Colm O'Regan: Why I'm linking the Luxembourg match to my central heating

I know it was only Luxembourg. Who somehow had become the auld enemy. We had a beef with Luxembourg! We shouldn’t be beefing with them. We should be having high-level meetings about innovative tax-planning. Or about tin foil apparently. (Luxembourg is home to one of the largest tin foil manufacturers in the world. I bet they NEVER save their tin foil in a hardback book in Luxembourg.) And yes I KNOW this was a dead rubber as a match while, elsewhere, bigger countries like em…Wales and Scotland- fried their bigger fish.

But still, there was a moment towards the end of the match where I thought “This is what it must be like to be other countries”. It was when Ireland got the third goal. It was the way it was scored. James McClean in full gallop, hitting a booming cross perfectly onto the instep of Jason Knight who stunned it back inside to Calum Robinson who swept it home, smiling, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
It’s the kind of goal that gets scored against us so often when we’re desperately chasing the game. And afterwards, there’s a debate about the state of football in the country and Johnny Giles or someone trying to be him, says something about street football and we have a post-mortem about why we can’t produce the players. I remember we once played Turkey and the commentators were going on about Turkish triangles. Where were OUR triangles? The situation was acute.

But now instead we were that other country. Clipping it around like those fancy Central Europeans. With their technical players. As if we had emotional ones all these years. Except Irish football history is littered with great players and sometimes The Kinds of Goals That Other Countries Score. Loads of passes, belters from distance. But you just wouldn’t know whether any given match would have those moments.

And a lot of games that were so dull you’d hope no one else from abroad was watching.

Well now at least we can watch the thing. And have that feeling where the team you love are also fun to watch. So this is what it’s like. And it’s nice. For me, it’s the Central Heating moment.

To explain: There was an ESB ad years ago for NightSaver. To the tune of Desmond Dekker and the Aces’ Israelites, a family danced around a warm house. They seemed high. But why wouldn’t they be? They had hot water whenever they wanted and you couldn’t see their breath in their bedrooms. And I wanted that. Bad. Growing up in a house that was very sustainably heated with a range, an open fire and hot water bottles, the heat was to be treasured like ‘The Only Remnant Of Fire After the Fall of Civilisation. There was never going to be central heating. To install it was too expensive and disruptive and might actually damage 100-year-old structures that would need to be rebuilt. A bit like reforming the FAI.

But when I moved out and was living away from home during a Winter for the first time, the house I was staying in… Well! You just turned on the heating and it came on. I remember sitting in my room, not needing to wrap up. That didn’t last long. I CAN’T sleep in a warm room. But still, I knew it was there.

Now you can’t just sit around marvelling at central heating, or indeed beating Luxembourg, but it is nice to just bask in the glow for a while.

And then we can start upgrading our rivalries to the next level. The next enemy. Who we played about fifteen awful 0-0 draws between 2018 and 2020. We’re coming for YOU, Wales.