Larry Ryan: Baggio, Haaland, and the lost magic of a VHS treasure trove 

AC Milan’s Roberto Baggio chips the ball over Inter keeper Gianluca Pagluica to score in this 1996 Serie A match at the San Siro in Milan, Italy. Picture: Claudio Villa/AllsportRoger Labrosse

Of course the internet isn’t listening to us.

On Thursday, the small lady was rooting at the back of a press and pulled out artifacts of a bygone age.

What are these, she wondered, stumped.

Videotapes. Life bookmarked. An obligatory Euro ‘88. France-Brazil from ‘86. Tipp-Limerick ‘89. And one marked ‘Baggio — Do not tape over’.

It’s not the full collection. There’s plenty more in an attic, their contents almost certainly lost to tape mould.

A few hours later, Facebook — having heard nothing, seemingly — shows me Hairy Baby’s ‘VHS Memories’ t-shirt. The design is a pile of tapes loaded with some of the pillars of Irish culture.

The Den Christmas Special. Father Ted. The Sunday Game. Know Your Sport, Ireland v England ‘88. Where in the World. Planet Rock Profiles. The Toy Show. Eurovision Riverdance. And a cheeky one: The Pope’s visit, scribbled out, and taped over with ‘Channel 18’. Cork Multichannel customers will know the score.

Maintaining the spirit of synchronicity, soon word arrived that Barry Lang is back on the radio, playing love songs on a Sunday morning Classic Hits shift.

Reverie was loose now, and we were truly back in an age where music collections were built poised by the ghettoblaster for the Hotline on 2FM — if that was your kind of thing — or later in the evening Dave Fanning, a less predictable affair, where you had to be more alert to the intros, if you were shopping for something specific.

It was an age of quaint piracy. But also a dangerous, often violent, time. One of the great Civil Wars sparked when I simply must not have seen that ‘Do not tape over’ instruction on the sister’s New Kids on the Block compilation, painstakingly pieced together off The Beatbox.

I suffered losses tenfold for that one. And little did we know at the time that the same disputes were probably going on inside RTÉ. And ultimately there wasn’t much they didn’t decide to tape over.

We have managed to replicate some of that tension these days with Sky+. You can still find yourself in the firing line after a sprawling three-game Super Sunday recording you’ll never watch has filled the box and innocently jettisoned a baking contest.

But there’s hardly the same sense of jeopardy. In the age of ‘on demand’ there’s surely nothing you won’t find again.

Was it all more appreciated, culture, when you had to press two buttons at the same time to capture it? Or were we just young — and excited about everything?

In those days, if you didn’t tape a match or a goal it might be forever lost. An anxiety not lost on the great friend who would record a whole season of Serie A goals off RTÉ’s Monday night highlights. A lad who deserves his standing alongside the most renowned curators at the Louvre.

Did the scarcity of storage and all those big calls to be made make you think more about what every game meant? To weigh its place in your future’s history. Tipp-Limerick ‘89 held on, for some reason, hardly just Joe Hayes’ somersault. Probably because that summer had a special personal energy.

These are time capsules really, nailing a moment, spooling a feeling. What survives might be down as much to the people you shared that excitement with. You can find most of the action now on YouTube, but it’s harder to put yourself in the story.

Mind you, who knows what’s really on those tapes? A VCR sourced from Cash Converters 10 years ago didn’t coax anything out of them and has retired since to the attic too.

There’s every chance France-Brazil might have given way to one of the Seven Bands on the Up sessions that were all the rage — The Fat Lady Sings maybe.

The Baggio one is a mystery. There’s no recollection of its birth. There was certainly an infatuation with Roberto Baggio — a name to annunciate in full Jimmy Mageese.

But I wasn’t a lad with the sort of patience to assemble mixtapes. Maybe I got lucky and he went round the keeper early in a Channel 4 live game where the reception held up. And it got preserved, probably 15 minutes of Peter Brackley, Lord rest him, before segueing into an episode of No Disco.

In my mind, Baggio went round the keeper every week, right or left, skipping by the serious Italian solid citizens of the era for the only goal of the game.

The great footballers, or at least the ones that fired youthful excitement, all seemed to have one superpower.

With Baggio it was the waterski glide, Diego the dribble. Soon Dennis Bergkamp was chipping the keeper every week for Ajax on Screensport.

Marco Van Basten’s thing was powerful elegant elasticity. And surely nobody with the foresight to record it ever taped over his four against Gothenburg in the Champions League.

Eventually Messi came along to prove you could do all things, all the time. By that stage, we weren’t taping anything. You took it for granted someone else was doing the curating.

Erling Haaland celebrates scoring Borussia Dortmund's second goal against Sevilla on Tuesday. (Bernd Thissen/Pool via AP)

We aren’t taping Erling Haaland now, but doesn’t he stir something that proves you can always be young and excited about everything?

He’s the very antithesis of Baggio. A brutaliser marauding around a game of careful precision. A kid who wouldn’t dream of rounding the keeper when it’s easier blast it past him.

And in a week where he stuck two against Bayern and two more in the Champions League, let us not over-romanticise the meagre rations of old. And give thanks we’re not scratching around for highlights and preserving precious morsels. Instead, we are watching a superhero’s story being built, goal by goal.

The internet had one more act of synchronicity to offer this week. Netflix is boasting Baggio: The Divine Ponytail coming our way in May, a dramatisation of one of the most beautiful careers.

I’ll be watching it anyway. Because even if the shelves of the digital libraries are well stocked with his goals, it’s worth going the extra mile to recapture a feeling, to recreate a lost energy.