Exactly!

From Studs Up, a sentence for which I've been grasping for years and which says so much in so few words:

...England remain international football’s version of Spurs...

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(embarrassed cough)

"It was just a thought when everything was so sad. I thought life has some beautiful moments and you should tell people you love them. I wanted to show some emotion."

Ah, Raymond. I feel for you, pal. It's happened to us all. We've all done something silly while drunk on a cocktail of hope and despair, no? Some of us have proposed to our partner live on national television; whilst other among our number have rashly declared that despite our estrangement and the harsh words and icy glances we've exchanged subsequently, we're still in love with you, Dutch football!

Yep. I was one of them. It might be something to do with my being a "beautiful game"-spouting pseudo-intellectual pygmy* who's read Brilliant Orange twenty times and longs to see something in Dutch football that is, perhaps, merely a ghost these days. Perhaps I got carried away by the contrast with the vapidity of the 2004 team and the 2006 vintage's descent into record-breaking levels of indisciplined ridiculousness, in tandem with Portugal. But hey, tell me you weren't swept up by the majesty of their performance against Italy, which was surpassed by the win over France four days later. Tell me Sneijder's goal in the first game and his and Robben's against the French won't come instantly to mind when you recall this tournament in your dotage. Wasn't your heart warmed by Marco van Basten withdrawing Kuijt and Engelaar and sending on Robben and van Persie? What does that Cruijff chap know, anyway?

And like poor old Ray, we were left feeling a bit silly returning to the seaside the morning after we'd scrawled our words of devotion in six-foot-high letters on the pier wall. At least we didn't do it on live TV, I suppose.

(Oh, and Gabriele Marcotti says we're morons. Cheers, Gab.)

So, like some shameless football slut, we discard Holland now that they've fulfilled their usefulness and jump on Russia instead. We're surely on more solid ground here. As Jonathan Wilson (the finest football writer around, I'm beginning to think) pointed out at the weekend , it's with them that the idea of Total Football is most faithfully embodied. Wilson points out that this has at least as much to do with Russia's own sporting tradition as with the fact that their manager is Dutch.

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a match (in a non-partisan capacity) as much as Russia-Holland. Sure, Holland appeared relatively sluggish - James Richardson's pun of choice on the Guardian podcast: "Holland Dozier Holland" - but Russia were superlative**. Whenever they had the ball, they looked to score. (The same went for the group decider against Sweden, too.) It didn't matter what the score was at the time. Even when a single goal to the good late in the game, they still went for it. This runs against the prevailing trend which says that possession is merely a means of not conceding a goal. This was glorious anti-anti-football. Most teams would have instinctively shifted their weight onto the back foot and doggedly hoped to protect their lead.

Like England. Good lord, remember how close they came to qualifying - to eliminating Russia? If that thought doesn't send a chill down your spine, you're probably English, in which case you're understandably excused. Think of the difference between the styles of the respective teams. Take England's collapse in Moscow last October: they take the lead and without even thinking, cede two-thirds of the field to Russia, giving up any notion of threatening to score again. They don't even try to control the game by maintaining possession, keeping Russia at arm's length. I would call it 'panic', but that just makes it sound like a reflex rather than the neurosis it probably is. Sometimes it works (cf. the win against Argentina in 2002). This time it didn't.

While we're dragging the party down, let's recall how our hopes are continually elevated and then callously thrown out of the fifteenth-floor window at these major championships. As well as Holland this time, I can think of Argentina in 2006, Anyone But Greece in 2004, Holland in 2000 and, um, Holland in 1998. And Spain, anytime. Yet here I am getting giddy at another bunch of teasers on the basis of a couple of games. The rational course of action would be to pre-emptively adopt the crash position and brace oneself for the inevitable.

Well, luckily, I'm human and therefore inherently stupid. So I hope...no, no, fearlessly predict that: Hiddink will figure out how to counteract the counter-attack of the Spanish; we get a fantastic game between two of the most technically accomplished teams around, with Russia winning; they will then overcome Germany with a wave of almost ideologically attack-minded football; pundits all over the world will not decry Russia's "naivety" and won't say "if only they didn't go for a second goal"; Andrei Arshavin's tournament will be hailed as the greatest since Roberto Baggio in 1994; and I won't be stood forlornly on the pier on Monday morning, clutching an engagement ring in my fist before chucking it into the ocean.

Photo by Georgio R. (away for a while) on flickr

*It's one thing being an intellectual pygmy; imagine being a pseudo-intellectual pygmy.

**'Superlative' being the superlative of choice when one can't think of an actual superlative to say.

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With Flanders and Swann playing in the background

Read this by wingco on the When Saturday Comes message board. That is all.

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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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