The night they drove old Ireland down
Of course, the moment you voice such a sentiment, especially in the current climate of doom and gloom, you’re asking for a good kicking from the critics and the cynics, whose high priest, Roy Keane, set the tone with the charge that the fans should never have been singing for a team which had just been on the end of a 4-0 hiding.
But I was in Gdansk that night when, with a few minutes left on the clock, ‘The Fields of Athenry’ began rolling in a huge wave around the stadium, and not for one second did I think there was anything celebratory or carefree or inappropriate or drunken or even plain dimwitted about the Green Army’s performance. On the contrary, it seemed to be just what the occasion required: at once a lament for dreams which had been brutally dashed and a defiant declaration that, in the team’s greatest hour of need, the fans were not about to abandon, let alone turn on, the same players who, by dint of the hard job of gaining qualification for the Euros in the first place, had given 30,000 travelling supporters and hundreds of thousands more back home and around the world, the prospect of a summer to remember.
