Days of Heaven (10 page)

Never enough, it seemed.

Twenty years later, even against a football nation which was clearly in decline, a draw in Hungary would seem reasonable — after all, they were in decline from such heights and we were
rising from such depths, maybe we were just meeting them in the middle.

It was also somewhat troubling that we had scored no goals in the first three matches of the group, though this could also be rationalised — we had been away from home, against a very good
team, a useful enough team, and Northern Ireland.

And having played the first three games away, even if we hadn’t been impressive, we were still alive. Normally, at this stage, we would have expected to be dead.

So there was a sense that the worst was over us, if you discount the lingering spectre of Northern Ireland still waiting for us in the last match of the group — ah, we had many, many miles
to go, on this journey.

Even the idea of playing the first three matches away from home was a new concept for us, hopefully another example of Jack’s original thinking, which would yield the same success as his
most original thinking of all, which was to play football without actually playing football as such. At least, not as anyone else was playing it in the civilised world.

We were still not free of this ingrained sense of foreboding, even though we could finish second in the Group and still qualify automatically.

Assuming that Spain would win the Group and Northern Ireland would get beaten often enough to do them down and Malta would get beaten by everyone, it was effectively between ourselves and
Hungary, the not-so-mighty Magyars.

Not the most awe-inspiring task.

Still we feared the worst.

Still we feared ruin.

It takes more than just a few good football results to get over that ancient feeling, so we feared all the things we have always feared, until the day that Spain came to Lansdowne.

I went to that match with George Byrne, the controversial rock journalist. We would later see deep significance in the fact that the last match we had attended together was the final agony of
the Eoin Hand era, a famously wretched 4-1 defeat at home to Denmark in 1985. And we had even missed seeing the Republic’s goal. We were only arriving into the stand at the moment that Frank
Stapleton headed the first goal of the match, early doors.

The rest would be a débâcle, with the stadium full of mad Danes wearing Viking helmets with horns celebrating the best team they would ever have, bound for the 1986 World Cup in
Mexico while we looked on forlornly, excluded from life’s banquet.

It was but a small consolation that we hadn’t paid in to that match, because I had been given two free tickets by the
PR
company putting together the match
programme, who used an article of mine from
Hot Press
, a piece in the Foul Play column on the fabled
RTÉ
football commentator Philip Greene. They also gave me
£25, as I recall, along with the two tickets, and we were undoubtedly drinking that money in the International Bar later that evening when the well-known folklorist and professional Dubliner
Éamonn MacThomáis walked in and declared in his usual heart-of-the-rowel style, ‘Ah, Brian Boru was the only fella who could beat them Danes!’

At that moment, we knew we were in hell, that we were at the point known to alcoholics as rock bottom — and still we had a lot of drinking to do on that night and in the nights to
come.

So it seemed meaningful that four years later, in April 1989, George and I were marching on Lansdowne in a much different frame of mind. It might be a portent of the worst kind,
our presence ensuring some similarly nightmarish outcome, or it might be a good omen, a reward for all we had suffered in the days when the likes of us were the only people still following the
Republic — and we were getting in free, with our beer money thrown in.

Was it too much to expect that on this day, against Spain who had butchered us in Seville, there might be something akin to what the psycho-babblers call ‘closure’?

On the whole, Paddy doesn’t do closure. But we came very close to it, on the day we beat Spain 1-0 at Lansdowne. You could hardly even call it a football match, this exhibition of
barely-controlled savagery on the part of the Republic. And the Spaniards wouldn’t call it a football match either: ‘This was not a football match, it was not even close’, their
striker, Emilio Butragueno, known as The Vulture, would later protest. ‘The Irish players were too harsh.’

And he hadn’t mentioned the crowd, who themselves had been a tad harsh.

There were about 50,000 in Lansdowne that day because thousands could still stand at matches, pressed up against the wire, screaming at Johnny Spaniard. It was just a few weeks after the
Hillsborough Disaster. Soon, there would be no more of this standing at Lansdowne Road or at any other football ground.

Not that Lansdowne was a football ground, in truth. For the visit of Johnny Spaniard, with all his poise and his superb technique, Lansdowne was a rugby pitch. It was so rough, no-one could have
played football on it, even if they tried. Not even Johnny Spaniard. ‘It was very difficult to play in these circumstances’, The Vulture remarked, apparently not fully aware that this
was precisely the idea and that Jack had been known to compliment the groundsman on his performance on such days.

I was close to the wire that day and I could see that The Vulture and his illustrious colleagues were struggling. Whenever a Spaniard came to take a throw-in he would be horribly abused by the
mob behind the wire, a mob which was starting to get the smell of fear from their refined visitors and another smell which was driving them on to greater obscenities — the smell of
victory.

Ireland scored after 17 minutes.

It turned out to be an own-goal by the celebrated Michel, from a cross by Houghton. Another kind break there, for Jack, who even lucked in to the correct pronunciation of the Spaniard’s
name in the post-match press conference. ‘Mitchell’ he called him, to the guffaws of the reporters who assumed in their cosmopolitan way that it must be pronounced
‘Michelle’. It turned out that ‘Mitchell’ was right.

During the game some of us thought that Stapleton had scored it, a sweet irony for myself and George, though in effect we didn’t see this one either, our view blocked by the crowd heaving
all around us. In fact Stapo scoring would have been somewhat problematic for Jack himself, who seemed to be making it his business to liquidate Paddy’s heroes of old, such as Brady and
O’Leary and Stapleton, perhaps to show Paddy who was in charge, perhaps because he genuinely hated the football they played.

So Stapleton was still giving Jack a pain in the arse but he had his uses. Which is more than could be said for The Vulture, the predator who was supposed to devour us, but who was himself taken
off during the second-half, sending the crowd into a new level of frenzy. I can still feel the animalistic energy of that day, that heightened sense that if we won this match, we were going to a
better place, for a long time, and if we couldn’t win it, we were utterly screwed, for a long time. A sense that all we had gained in the madness of Euro 88 was now on the line.

I remember Staunton in particular because he was on our side of the pitch. In these all-seater days, you get a proper perspective on the match, but in the last days of the old regime, from where
we were standing, it seemed to be all about Staunton, stopping everything that came his way, charging and chasing and harassing.

For a lot of the folks on those terraces, this was the defining match of the Charlton years, and nothing would be quite the same again. The multitudes with their Olé Olé-ing and
their que-sera-sera-ing would now be signing themselves up for full membership of a club to which they had never really belonged and which they would never rightly understand.

Football itself would never be the same again — in fact John Aldridge wasn’t playing against Spain because he was still traumatised after Hillsborough.

And just as football seemed to be dying in its ancient heartlands, for Ireland, football seemed to be promising the world.

There was a routine 2-0 home win against Malta (ah, how blithely we dismiss these little people). Though even then, I recall writing a piece in the
Sunday Independent
which mentioned a
thing called
PMT
, or ‘pre-Maltese tension’. We got over that, and on a sunny Sunday in June 1989, there was an extraordinarily happy day for Ireland when we beat
Hungary 2-0, a game distinguished by a particularly fine opening goal from Paul McGrath. Even Paddy, with all his perfectly justified fatalism, was starting to believe that he was about to qualify
for the World Cup for the first time.

I watched that one from the Press Box, perhaps feeling that I wasn’t needed any more, down in the pit — and soon, there wouldn’t even be a pit.

In fact as the Group progressed, my viewing arrangements seemed to reflect the broader trends. Having stood with the howling mob against Spain, I then found myself in the relative serenity of
the main stand for the Hungary match. For the home match against Northern Ireland, a 3-0 win which was realised almost contemptuously after a nervous first half, I had moved my operation to the
Purty Loft in Dun Laoghaire, drinking pints of lager all day and watching it on a big screen. And for the ceremonial defeat of Malta in their Ta’ Qali stadium, I had moved to an even bigger
screen in a banqueting room in Sachs Hotel, where
Hot Press
had organised a party, attended by various rock personalities, most notably Mr Joe Elliott of Def Leppard. Though I should add
that Joe was not just some celebrity cheering all the wrong things at the wrong time, but a football man of impeccable pedigree, a fiercely committed Sheffield Utd fan — and like most
Englishmen, he wished us well.

Hot Press,
too, was entitled to have a bit of a do, in view of its outstanding loyalty to the game in this country, exemplified by the Foul Play column and the growing reputation on the
field of play of the grand old club
Hot Press
Moenchengladbach. The fact that a party was being thrown with the result not absolutely one hundred per cent certain tells its own story of the
breakthroughs we were all making.

But the gods were still throwing odd little barriers in the way of our pursuit of happiness.

Fog descended on Dublin Airport in the days before the match, with fans becoming increasingly anxious that they might not get off the island in time. And anxiety naturally leads to the
consumption of alcohol in very large quantities — especially if you’re hanging around an airport for a long time and you’re wearing a green, white and gold curly wig and your name
is Paddy. Happiness also has that effect, as does sadness and all the hobgoblins to which we are prey. But this time it was the anxiety that was sucking up the booze.

On
RTÉ
News, as the crisis deepened, a woman was seen weeping bitterly.

Having had their sport with us, those baleful gods lifted the fog on Wednesday morning, allowing just enough time for everyone to get out there and to see us beating Malta 2-0. Even if some of
them only got there for the second half, Paddy would, after all, have his day in the sun.

Beyond in Malta, at the Ta’ Qali National Stadium in Valletta, the gentlemen of the press would be filing their triumphalist reports, perhaps recalling a less happy time, when one of their
number was not so sure of the outcome.

He had been one of several journalists who had partaken of a long and leisurely lunch on the day that the Republic were playing Malta in a European Championship qualifier. Perhaps the local wine
was fortified, because this particular reporter seemed to be still feeling the effects later that evening, during and after the match — his colleagues heard him muttering angrily on the bus
back to the hotel, that it was a disgrace that Ireland had sunk so low they couldn’t even beat these eejits from Malta. Yet they had beaten Malta, albeit narrowly, with a late goal from
Stapleton, which had apparently gone unnoticed by the reporter.

As his colleagues manoeuvred him back to his room, they feared for him. When they had lashed out their own reports in their own rooms, a few of his colleagues went to this man’s room to
check on his condition.

They knocked on his door, but there was no answer. They tried to enter the room, but it was locked. So with the help of a concierge with the master key they entered his room, which was now in
darkness.

Through the gloom, they could see a figure sitting at a table, apparently fast asleep, slumped over a typewriter. Instantly they knew that they would probably have to do his work for him, at
great speed, to rattle out a bunch of clichés in his inimitable style, as the deadline loomed — it was the right thing to do and a sign of the comradeship which prevailed among the
press corps at that time.

But he had already written something.

As they approached the slumped figure, they could see that he had indeed been able to type something on the sheet of paper which he had somehow wedged into the typewriter.

‘Last night in the Ta’ Qali Stadium’ ... it began.

And that’s all he wrote.