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…..
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