a false basis. Far too often, we go in for the adversarial system in sport, with the incumbent as perpetual defendant. More often than not, a straight guilty or not guilty verdict is unsatisfactory. Some of the coverage of Trap since his arrival has been odd to say the least. Denis Walsh of the Sunday Times — a fine writer, mind you — lamented the absence of romance in Ireland's style a couple of weekends ago. A writer for another Sunday paper, who shall remain anonymous on the principle that it is wrong to kick a man while he's stupid, has wailed on that baby for what seems like forever. One wonders whether they remember the history of this team. When has it ever been about even tipping a wink towards the, *cough*, beautiful game?

One wonders whether some even remember two years ago, how godawful things were in the freefalling Staunton era. Memories can be short in sport, but some of the criticism of Trapattoni has foolishly neglected to bear in mind his greatest achievement: giving the players their belief back. I reckon that some of this renewal has come from within the players themselves; despite the sniping aimed in their direction amid the rubble of Nicosia and Serravalle, they've always come across as a proud lot. But Trapattoni's role in this should not be downplayed. The methods by which he chose to do this may have displeased many, but how was this supposed to be easy? What the team needed was someone to take control, to systematically give them new life.

Systematic need not always mean boring. Sometimes, though, it, um, does; Ireland have been that at times. Some of this has been exaggerated in the retelling. One feels that had Trapattoni not come from Italy, he might have been cut more slack. Some have tried to classify Ireland's system as catenaccio, which is patently false. Indeed, Trap has consistently fielded four attacking players: not exactly the epitome of derring-do, but not the most negative of mindsets. However, there have been times, especially when defending a lead, that timorousness has overtaken the team, the midfield retreating glacially until they are almost duplicating the roles of the backline. This backfired away to Bulgaria (though what mainly backfired was the concept of Kevin Kilbane, left-full).

I myself have been sucked into believing in Trap's innate suffocating negativity. I imagined that Ireland would try to lock the first leg down to prevent the concession of the away goal. Yet Ireland went for it, in a way. They didn't go about things with reckless abandon, exactly, but not was it as negative a display as characterised. It was honest if unsuccessful toil for two-thirds of the game, fatigued chasing for the rest

In the main, Trap's ways have worked. Again, remember how recently it was that we were talking of the worst performances in the team's history. To get so close, so soon, is remarkable. Maybe if, say, Andy Reid were in the team, it would have made the difference. I have my doubts, though I can't disprove it. Thing is, you can't prove it, either. It's certainly not the cut-and-dried situation many believe it to be.

But then, what is? Not this match, not this sport. I don't want to go too far down the road of declaring moral victory. I don't quite believe in the sainthood of Roy Keane, but he was pretty much spot on in Amsterdam in 2000, declaring himself mightily unsatisfied. But the emotion one feels in the wake of last night is not neat despair. Another consequence of being a subset of English football is that while technique is not prized as it ought to be, fight is. In England, they are going through a difficult phase in which they try to reconcile themselves with the notion that most of the rest of the footballing world has different priorities (how this goes is one of the most fascinating issues in the sport today). The old gung-ho attitude is becoming gauche. But it should be remembered that it is not an inherently undesirable quality; in fact, it is enviable, and this need not be a philistine position to adopt. Would that Ireland could even play like Croatia, a country with a similar population. But we can't, not right now. We've had to make the most of what we have, and with determination and organisation, that's what we've done.

Or have we? That's one of sport's eternal questions, I'm afraid. Sport's a fucker. That's what we take away from this game: a nagging sense of opportunity missed coupled with a great pride in how we've gone about things which, in this writer, has at least pushed against the squeamishness he feels about the idea of national-team-as-proxy-nation. We're proud, but it's not as simple as that. We lost, but it's not as simple as that.

There is so, so much more to say about last night, but I'll leave you with this thought: everyone who has ever mocked Richard Dunne can fuck off. Read more...

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Gio knows

Forgive me for the egregious use of the first person when talking about the national team — can't be helped, sometimes...Thoughts on Ireland worth checking out from the Okey Doke Football Blog and Jump the Fence, Baby. Here are mine.

I was going to begin by noting how odd the national relationship with the Ireland team is, but on reflection, it's probably not that exceptional at all. Two aspects of international football give it a quality distinct from that of the club game: nationalism (used here in a general, not-necessarily-pejorative sense) and the scarcity of fixtures. European qualifying tournaments usually give each team between eight and fourteen games, spread over a year and a bit. So much more, therefore, rides on an average qualifier than on a domestic league game. The particular intensity that this lends to such games may often be absent for larger countries whose qualification is more or less guaranteed, but it's there for most of us; and every aspect of the matches appears far more significant than it otherwise would. Ireland, having usually been there or thereabouts for a couple of generations, are a fine example of this.

There are a few other elements which go into the mix here, such as the strange sense of entitlement many people seem to feel about the team. Several things feed into this. The Charlton era left us first giddy, then grouchy when things didn't go our way as often as they did during that golden age. Most Irish fans experience their football as a Sky production; some, such as the small but heard group who booed the team at the final whistle of the Bulgaria game, seem unable to see what is in front of them as the imperfect reality it is. (As Jump the Fence noted, "it's not X-Factor you're watching".)

Perhaps there is some residue from the chimeric Celtic Tiger bluster which filled our sails not so long ago; more precisely, from the invocation of the national miracle in the aftermath of the Saipan affair* by the type of people who believe we would have won the World Cup if not for Mick McCarthy.

Furthermore — at the grave risk of appearing to enter into some gratuitous meeja-bashing — the coverage of the team's exploits has become ever more tabloidesque, and not just amongst our, ahem, beloved redtops. That is, it's bipolar: the highs are very high, the lows impossibly low. Every slight is a catastrophe that demands an immediate sacrifice. Impatience is the drug, whose dose was increased in 2002. Add to that a national broadcaster as dominant in determining the national sporting discourse as the rest of the news agenda, and who continue to employ a certain demagogic ex-Millwall player who many people actually take seriously, and you have a nice little mudpit for irrationality to wallow in.

Of course, this isn't all-pervasive; thankfully, there is enough reasonable talk to keep things sane (things haven't got as bad as the steaming pile of nonsense that gets written about England). But it's there, and it's inevitable.

The beauty part of Giovanni Trapattoni's tenure is that he bypasses all of this. So far, he has appeared not to care about the circus. However eager the media is to play up his supposed eccentricities, he has been the most normal of the lot of us. By assessing the available talent, devising a plan and sticking to it — in other words, by going about his managerial business as any good manager would — he's been damn near subversive. While some decisions have been questionable in isolation (PaulMcShanePaulMcShanePaulMcShane), Trapattoni isn't from the mould of the previous unfortunate holder of the office, who made us unsure as to whether he wasn't just making it up as he went along.

The truth is, despite the risible claims of some, Ireland are not a world-class team, or favourites to win the group. We have qualified for four finals tournaments in seventy-five years. More talented Ireland teams than this one have failed. This very team failed dismally in the last campaign. That four games remain and we're still in contention is itself a small victory. If we fail to qualify, it may well be because of a calamitous error by Trapattoni (it hasn't happened yet, though). More likely, it would be because sometimes these things happen. We're not owed a place at the World Cup. We've always had to fight for every goal and every point. It seems to me that's exactly what we're doing right now. Let's see where it gets us.


*Is anyone else depressed and a tad embarrassed that the word "Saipan" now calls to mind not one of the bloodiest battles of World War II but a spat between a footballer and his manager?

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"What could be, what might be...what is"

Bart: This isn't bad.
Homer: Isn't bad? Tell me one thing mankind's ever done that's any better?
Lisa: The Renaissance?
Homer: This is better.

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A prologue to history

If you find yourself being sucked into a black hole all of a sudden this Saturday, it's not that they've fixed the Large Hadron Collider: it will have originated at the Millennium Stadium.

Ordinarily, I don't get as worked up about rugby as about football. It's great when Ireland win and not so great when they lose, but it's not as if it matters that much. What's more important is that it's a good game.

But this weekend? With Ireland one win away from a second ever Grand Slam (the first for six decades), a first championship since 1985 and a just reward for one of the greatest Irish teams ever, in any sport? With Wales still in with a chance of a second consecutive Six Nations, still sore about losing their chance at another Slam, at home, pepped up by some residual Gatland bitterness? In the last game of the least aesthetically-pleasing Six Nationseses in years?

Man, it's going to be ugly.

So sod that for a game of soldiers: as much as I like the Welsh rugby team, here's to an Ireland win, no matter how.

In the spirit of wilful perversity, here are a couple of great Welsh moments from the past. Or more precisely, a couple of great Phil Bennett moments. The first is from 1977 against Scotland; the second is that try scored by the Barbarians against New Zealand in 1973 — finished off, of course, by Gareth Edwards, but begun by some Bennett trickery.




Why the Bennett stuff? Why, I've been listening to the Manics, of course. No other band could get Bennett, Steve Ovett, Shaun Ryder and Neil Kinnock into the same song. Nicky Wire: you may be a Spurs fan, but I salute you.

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BO'D is your G-O-D

Oh, just a heads up in case you missed the news at the weekend: whatever deity you've been praying to all these years has been usurped by Brian O'Driscoll. In the words of Richard Williams, "the 30-year-old outside-centre showed how a great player can grab a mediocre match and bend it to his will, calming the anxieties of those around him and giving shape to the collective endeavour". Fear him, praise him, bash him in the head: he is indifferent to your petty human foibles or borderline concussions.

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Ireland 2-1 Georgia: Gump brace seals win

Tapping into the market for day-old recaps of games you couldn't care less about.

When Trapattoni faces Cúper, the game could probably do with something to liven it up, lest the tension -- the kind of tension that defines a perfectly silent room, until you fall asleep -- becomes too much. Thankfully, Stephen Kelly took less than a minute to display his fine appreciation for the nuances of dramatic theory; or, in footballese, to fail to get the ball the bloody hell out of the area. 0-1.

Thus was shape given to the match: Georgia defended and tactical-fouled; Ireland tried to attack, the way I would try to re-attach your renal artery to your kidney. The ennui was broken briefly when a Keith Andrews shot was deflected past Giorgi Lomaia and in. The Finnish referee, however, as befitting a man who speaks a language with an aversion to voiced consonants, had become attached to the growing melancholy. He invoked the little-known "Gravitational Pull" clause of the interfering-with-play bit of the offside rule, feeling that the powerful atomic processes that drive Kevin Doyle had had a tidal effect on Lomaia's brain juices.

Keith Andrews ran around, quite effectively. The half ended.

Ireland woke up in the second half and did anything -- had a bowl of cereal, watched a SpongeBob SquarePants quadruple bill, cleaned out their bedside locker for the first time in months, had another bowl of cereal (this time without milk), sent emails to themselves -- but study for their big history test the next day. When, with half an hour to go, panic set in (it was even marked on their study planner: 60' PANIC!!!), they opened their textbook on the World War I chapter, upon which inspiration struck. So, as Gavrilo Princip surely would have done had he played central mid, Glen Whelan started playing fifteen yards further forward. Aiden McGeady joined in, deciding to stop pretending he'd forgotten how to play football. Things started happening. Even the ref cheered up a bit, deciding to play the scamp by awarding a penalty to Ireland for that old favourite, the Dubious Handball.

In a sport like, say, basketball, there is a relatively efficient transition between consistent good play and a favourable outcome on the scoreboard. Football, on the other hand, is screwy. Robbie Keane exceeds his quota of screwiness. He had as much impact on the game as you did, yet had the biggest influence on the result. He converted the penalty, and scored the second with a magnificent shoulderer from six yards. He's Ireland's record goalscorer, dontcha know.

In Trap, Ireland have found someone whose ideas chime with our own. Once ahead, he replaced Damien Duff with Stephen Hunt and cranked up the power on the player magnet attached to Ireland's goal, dragging them deeper and deeper. This time, though, there wasn't enough time to throw it away. The table doesn't look right, but like I said, we have Robbie Keane. Ireland win, world saved, until March 28th.

DUNPHY UPDATE: Still a dickhead!

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I am the scourge of referees and the selector of killer choons

See me foment revolution in my latest Soccerlens post, whose titles's unintended ambiguity I make sport with in the title of this post. What japes!

Also, I had the pleasure of assisting Webbie in selecting the songs for the latest, Ireland-themed post on the ever-marvellous Football and Music. Needless to say**, I chose superbly. Head on over and have a listen.

**Why is the phrase "needless to say" always followed by precisely what is supposed to be needless to say?

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Sticking up for Stephen Ireland

Stephen Ireland has been talking about his self-imposed exile from the Irish national team, revealing that he has received hate mail from Irish fans. Much has been said about 'Grannygate', but the article reminds those who need reminding of the tragic circumstances behind that confused episode.

Amidst the stick and the easy jokes about made-up relatives, it seems to have have been forgotten, or wilfully overlooked, that the whole thing began with Ireland's girlfriend miscarrying while he was away with the national panel. Between the pair of them, they panicked and made a mistake. That's all. It's very difficult for any of us to account for what we might do in such a traumatic situation. Those that have rushed to judge Ireland over the incident in the last year have been neglectful of the facts at best and callous at worst. Whatever truth there is in the rumours of bullying at the hands of some national team-mates about his hair, why would he return to the team to face the unfairly intense media scrutiny that would surely await him?

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Ireland 1-0 Cyprus: Keano collaboration

From Lost Worlds by Michael Bywater:

...we should pay our respects to the Daily Sport, which dispensed with the idea that 'news' should be true. (FOOTNOTE: A bit like the Daily Mail or Fox News, but more honest.) This innovation allowed it to come up with the most engaging pair of front pages in the history of journalism. In the first, it took a picture of the moon and superimposed a Second World War bomber on it, under the headline: 'WW2 Bomber Found On Moon'. Shortly afterwards, it simply published the picture of the moon, headlined 'WW2 Bomber Found On Moon Vanishes'.

The Irish media got a similar two-stories-for-the-price-of-none this week regarding Andy Reid. One day they were reporting on a supposed rift between Reid and Giovanni Trapattoni, the next they were reporting on its apparent non-existence. This speaks of two things. Firstly, the media here grows ever more keen to poke at a wound until it gets infected (of which more, I'm sure, at a later date). Secondly, it reflects the affection there is for Reid amongst many here and their longing to see him in the green jersey.

I'm mightily torn on this. I heart Andy Reid. He is my favourite current Irish player because he is so un-Irish. There has never been such a thing as a distinctly Irish style of football. We are firmly within the English sphere of influence and as such everyone grows up with the two straight lines of four and the big fella up front and all the other typically English facets, for good and for ill. Reid seems to have been born in the wrong place. The mere fact that he sees the game in three dimensions, beyond the linearity we are usually cursed with, makes him almost illicitly exciting. It's hardly bearable when the director cuts to the bench and we see Reid huddled up in his big FAI jacket. Letting his talent wither on the vine is something that we're going to end up regretting when we look back on this era.

Yet one can see why Trapattoni has not yet used him. He has a particular system in mind: a 4-4-2 with two tidy central midfielders, one a ball-winner, the other to be a reasonably accomplished ball-player (Steven Reid played in this role in the first two qualifiers); two wingers (versus Cyprus, Duff and McGeady) and two strikers. Steven Reid's absence from this game had many clamouring for Andy Reid to play in the centre. While this would add a spark of creativity to the position, Trapattoni's reasoning is that it is quite sufficient to have a pair of attacking wide men and just have the central duo go about their work quietly. The central midfielders are expected primarily to solemnly keep watch in front of the defence, and this is not Andy Reid's game. You could play Reid wide, but he is a poor defender.

He could be employed behind a lone striker in a 4-2-3-1, but then you'd have to drop Robbie Keane or Kevin Doyle.

It's a dilly of a pickle. For what it's worth, I'm erring - just - on the side of Trap's policy right now. This is despite the problems mentioned later on, and my Reid thang. It's a matter of the benefit of the doubt going to one of the most successful managers in history, and the desperation induced by successive inglorious failures since the last time we were at the big show. If I suddenly go missing around about November 2009, it'll be because I've embarked on a pilgrimage of repentance to some place dark and lonely.


More stuff about the game:


Damien Duff slinked his way through the Cypriot defence and dinked a sexually good chipped cross for Robbie Keane to head into an empty net, and went on to have a fine game. Welcome back, Duffer!

If I had a daughter I would insist she marry Kevin Doyle. He's as reliant and dependable as they come. His work ethic is a marvel - it doesn't matter how the game is going, how well or how badly he or the team are playing: he will never stop. And his efforts are not of the headless chicken variety, nor is it a case of someone throwing in a couple of wild slide-tackles to give the appearance of full commitment. It is more intelligent than that, and when allied to a mature mind and sold technical ability, it's no wonder there is more than one top-flight club angling for him.

If Doyle was already spoken for, I'd settle for being Richard Dunne's daddy-in-law. Christ, he's amazing when he's on top form. Whenever I see Dunne in an Ireland shirt, I think of an alternative universe in which Phil Babb decided that he wouldn't play Hutch to Mark Kennedy's Starsky and slide over the bonnet of a cop car in Dublin days before the World Cup qualifier against Holland in 2000, thus avoiding disciplinary action and keeping a young Richard Dunne on the bench. I think of Patrick Kluivert having a field day and of Kenny Cunningham's eyebrow furrowed in a mixture of anger and sadness. I shudder.

But - why is there always a but? - the fact that the best aspects of Ireland's game were the workrate of a centre-forward and a near-heroic centre-half's performance tell a story. Giovanni Trapattoni bowled the nation a googly by selecting Darron Gibson to replace Steven Reid in midfield, to play beside Glen Whelan. It, um, didn't really work. They neither provided the required cover for the defence nor gave anything when Ireland had possession. Trapattoni does not demand anything spectacular from the central two in the latter situation, but when the team would try to string some passes together, the lack of the ability - or will - of Gibson and Whelan to try anything vaguely positive forced the play deeeper and deeper until it ended up at the feet of Shay Given, with an aimless hoof the result. The second half was a hearty workout for the back line, punctuated by counter-attcks of varying degrees of success (luckily we had the attackers to make something decent of such scraps).

Frustration, thy name is Aiden McGeady. He possesses talent rare in an Irish player, but his footballing intelligence is questionable. One minute he is pulling a Garrincha, the next he is coughing up the ball after a mazy run because his head has been down the whole way and he has no idea of what's been happening around him. I'm going to sound like a patronising gobshite here, but he needs to get himself to the Premier League.

Cyprus were not at their best (they were scintillating against Italy last month) yet still deserved something from this one.

I love Paul McShane in a Philippe Senderos kind of way. His debut against the Czech Republic in 2006 was an example of the type of thing which gets me right in my dysfunctional heart: shutting down Jan Koller and not allowing him a single meaningful chance...except for the one which Koller turned into an equalising goal (it finished 1-1). Having McShane play, even at right-back, is a bit like Homer Simpson being in charge of safety at the nuclear plant. The enduring images from this game will include several of McShane on his arse, Ioannis Okkas having skedaddled past.

Éamon Dunphy is a bleating, know-nothing, blowhard, self-serving, egomaniacal, bufoonish hack. But then we knew that already.

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E=SH²

What is Stephen Hunt and where did it come from?

The answers to the latter question are, alas, cloaked in a fog of mystery, perhaps owing to a blunt force trauma to the head of history, incurred somehow. Such obfuscation has given rise to several myths purporting to explain Hunt's essence.

One has the young Stephen playing around the perimeter of Portlaoise Prison and discovering a piece of Semtex which he mistook for plasticine. He would carry it around with him wherever he went, and one day, as a curious child might, he put some in his mouth and swallowed it. (This tale is highly dubious, but it might explain his red card in the Czech Republic last year.)

Another says that he was discovered by a Crystal Palace scout while competing at Waterford Greyhound Track. It was not his speed or stride which impressed the scout so much as the ferocity with which he tore into the mechanical hare after the race. Some say he was the mechanical hare.

The most plausible explanation for Hunt is that he was, in fact, a budding professional cyclist from Colombia who became enchanted with Irish football, especially with the national team's left-flank combination of Ian Harte and Kevin Kilbane. So he forsook his destiny of polka-dot jerseys for a life of running around a lot on football pitches in England.

Whatever about his provenance, we know what Stephen Hunt is - energy. Rumour has it that in one drugs test, he passed pure battery acid. Apparently, Reading's decline last season was in part due to his being chased by several nefarious laboratories, all desperate to harvest his bone marrow for use by some of their more illustrious clients before the Olympics.


What he seems not to be is a footballer. The firing-up of the Large Hadron Collider appears to have had an unintended consequence on the left wing of a football pitch in Podgorica last night - the ball kept disappearing whenever it reached Hunt. His method when in possession - assuming he has managed to bring the ball under his control in the first place - is to run, and see what happens. It sometimes leaves him inside the penalty area, as if he's passed through a wormhole. Sometimes he is in a position to pass to a team-mate, often making the latter undergo hideous contortions in order to control it. Most frequently, there's a tangle of legs resulting in the ball ending up at the feet of an opponent.

This same uneducated instinctiveness is what makes him invaluable to Trapattoni's Ireland. He must be one of the most annoying, not to say frightening, players to face. Even if your not worried about the possibility of your ankle feeling the force of his studs (something which happens with alarming regularity, including to a Georgian player in the first minute of Saturday's game), you must contend with Hunt buzzing around you like a wasp on a bun. And he does it forever. If the match was still on right now (this is applicable whenever you're reading this) he would still be there, losing possession before hounding his opponent back, not allowing him a second's clear thought.

And this appears to be a microcosm of the national team's new era. One yearned to see Juan Rom...I mean Andy Reid, almost the inverse Stephen Hunt; someone who won't give the ball away easily, and would provide some incision going forward (this would have been especially welcome given another frustratingly misfiring game by Aiden McGeady). It would certainly have taken the edge off Robbie Keane's dose of the strops which afflict him every time he plays for Ireland, the poor chap.

What Reid lacks, despite his insistence to the contrary, is Hunt's ability and willingness to run and snap at ankles. Given that Trapattoni's priority is to keep things ticking over defensively rather than build around flair, his apparent antipathy towards Reid is understandable. One could even say it has been vindicated, partially at least, by the four points garnered so far, one of which was earned by blunting Montenegro's supposedly fierce attack. But for all that Hunt's tenacity benefits the team, the thought of Reid kicking his heels on the bench is a painful one. It's the thought of talent unfulfilled, of the kind of wizardry so rare in an Irish player going to waste. It appears Trapattoni would rather see the immediate, kinetic energy of Hunt and is happy for Reid's to remain potential.

Flickr photo by g r e e n g a g e.

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Irish sport, in stamp form

(Click on the image for a better view of our national misery, you voyeuristic bastards.)

This week saw the issuing by An Post, the Irish national postal service, of two stamps by the artist and sculptor Graham Knuttel on the occasion of Ireland's participation in the forthcoming Olympic Games in Beijing.

The one on the right depicts a member of our coxless four rowing crew just before they cross the line to finish fifth in their semi-final, setting a new national record in the process. He wears a scowl, at once born of the essential determination of the Olympian and the defensiveness that he must pre-emptively adopt in order to brace himself for the disappointment felt by the viewers back home. He knows that despite the thousands of hours of toil he and his team-mates have endured in the last four years, with meagre resources and nominal support from the Exchequer, all the while holding down full-time employment or education, and competing against professionals who have practically infinite wherewithal to allow them to spend as much time as they want in physical, mental and technical preparation, the people of Ireland will wonder why the crew failed to even make the final, let alone win a medal. The national airwaves will be ablaze with phone-in shows dedicated to discussing whether we should be wasting any tax-payers' money on such a bunch of losers. He will not go to London in 2012.

In the background is a decaying tree in a lush, green field. This stands for the withering of the rower's dreams in the midst of the grand celebration of human vitality that is the Olympic Games. The field also symbolises Ireland, with the tree as the Irish soul which, in these post-Celtic Tiger days, knows the price of everything.

The second stamp is similarly detailed in commentary. The first thing to note is that the female shot-putter is looking towards the top-right hand corner of the stamp, as if in disbelief at the price (82c for a stamp?!). Secondly, she is practising at home in Ireland. This is because she has failed to qualify for the Games; in fact, no Irish shot-putter did. The nation shrugs and turns on the Gaelic football (as symbolised by the Macgillycuddy's Reeks in the background, a mountain range in Kerry, Ireland's foremost Gaelic football county). The image is ambiguous: is she in training for an attempt to reach the next Olympics, or has the lack of recognition for her almost Stakhavonite devotion to her discipline driven her to bash herself over the head with her own shot?

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It was in the year of eighty-eight, in the lovely month of June

Oh dear. Another nostalgia-laced post accompanied by a YouTube clip. Not even a week in and we're resorting to this. Doesn't bode well, does it?

Well, screw it. I'm going to wallow and I don't care who sees me. Today is the twentieth anniversary of Ireland's first ever game in a major championship, in the 1988 European Championships. As if this weren't momentous enough, it was against them across the water ; and blow me down if we didn't go and win 1-0.

Actually, Euro '88 came around a bit too soon in my life for me to have any concrete memories of it (Italia '90, on the other hand, I remember as if it were yesterday). But somehow this doesn't lessen its impact on me. Watching the footage - Ray Houghton's goal (and the slapstick routine that created it), the Lineker misses and the batten-down-the-hatches drill that preserved the lead, the awe-struck celebrations - is a bit like being sat down to be told the story of your great-great-grandfather who, passing by the river one day, saw a drowning man and dived in and saved his life.

Okay, that's stretching it a bit. But my point is that the wave of pride that washes over me is as great as it would have been had I been there.

Ireland is a pretty good place to be these days, what with the economic miracle that somehow made its way to us a decade-and-a-bit ago. Twenty years ago, however, it was, frankly, shit. Defined by theocracy, terrorism and an economy that was barely functioning, the place was a misery. Anyone who could get out, did, which of course dug the country into an ever deeper rut.

So this was more than just a sports team winning a game. For one thing, here we were on an international stage, actually being good at something. We weren't the most talented team in the world, but we were competing with the elite, sometimes even winning, always at least giving
them a mighty fright. Maybe, even if only for one day, people would think of Ireland without simultaneously bringing to mind the IRA, or those thick Paddys immigrants in their neighbourhood.

As well as this, it served simply to make people happy. Perhaps oddly for a country where soccer isn't even the number one sport (though it's getting closer), whenever we've been involved in a major competition, the country has been consumed by it to the exclusion of almost everything
else. It's really quite amazing. When we play a game in a tournament, everyone forgoes whatever it is they'd normally be doing and watches. People with no knowledge of football, and no interest otherwise, become not only as engrossed as the hardcore fan but instant experts. And when we achieve something special, as luckily we have done in each tournament
we've been in, everyone come together and shares in the elation. There has
been no unifying force like it.

And this unity and joy were especially important in 1988. When the nation was slowly drifting away in a sea of despair, here was a taste of the purest of pure happiness, no strings attached.

Of course, a lot of the pride felt at such moments derives just from being a small country bucking the odds. By dint of our small population, it's not often that we're the best, or among the best, at any sport. Personally, I'm not all that patriotic, and I'm certainly not nationalistic, but when Pádraig Harrington wins a British Open or Sonia O'Sullivan a gold medal, it still generates that feeling of "that's one of us". I often wonder whether someone from one of those enormous
countries that hog the medal table at the Olympics can feel that with the same intensity; surely the regularity of success dulls the emotions.

Ireland went on to draw with the Soviet Union and lose to Holland by a late, lucky, lucky goal, and were eliminated. The team was welcomed as heroes by hundreds of thousands on their return. Two years later, we reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup, and the country nearly melted down.

It's been argued that these tournaments were the beginning of the Celtic Tiger, giving a shot of inspirational confidence to a demoralised people. It's a nice theory, if a tad far-fetched. Still, perhaps it says something that this idea can be proffered without being totally laughed out of
court.

Reading back over this, perhaps I'm over-sentimentalising it, viewing it through football-tinted glasses, as someone who wasn't even conscious of it at the time; take that at a caveat if you will.

As a reward for reaching this far in the post, here's that YouTube clip I mentioned. I could have posted a highlights clip, but this is somehow more evocative; it's a rendition by Christy Moore of his song 'Joxer Goes To Stuttgart', depicting a trip to the Euros by a band of intrepid Irishmen.
Lord knows what anyone not Irish will make of it, but hey:

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