Colin Sheridan: The good days are rare for Ireland, we have to find joy in them

WINNING FEELING: Ireland manager Stephen Kenny savours victory with defender John Egan on Saturday. Picture: Inpho/Laszlo Geczo

Last week’s Conservative Party conference in Manchester seems an usual starting point for a meditation on the virtues of football, but start with the Tories we will.

It was there that British Home Secretary Priti Patel vowed to fight the immigrant boats at sea and drive them back to Calais, in a kind of a dyslexic take on Dunkirk. She was cheered off the stage like a batsman leaving the crease after knocking a century at Old Trafford.

Elsewhere, testimony was given at a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill alleging that social media behemoth Facebook deliberately exploits people. This news came hot on the heels of the platform crashing — along with its messaging service WhatsApp — for several hours, a travesty that forced families around the world to speak to each other for an entire evening, thus proving the exploitation allegations.

Later in the week, they were dancing on the streets of Newcastle as news emerged they were replacing one insidious ownership regimen with another. The vox pops that emerged were as grim as the weather up north. At first you could forgive them for not realising the irony of swapping one dictatorship with an even worse one. The forgiveness was short-lived. They realised alright, they just didn’t care.

Speaking of caring, dozens of people were killed in a suicide bomb in Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? It barely makes the news anymore. Back home in Ireland, thousands of people protested their homes crumbling just as the Government announced they were raising our corporate tax rate to 15%. Well, kind of raising it. Just for the companies with a turnover of €750m or more. The rest of us fools hand about a quarter of our salaries back as we look forward to a rail link to the national airport being built circa 2098.

Netflix, the new church, released a South Korean horror series called Squid Game which seems to be not about squids, but about death and debt. People love it. Probably the most disturbing news of the week came as singer Adele announced she has a new album coming out. When it rains, by God it pours.

Amidst all of this chaos and catastrophe, there were two games of football to ponder — albeit at opposing ends of the quality street — that did much to restore faith in the power of the beautiful game. Belgium and France, playing in the Nations League, boasted a galaxy of stars so bright, you would assume none of them cared enough to make the game interesting. Thankfully, the opposite was true. If you only had a passing interest in football, you might be forgiven for sometimes wondering why all the fuss about Kylian Mbappé and Romelu Lukaku and their ilk. This game was exhibit A in their defence. Throw the criminally underrated Karim Mostafa Benzema into the mix, and you had three of the world’s best footballers playing a game that they — for that two hours in Turin — genuinely seemed to love. Geniuses loving their work is intoxicating. Infectious, even.

Speaking of infection, the second installment of football’s two-parter may have been far less sexy, but arguably more important. As Ms Patel was stirring up the curse of nationalism in Manchester, Callum Robinson of West Bromwich Albion and Ireland was creating his own tsunami of divided opinion by admitting he had yet to take the Covid-19 vaccine, and was uncertain if he ever would.

He didn’t rule it out, but he didn’t rule it in, either, his unwillingness to commit either way an undoubted rebuke to the binary rulings of VAR, which has gone some ways to eradicating being unsure about things from our lives.

In doing so, Callum put himself at the very front and centre of a debate that, let’s face it, is much less of a debate and more of an ethics lecture on personal responsibility. Stephen Kenny, a man who wears the anxiety of his job on his face, must’ve wished he was the Minister for Housing rather than the manager of the Republic of Ireland in the couple of days that followed Robinson’s disclosure. The fact that there could be as many as eight players amongst his squad unvaccinated meant that if Kenny actually took a stance and chose not to select unjabbed players, he would be left with little choice but to call up a few of the traveling journalists to the squad. At least it would have driven the players’ ratings index up.

The Robinson affair had reached a plateau by the time kick-off arrived on Saturday evening. Even those opposed to his inclusion in the team must have reasoned that his folly would be forgotten if he could only go and nick a goal from somewhere. Anywhere. There was almost an inevitability when he did, which is strange to say because there has never been anything inevitable about Ireland scoring goals.

Robinson’s effort was much less “nicked” than it was hammered to the top corner of the Azeri net. The only thing more impressive than his finish was the avalanche of puns that poured into Twitter timelines from everyone watching. There’s giving the people what they want, and there’s doing what Callum Robinson did on Saturday evening. Twice.

Stephen Kenny, his anxiety visibly surrendering to unbridled joy, must have suddenly thanked God that his unvaccinated players numbered more than Robinson. That there was no moral quandary in his selection. He, we, they — all of us will urge caution in celebrating the victory in Baku, and in particular the continued emergence of a new style, and more importantly, a new breed of player who seem blessed with the most un-Irish of traits, confidence.

Kenny’s revolution was always going to be far less a storming of the presidential palace, and more a slow burn. A swallow does not a summer make, but, sometimes, you have to find joy in what you’re watching, especially when the alternative is a South Korean horror series about death and debt. The good days are rare and they are wonderful. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.