The World Cup has started and although Australia is one of the participants, you wouldn’t exactly say that excitement has reached fever pitch here. It’s more like a small cold with the occasional sniffle. Losing 4-0 in their first game hasn’t helped of course. The Aussies like winners and have expectations way above their ability. A trait they clearly learned from the English.
I kicked off an office sweep last week, drawing displeasure from my boss who thought the reference to France as being a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys was not in the spirit of an International Banks diversity policy. He didn’t mind my reference to the English as whinging Poms, but that’s Australian double standards for you.
I think it’s fair to say that if Australia was not taking part, then interest here would be confined to those of us brought up in a European soccer culture and the young Asian fraternity who have been brainwashed by the Murdoch driven promotion of the English Premier League. Apart from Kiwi’s of course. There is a huge population of New Zealanders in Melbourne who are discovering the beauty of the World Game, helped of course by a last minute goal against Slovakia in their first game and an even better performance against Italy. I would mock their jubilance in achieving mere draws, but as the Irish are still celebrating the time we hammered England 1-1 in the 1990 World Cup, any giggling by me at New Zealand would be as hypocritical as Thierry Henry appealing for hand ball. And he would never do that, would he?
The past of course is another country. In 1994, that country was the USA. I was supposed to go, but impending nuptials got in the way. We kicked off that World Cup with a win against Italy. It lives in Irish folklore with the English game in Stuttgart in 1988 but doesn’t have the same pleasant memories for me. I watched the game in a house in Limerick in the heartland of Irish Rugby. In much the same way as many Kiwis are doing now, Ireland’s rugby fraternity jumped on the football bandwagon in 1994 without bothering to school up on such trivialities as rules and tactics. While the country enjoyed the match, I had to listen to a bunch of middle class oafs with no necks and cauliflower ears call for line outs every time the ball went out of play and triumphantly cheer every time we won a corner.
We beat Italy that day of course in Giants Stadium, New York. Paul McGrath played with a dead arm but still mastered the Latin millionaires that adorned the Italian side. Ray Houghton scored a freakish goal that made us dream about winning the World Cup. But it was all downhill from there. As was my impending nuptials as it happened. Our football woes were caused by FIFA dictating that we should play our remaining games in Florida, which in June is a smouldering cauldron with the sort of clamminess that could drown a fish. In short, it’s probably the last place freckly, pale skinned Irish people should play football.
Not only that, but they made us play at lunchtime when only mad dogs would be found on the Tampa streets.
I called my Mother to discuss tactics before the Dutch game in the last 16. She was a late convert to the beautiful game but like many Irish mammies, she was seduced by the dulcet Northern tones of Ireland’s then manager, Jack Charlton. She was pessimistic about Ireland’s chances. “It’s not the hate that will get them. It’s the humiliation”. In the end, it was heat and humidity that got them, but as the team that Jack built fractured at the end of that tournament, I can’t help thinking that my mother was right all along.
By the time France 1998 came around, I was in Ireland, surfing on the back of the Celtic Tiger (who was just a cub back then). I had just joined my current employer and was given the task of migrating data to the US. This meant dealing with technicians in India and Hong Kong, who were blissfully unaware that the festival of football was underway. They pencilled in a call for the afternoon of the day that the final was being played, to my great annoyance. But luckily we wrapped things up with an hour to spare. Our final conversation that night was around our plans for dinner.
I told the Asians on the call that they should head out and have an Irish, as I was tossing up between having a Chinese or an Indian. The joke flew over their heads unfortunately, but they felt a vague sense of being offended. That began a long history of me putting my foot in it at work, which has lasted right up to these games.
2002 was the year Ireland split between the Keane and McCarthy camps. I was a McCartyite, loyal to the conservative traditions of servitude and class order. If football is war without guns, then we fought ourselves to a bloody stalemate that long, hot summer. Eight years on, I’m still not sure what the argument was about. Lack of balls was mentioned at the time and in fairness that seems an appropriate metaphor.
I started a new job in 2006, one that would eventually lead me here to Australia. Strangely I remember very little of that summer’s World Cup, while I can still name the Zairian midfield from 1974. Maybe football has become less important to me or perhaps my brain had little else to think about back then. But those long ago games seemed filled with spectacular goals, vibrant green pitches and scantily clad Brazilian girls in the stands. World Cups now seem to be filled with dodgy penalties, bizarre refereeing decisions and people clad in overcoats in the stands. Is that all 2010 will be remembered for? Or is there a kid somewhere eating apple tart in his auntie’s house and memorising the middle names of the Honduran squad?
Wednesday 23 June 2010
Thursday 3 June 2010
I Measure out my Life in World Cups - Part 1
The World Cup will shortly be among us and plans are being made in Australia for how best to enjoy an event which will take place in the middle of night. The hype is not quite on a par with Ireland in 1990 but a win or two will get the Aussies on board. They have a winning mentality which can only be fed by success.
I will be keeping a fond eye on New Zealand, if only to encourage my significant other to watch some late night TV. Watching England lose on penalties and seeing those cheating frog eating surrender monkeys lose are also high on my wish list.
But I get another feeling every time a World Cup comes round. I remember past competitions as milestones in my life, as though my very existence was measured in four year increments. My first was 1966 when I guess I was just learning to walk. I thankfully slept through England’s thieving of the trophy, although I’ve had to hear about it ever since. As an Irish comic said “the only plus side out of England winning this year’s World Cup is that it might finally get them to stop talking about 1966!”
1970 is my first memory of going to the cinema. They made a movie of that year’s World Cup in Mexico and Dad brought me and my brother along to see it. It’s also my only memory of being at the cinema with my Dad (he has always been an outdoor’s kind of guy). We had a black and white TV back then and the movie opened my eyes to technicolour. I can still see the vibrant emerald shades of the Axteca Stadium pitch and the bright yellow shirts of the triumphant Brazilians.
Four years later, we still had that old black and white TV and I had become a nine year football obsessive. Two days before the final, I received the welcome news that my Aunt Winnie had invested some bingo winnings in a new colour TV. My Dad and I were invited to watch the sour Germans take on the flying Dutchmen in the final and to feast on Aunt Winnie’s apple tarts (delicious on the lips but ran through you like Usain Bolt).
I hassled Dad all the way home to buy a colour TV and he humoured me. Sadly, back then I knew a lot more about football than I did about economics. But I’m pleased that the two most colourful memories from my childhood where in his company.
In 1978 my parents bought a portable television. We had moved into the colour world since the previous world cup, but my mother saw this as her personal domain. My abiding memory of 1978 is sitting in the kitchen, perched on high stools with my Dad and brother and watching football on that tiny black and white portable. My mother sat alone in the next room, reading a Mills and Boons novel and occasionally casting an eye on the soap opera on screen.
We did get her to watch one match during those finals which was interrupted by a powerful thunderstorm. My mother looked up from her Mills and Boons novel and saw the rain on TV. She instantly leapt up and raced out to the back yard to bring in the washing. When she came back, my Dad pointed out that the game was being played in Buenos Aires and we were thousands of miles away in Dundalk. “That must be one hell of a cloud” he said, which was just about the funniest thing I remember from the seventies.
I sat my school leaving exams in 1982 and went through the torment of trying to study while my brother mocked me by cheering every two minutes downstairs. I’d race down in the expectation of seeing a goal, only to see him rolling around laughing while on screen a South American footballer was rolling around in feigned injury and no goal was in sight. I still blame the Italy V Brazil quarter final for my spectacularly ordinary results.
I was 21 in 1986, full of bravado and cheap Northern Ireland beer. I’d fought a battle with my mother for years to gain better access to the television, particularly when football was on. She helped enormously in 1986 by dragging my Dad to America for a month while the finals were on. It meant he got to see no football and I got to see as much as I wanted.
In the summer of 1986 I was standing on the platform of the railway station of life. I had already bought my ticket and knew my final destination. We laughed, we danced, we snogged, and we squeezed the last juice out of our childhood. It was our last chance before the train left and we took it with enthusiasm. Innocence wasn't so much lost that summer; it was traded in for the rites of passage to a new life. It was the best of times and our lives were changing forever before our very eyes. 1986 is also famous for the fantastic goal that Maradona scored against England and the second one he scored that day wasn’t bad either.
Unless Ireland wins a World Cup, 1990 will forever be the Daddy of all tournaments. It was so wonderfully innocent, so new and exciting, so passionate and drunken. We wore tight fitting polyester shirts and didn’t care. We inflated plastic bananas (for reasons that still escape me); hung bunting from our houses and generally lost the run of ourselves. And best of all, I got to go. I stood in that stadium in Genoa when we beat Romania on penalties, I sang my heart out in Rome when we lost to Italy and sat outside the Palermo ground when we qualified for the second round and gave my best scarf to a passing Italian because the world had aligned at that very moment with a beautiful kiss of serendipity.
I fell in love for the first time just before that World Cup started and that love lasted until 1994, when it fell apart around the same time as Jack Charlton’s Irish team at that year’s finals. But that’s another story and only proves that love and football can be cruel mistresses.
To be continued…..
I will be keeping a fond eye on New Zealand, if only to encourage my significant other to watch some late night TV. Watching England lose on penalties and seeing those cheating frog eating surrender monkeys lose are also high on my wish list.
But I get another feeling every time a World Cup comes round. I remember past competitions as milestones in my life, as though my very existence was measured in four year increments. My first was 1966 when I guess I was just learning to walk. I thankfully slept through England’s thieving of the trophy, although I’ve had to hear about it ever since. As an Irish comic said “the only plus side out of England winning this year’s World Cup is that it might finally get them to stop talking about 1966!”
1970 is my first memory of going to the cinema. They made a movie of that year’s World Cup in Mexico and Dad brought me and my brother along to see it. It’s also my only memory of being at the cinema with my Dad (he has always been an outdoor’s kind of guy). We had a black and white TV back then and the movie opened my eyes to technicolour. I can still see the vibrant emerald shades of the Axteca Stadium pitch and the bright yellow shirts of the triumphant Brazilians.
Four years later, we still had that old black and white TV and I had become a nine year football obsessive. Two days before the final, I received the welcome news that my Aunt Winnie had invested some bingo winnings in a new colour TV. My Dad and I were invited to watch the sour Germans take on the flying Dutchmen in the final and to feast on Aunt Winnie’s apple tarts (delicious on the lips but ran through you like Usain Bolt).
I hassled Dad all the way home to buy a colour TV and he humoured me. Sadly, back then I knew a lot more about football than I did about economics. But I’m pleased that the two most colourful memories from my childhood where in his company.
In 1978 my parents bought a portable television. We had moved into the colour world since the previous world cup, but my mother saw this as her personal domain. My abiding memory of 1978 is sitting in the kitchen, perched on high stools with my Dad and brother and watching football on that tiny black and white portable. My mother sat alone in the next room, reading a Mills and Boons novel and occasionally casting an eye on the soap opera on screen.
We did get her to watch one match during those finals which was interrupted by a powerful thunderstorm. My mother looked up from her Mills and Boons novel and saw the rain on TV. She instantly leapt up and raced out to the back yard to bring in the washing. When she came back, my Dad pointed out that the game was being played in Buenos Aires and we were thousands of miles away in Dundalk. “That must be one hell of a cloud” he said, which was just about the funniest thing I remember from the seventies.
I sat my school leaving exams in 1982 and went through the torment of trying to study while my brother mocked me by cheering every two minutes downstairs. I’d race down in the expectation of seeing a goal, only to see him rolling around laughing while on screen a South American footballer was rolling around in feigned injury and no goal was in sight. I still blame the Italy V Brazil quarter final for my spectacularly ordinary results.
I was 21 in 1986, full of bravado and cheap Northern Ireland beer. I’d fought a battle with my mother for years to gain better access to the television, particularly when football was on. She helped enormously in 1986 by dragging my Dad to America for a month while the finals were on. It meant he got to see no football and I got to see as much as I wanted.
In the summer of 1986 I was standing on the platform of the railway station of life. I had already bought my ticket and knew my final destination. We laughed, we danced, we snogged, and we squeezed the last juice out of our childhood. It was our last chance before the train left and we took it with enthusiasm. Innocence wasn't so much lost that summer; it was traded in for the rites of passage to a new life. It was the best of times and our lives were changing forever before our very eyes. 1986 is also famous for the fantastic goal that Maradona scored against England and the second one he scored that day wasn’t bad either.
Unless Ireland wins a World Cup, 1990 will forever be the Daddy of all tournaments. It was so wonderfully innocent, so new and exciting, so passionate and drunken. We wore tight fitting polyester shirts and didn’t care. We inflated plastic bananas (for reasons that still escape me); hung bunting from our houses and generally lost the run of ourselves. And best of all, I got to go. I stood in that stadium in Genoa when we beat Romania on penalties, I sang my heart out in Rome when we lost to Italy and sat outside the Palermo ground when we qualified for the second round and gave my best scarf to a passing Italian because the world had aligned at that very moment with a beautiful kiss of serendipity.
I fell in love for the first time just before that World Cup started and that love lasted until 1994, when it fell apart around the same time as Jack Charlton’s Irish team at that year’s finals. But that’s another story and only proves that love and football can be cruel mistresses.
To be continued…..
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