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| On The Ball City! |
I’M ALWAYS ripping stuff on this blog, and there are lots of reasons right now to do so. We have the Warriors gagging away an NBA championship and tarnishing a historic season, we have an utterly inept performance by USA FC against Argentina in the Copa América Centenario semifinals, we have a performance by El Tri in the Copa quarterfinals against Chile so heartless and pathetic that it made the Americans look competent, and I should kill Baylor and the whole of the NCAA at some point here soon, and if I ever start writing about the bastion of bombast and largesse and corruption that is the upcoming Rio Olympics, I may never stop. So much lose, so little time. But right now, it’s important that we turn away from hate and skepticism and scorn, instead embracing love after Wednesday’s events at the Euros in France.
When it comes to international football, I generally root for the Dutch. They play brilliant football, and their propensity for losing dramatically, and doing so in memorable, critically-acclaimed fashion, is in keeping with my general life ethos. But the Dutch threw up all over themselves and didn’t even qualify for the Euros. I’m also somewhat naturally inclined to lean towards the Belgians, of course, and the Belgians have a stunning collection of talent this year, but they’re coached extremely badly and can be maddeningly frustrating to watch, so right now Belgium isn’t doing it for me. But there is one team in the competition in France who has held my heart for years, and after Wednesday, it’s necessary for me to re-up and reëstablish my longstanding, albeit intermittent, membership in the Irish football supporters union, a membership which dates back to this time 26 years ago …
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It’s June of 1990, I’m 21 years old and I’m in Dún Laoghaire, a seaside town and seaport south of Dublin whose name you can’t pronounce correctly. I’ve spent a week circling the Emerald Isle, going all the way down to Killarney and up the West Coast, stopping off for some lobsters and some glorious Celtic music in the pubs of the small town of Doolin, a gateway to the Aran Islands and one of the most soulful spots on the earth, then cutting through the center of the country on the way back to Dublin, all the while being chased by the rain, because it’s Ireland and it rains approximately 398 days a year there. But this particular day is perfect, or as close to perfect as you can imagine. It’s got to be 75° on the east coast of Ireland, if not more, the sun is shining and it’s absolutely glorious and I’m not looking forward to what promises to be a particularly boring trip: a 4½ hour ferry ride from Dún Laoghaire to Holyhead, Wales, followed by an insufferable, 7½ hour overnight train ride to London, followed by a Tube trek across town to Liverpool St. Station, followed by 2 more hours on a train to Norwich. Bo-ring! The novelty of passing through Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch wore off when I made the westward part of this trip, when I was still excited for the vacation exploits to come and everything was fascinating. The trip back to Norwich is shaping up to be little more than a dreadfully dull, overnight slog.
So I’m boarding the ferry, making my way up the ramp and generally feeling immersed in my usual, 21-year-old ennui, when I hear the roar behind me. The thunderous roar. I turn to look and I witness the coming storm. I see the mob moving my way, I hear and feel the thunder and the sound.
“Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!”
Making its way towards the Dún Laoghaire ferry terminal is a mass of humanity dressed in various shades of green. A few of them are dressed in the green and white hoops of Glasgow’s Celtic F.C., but the majority of them are wearing jerseys from the Irish national football team, who will be making their debut World Cup appearance in Italy in a few days’ time. The fans are in full voice, and their chants of “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” rattle and resonate and shake.
I come to discover that they number 2,000. I’m going to spend the next 4½ hours on a boat with 2,000 Irish football fans who are embarking on the journey of a lifetime: a ferry to Holyhead, a train to London, another train to Dover, a ferry to Calais, and then a train to Paris, and a train to Marseille, and then yet another ferry headed to Sardinia, yes, Sardinia because Ireland’s first match is against England and is taking place in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, because this is still the age of hooliganism, you see, and the Italian World Cup organizers’ plan for coping with the possibility of English hooligans was to pen the mass of English supporters on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean for the duration of the first round of the tourney. It’s something like a 31-hour journey for these 2,000 faithful supporters, who’ve bought this travel package from the Irish F.A. because 31 hours of train and boat travel is still cheaper than 4-5 hours on an aeroplane. These are working people, blue-collar people who don’t have a whole lot of money and they’ve been scrounging, saving up and putting away their Irish pounds from the moment that the Irish officially qualified for the tourney.
I appear to be on a booze cruise for the next 4½ hours. Welcome to the mess.
Now, consider the situation here. It’s a perfect day in Dún Laoghaire. It’s absolutely perfect. I’ve spent the afternoon hiking with my sister to some waterfalls at a lavish country estate, enjoying the bright sunshine. It is truly a perfect day that could get no better. And if you're a young Irishman, and it’s the first day of your dream vacation, and it’s a perfect, 75° day in a pleasant seaside town, what are you going to do? You’re going to go to a restaurant or a bar or a café and DRINK BEER! Duh! All of these guys are smashed.
So not only am I now being approached by a mob of 2,000 strong, but these guys all have clearly been drinking since about noon. And I do mean “guys.” It’s probably 85% males, with a few interminably patient wives and girlfriends interspersed. Young people, mostly: early to late 20s, early 30s, most of them pasty pale and insanely excited for spending several weeks on the beaches of the Italian isles, as their other two matches are taking place in Palermo on the island of Sicily. You can feel the testosterone dripping as they board the ship and begin filtering into the deck where I’ve selected a seat. It verges on overwhelming. This ship of fools desperately needs some girls.
Enter 300 catholic school girls.
This is a natural wonder of the world to my 21-year-old eyes. The scenery just dramatically improved, and this trip is getting better and better.
Not only do we have 2,000 Irish football fans headed to Italy on this booze cruise, but we also have 300 recently graduated catholic high school girls, all of them wearing their cute catholic high school uniforms and short catholic high school girl skirts, who are heading off to Berlin on a graduation trip, and who are loud in their distinctly 18-year-old girl sorts of ways, so between them and the 2,000 fans chanting “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” in 5-minute intervals, the decibel level on board is verging on ear piercing.
But you cannot help but feel a bit uplifted amid all of this enthusiasm, as its contagious and whatever nonsense neurosis it is that is getting you down starts ebbing away. And if it grows too loud, there is always sticking in the earphones and slipping a cassette tape into my walkman. (Yeah, I know, I’m dating myself. Deal with it.)
And we’ve not even left Dún Laoghaire, mind you. The boat is rocking and raucous and we’re still moored in the Irish seaport. And since this is an international voyage, as we’re trekking across the Irish Sea tonight, there is a nice duty free store on board, where is where I promptly went upon boarding and picked myself up a bottle of Irish usquebae and a 10-pack of Drum. And you can imagine what any self-respecting Irishman who has been drinking since noon, and who has a 31-hour trip ahead of them, is going to do upon boarding this ship: invade the duty free store. The fans overrun the store and they buy every ounce of liquor in the place – cases and cases of Guinness and Harp, bottle after bottle of Jamesons, and then they even buy up the expensive stuffs, the scotches and the cognacs and the champagnes and the like. The store is completely overwhelmed by the masses, who spend freely and frenzily and they clean the store out. It’s picked so clean that you might need to check it for dental records. Everyone on board is thus well-prepared for the long journey ahead.
But then we embark, at which point there is an announcement over the loud speaker for those going on the “football train” once we reach Holyhead, the special train that the Irish F.A. has chartered: there will be no alcohol permitted on the train. This is met with considerable consternation from the masses, as well as a not insignificant amount of profanity. But the Irish are a pragmatic and resourceful people at heart, and when life gives you lemons, you’d better make some lemonade. So what do you do in this situation? It’s an ingenious, 2-part solution:
1. Drink as much as you can before you reach the British shore.
2. Give the rest of it away.
And again, let me reiterate: there are 2,000 Irish football fans on this boat, all of whom are drunk, all of whom now have too much alcohol on their person, a good number of whom are hell-bent on drinking themselves to the point that they’ll be passed out for the entirety of their train ride to London, and a good number more who come to the realization very quickly that drinking all of the alcohol they’ve just purchased over the next 4½ hours is likely to result in them being dead. There is more available alcohol on the premises than I have ever seen, and the Irish football fans are giving it away! It’s not more than two minutes after we’ve embarked for Holyhead that a guy wanders up to me where I’m sitting, which is near to the front of this particular deck of the ship, and he pulls out a can of Guinness from the flat he’s carrying.
“Want a beer?”
Is there a more precious, cherished phrase in the English language to a 21-year-old college student?
And this is happening everywhere. Guys are going around the deck and offering alcohol to everyone. They are offering it to the rank-and-file passengers, most of whom accept with a modest shrug and a toast. They offer it to the collection of 300 catholic school girls as well, most of whom are somewhat pensive, at first, and also somewhat giggly, but most of whom are willing to oblige, only to be discouraged the first time around by their stern and stony-faced chaperones. I take him up on this offer, and I toast with the guy, grateful for the free beer.
“You’re not Irish,” he states in a thick brogue after hearing me speak.
“American.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Come and meet me mates,” he suggests, gesturing with a tip of his head. “We’re in the corridor.”
“Should I bring the whiskey and the Drum?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
Well, what the hell?
And this boat is filled to capacity, mind you. Every seat would be taken if people were actually bothering to take a seat – but no one is taking a seat, because everyone who has a case or two of beer they need to get rid of before Holyhead is sitting on the floor. The floorspace on the decks and in the corridors is packed so tight with people that you’re stepping over them if you want to get to the washrooms.
So I take up some floor space with a group from Cork and hold court, because I’m the American kid from Los Angeles and everyone knows of Los Angeles and Hollywood and California, and they want to know more about it, and even though I’ve had generally a miserable time living in Los Angeles, I can’t help but speak fondly of the place, so fondly that I actually start to think that it’s pretty good. And I’m hanging out with a cross-section of the Cork working class – there are farmhands and lorry drivers and dock workers and ‘students,’ the term being a catch-all to describe intellectually driven young people who don’t have a job and don’t have a clue what they’re going to do with their lives. And every 10 minutes or so we have to break into another rendition of “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” And I’m learning Irish football songs in English, and learning songs in Gaelic, and mangling songs in Gaelic, as I am popping open another Guinness and passing around my bottle of whiskey while repeatedly dipping into my packs of Drum, because at this point in my British educational experience I can hand roll a cigarette in seconds flat.
And we talk football, of course. One of Ireland’s best players, Andy Townsend, plies his trade for Norwich City, so my sworn allegiance to the Canaries scores me points with the locals. The coach is an Englishman, and virtually all of the Irish players have, in fact, grown up in Britain and simply possess lineage qualifying them for Irish passports. No matter. They have sworn their allegiance and donned the green shirt, and thus they may as well have been born in Donegal. The fans are alternately brash and realistic about their side’s chances, chirping of how they’re going to smash the English at one minute and then, a minute later, hoping they can sneak their way out of the group and into the knockout phase. The Irish national team are tough, tenacious, clever and resourceful, much like the island nation that they represent even though almost all of them have grown up playing the English game. They’re “our lads,” just as I am rapidly becoming one of “our lads” even though I have an American passport.
And it’s not long after I’ve sat down with my new friends that a few of the school girls start filtering in from the corridor, eluding the watchful eyes of the chaperones, and then a few more of them start filtering in, and a few more, and a few more after that. They sit down and join in the fun and they’re immediately the life of the party, of course, because they’re impossibly charming and delightful and gorgeous and you cannot help but fall in love with them immediately. Eventually, some of the chaperones pass through the corridor, stumbling through the area and stepping over all of us, but they don’t bother to scold or admonish the girls, because the girls are in good hands. They’re safe. Nothing is going to happen to them. It’s a mass of humanity they’ve become engulfed in, but it’s respectful and it’s protective. The Berlin-bound girls have been indoctrinated into the footballing faithful now. They’re part of “us.” And since there is no cause for concern, some of the chaperones feel free enough to pull up some floor space here in the corridor and accept the offer of a free can of Guinness or two. Or three. Or four …
And when I rise and move about the ship, I simply venture over to another party, another group of football fans from Tipperary or Sligo or Limerick, and settle in and have a drink and roll a few more smokes and sing a few more football songs. Periodically, you have to get up and dance around the ferry and shout “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” because of course you have to do that.
Eventually, I’m completely hammered and doing a conga line throughout the deck of the ferry singing “Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!” with my hands on the hips of one of those catholic school girls – all of whom were forgoing alcohol at first but who are now fully engaging in the practice – and this act of corrupting a young person doesn’t bother me at all, because behind me in the conga line is one of the chaperones of the Berlin trip, some charming 40-something year old mum from Dublin who is shouting and screaming and getting on her gigue and declaring that her boring 40-something husband back in Dublin can get stuffed. We’re all drunk, we’re all nuts, we’re losing our minds and we’re all Irish. We’re Irish, everyone of us, and the lads in green are going off to Italy and they’re going to conquer the world!
But are they really going to conquer the world? The Irish have a tough group after all. England have their best team in years, the Dutch are the current European champions, the Egyptians are the best team in Africa. And the competition isn’t simply contained to La Favorita in Palermo and Stadio Sant’Elia in Cagliari, but might very well extend into the streets. English hooliganism is notorious; the Dutch fans are in a strange phase where they seem to want to throw explosives on the field periodically and generally be a pain in the ass; the Egyptian fans have a reputation for being volatile. And all of these people are trapping on fucking islands, for christsake! Whoever came up with that stupid idea? How do the Irish plan to deal with being in close quarters with these cranky collections of opposition supporters? How will they coexist?
“We’ll be fine. We’ll just charm them,” a lorry driver from Waterford assures me. “We’re charming, we’re clever, and we’re also good looking.”
And all of this time is precious, of course. It’s precious but you might not realize it at the time. I’m on a booze cruise with 2,000 new friends, all of whom share a common love of football and a joy and delight that’s contagious and infectious and you cannot help catching the bug. The football fans on board are joining in, and the non football fans are joining in. It’s a party spanning the length of the ship. The crew members are letting people have their fun, because this motley crew are, all things considered, decidedly well-behaved. There is no ill will nor malice, there are no petty disputes. This is the trip of the lifetime, for the Irish have never qualified for a World Cup before. For all concerned, it’s a long Italian summer vacation they’d never thought they would ever have, and they are damn sure going to enjoy every minute and bring unsuspecting sops like me along for the ride.
Eventually, I somehow stumble upon the guy who first offered me a Guinness, and we’re both piss drunk and out of our minds, and I pause long enough from playfully flirting with catholic school girls to give him a handshake.
“You’re Irish. You’re one of us now,” he insists, and I don’t dare disagree. “Which is a good thing, because your American footballers are shite and the Italians will kick their arses.”
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Actually, the U.S. only lost 0:1 to the Italians in Rome, but yeah, our football team was more or less shite, finishing last in Group A.
The 1990 World Cup goes down in history as one of the lousiest World Cups that’s ever been played. On the pitch, the quality of play was so dire and uncreative that FIFA almost immediately instituted new rules which banned the back pass into the hands of the goalkeeper and awarded 3 points for the win in order to encourage teams to stop being so defensive. There were constant concerns about possible trouble off the pitch from supporters, there were teams from Eastern Bloc nations becoming factionalized after the fall of the Berlin Wall and beginning to split apart. The football was terrible, the hair was terrible, the jerseys were terrible. It was a big, ugly mess.
But everyone involved agreed that the bright spot were the Irish, who made it all the way to the quarterfinals in their debut World Cup appearance and who brought along their throng of vocal, joyful, fun-loving supporters wherever they went. And for more than 20 years now, the Irish have carried that reputation wherever they go. They come to your town, they charm and embrace and enjoy, they lure you in and bring you over to their side, they diffuse tensions and conflicts with their good humor and love of the moment. Football isn’t worth fighting over. It’s worth celebrating.
You can’t outsmart the Irish, as they are much to clever for you: this summer, during the Euros in France, some Swedish fans began to chant at the Irish, “go home to your ugly wives,” to which the Irish responded, “go home to your sexy blonde wives,” at which point the Swedes knew they had been trumped, so everyone started laughing and throwing beer on each other and mucking it up. The Irish party hard but they also respect their hosts: there are videos of the Irish football fans from this summer’s Euros singing as they go about cleaning up the town square after a night of celebrating, picking up trash and beautifying the place. They bring the party, they bring the fun, they bring the love, they bring modest expectations and celebrate any and all success.
And let’s be honest here, there isn’t a whole lot of success. Part of why I rarely trumpet my Irish allegiance is that fact that, well, they’re generally not very good. The Irish play hard and play like hell, but they don’t win too often. The tournament expanding to 24 teams this year afforded the Irish a chance to qualify, which they claimed by winning a home-and-home playoff with Bosnians. Even so, advancing to the knockouts of the tournament seemed unlikely, as they found themselves drawn into a tough group with Italy, Belgium, and Sweden. They were expected to finish last, and hadn’t won a game in the Euros since 1988, but for their forever patient and forgiving supporters, who were certain to turn up in droves, finishing last was nonetheless certain to be a trip of a lifetime.
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And that boat ride of a lifetime ended rather nonchalantly, as the Irish football supporters were segregated out at customs and bordered their own chartered train, while the rest of us passengers all stumbled our way to a separate train and promptly passed out. I woke up somewhere in Central England and didn’t know where the hell I was. It was a strange train in that there were no station announcements and no conductors seeming to ever pass through the aisleways. It was all eerily, uncomfortably quiet. The whole experience seemed surreal. It seemed as if it didn’t actually happen.
And to this day, I have no idea what those people’s names where. I think the redheaded girl I was conga dancing with was named Claire, but I cannot say for sure. They were all people who simply passed through life, people you shared a moment and a connection with who then simply disappeared and you don’t have any idea what happened to them.
Except I did know what happened to them, because I turned on the television for the World Cup games in Italy, and each Ireland game was inevitably prefaced with a live spot where an overdressed reporter found themselves embedded in a wave of Irish supporters, trying to deliver their report as the green-clad fans jumped around and went crazy in front of the camera. And immediately, I knew their faces. I knew all of their faces. I’d been sitting with them in the dark, cramped crannies of an Irish ferry headed for Holyhead, passing them hand rolled cigarettes as they passed me a bottle of Jamesons or a beer. I’d like to think that, 26 years onward, they might remember the American kid from Los Angeles that they met on the ferry. You’d like to think you made that sort of impression, since the collective of them made that impression upon me. And while I cannot be certain, I could have sworn that, among those swarms of Irish football fans on the TV during those Italia 1990 telecasts, interspersed among the football diehards were one or two of those school girls who had somehow slipped onto the wrong train.
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The Celtic folk of the British Isles – the Irish, Welsh, and the Scots – have always done well playing for Norwich City over the years, and this year, two of Ireland’s better players – Wes Hoolahan and Robbie Brady – wore the yellow and green of the Canaries. Hoolahan is the Irish playmaker and he was brilliant in one of their pivotal qualifiers, a stunning 1:0 upset of Germany in Dublin which put them in position to reach the playoff with the Bosnians. Brady, meanwhile, takes many of the free kicks and corners and mans the left back position most of the time, but will occasionally play in the midfield. Brady scored the goal in Ireland’s 1:0 playoff win over the Bosnians in Zenica, a game played in a fog so thick that you couldn’t actually see, on the telecast, that Brady had scored. You just had to take the announcer’s word for it.
And it was Hoolahan who brought joy to the Irish throngs in their first game of Euro 2016 with a gorgeous volley early in the second half to give them a 1-0 lead over Sweden – a team whose second best player, defender Marin Olsson, happens to also be a Norwich City player and whose best player, striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, happens to be TERRIFYING. Even though Ireland had the lead, Olsson ran rampant up and down the left flank, pouring crosses into Zlatan in the box which the Irish turned away somehow, but eventually Zlatan maneuvered his way around the Irish defense and looped one off the head of an Irish defender and in for an own goal, an equalizer which likely doomed Ireland’s chances of advancing. Following the 1:1 draw with Sweden, the Irish got pasted 3:0 by Belgium to find themselves in last place, needing a win in their final group match against Italy to advance. But the Irish caught a break – Italy had already clinched first place in the group, and chose to rest their starters in the final game – and so the Irish took the game to the Italians, chasing the win they desperately needed.
It was a tight and tense game, scoreless well into the second half. Hoolahan flubbed a fairly easy scoring opportunity late on, and it appeared the Irish would not get the result they needed. But then Hoolahan got the ball at his feet a moment later, and he picked out his on-rushing Norwich City teammate Brady in the center of the box with a peach of a pass, an absolutely perfect ball right onto his head and Brady hammered it past the Italian keeper. Ireland had their breakthrough. Ireland had their 1:0 win and a place in the knockouts, which brought tears of joy to the players, coaches, and their loving fans.
There has been quite a bit of criticism in Europe for expanding the field to 24 teams, theoretically diluting the quality of play, but what it’s also done is made it possible for some of Europe’s minnows to take their place and swim the big fish and get in some bites here and there. Funnily enough, when you give Wales and Albania and Northern Ireland and Iceland a chance to compete, they tend to do okay, and the energy of their supporters is refreshing. You remember why it is that you love the game in the first place when you see, and hear, the sort of elation that it can bring.
And that’s what it should be about. Joy and love, camaraderie, togetherness. It shouldn’t be about hoodlums throwing chairs at each other in the streets of Marseille or setting off bombs on the pitch. It’s easy to be cynical and forget that sometimes.
So it is on to the 16s for the first time ever, and a date with the French, the hosts and the tournament favorites. Ireland’s last trip to France didn’t end particularly well, so the Irish have a point to prove and a score to settle … aaaand we’ll probably get our asses kicked, but fuck it! Go for it! We’re playing with found money here, a lucky penny we found at the end of the rainbow. The Irish will turn out in force, will be in good spirits, in full voice, and win or lose, they’ll have a hell of a good time. And I’ll be sure to go rummaging through the closet and pull out my finest green clothing for the occasion, because I am one of them once more.
“Olé, olé olé olé! Ireland! Ireland!”
