The guy who came in from the cold
Knowing how much you care for us and pray for our well-being as we travel the world getting paid to watch football matches, we didn’t want to make too much of a fuss or appear too self-centred by banging on about our worries in the run-up to the game. That’s why we remained scrupulously objective in our reporting on the mini-row over whether the roof in the Friends Arena should remain open or closed. Admittedly, you might have seen the odd, arguably loaded phrase, such as “health-threatening” or even “death-dealing” creeping into the copy here and there but, by and large, we gave you just the facts, ma’am.
The truth, however, was that deep down we were, I think it’s safe to say, chilled by the possibility of having to sit, never mind try to type, for the guts of two hours in temperatures expected to be somewhere south of minus 10 degrees. As you all well know, journalists are not given to overstating things but, frankly, there were some of us who, in contemplating this brutal tableau with an appropriately suitable shudder, had no trouble envisioning ourselves as the intrepid adventurers in Bob Dylan’s Isis, one of whom comes to a grisly end. Altogether now: “Well the wind it was howling and snow was outrageous/ we chopped through the night and the dawn/ when he died I was hoping that it wasn’t contagious/ but I’d made up my mind that I had to go on.”
True, Dylan’s characters were on the hunt for fabulous treasures stashed away in caskets concealed within pyramids all embedded in ice, whereas our quest was more concerned with finding novel ways to say things like ‘the wall did its job’ but, still, I feel the comparison is fundamentally sound. After all, we were all, in our own way, committed to seeing the thing through to the bitter end.
Unfortunately, had the roof remained open to the elements, the literal bitter end in Stockholm would have likely meant some of your most beloved practitioners of the inky trade having to be hacked out of solid blocks of ice, a bit like those eerily preserved stone age dudes they sometimes dig up high in the Alps. (But not as well-dressed, obviously).
Before commonsense prevailed, the prospect of this nightmare scenario had a few of us wracking what’s left of our brains to remember when, if ever, we’d watched a football match played in equivalent “devilish cold”, to quote his Bobness again. My own nomination was for the World Cup qualifier away to Denmark in the Parken Stadium in 1992, when the early arrival of winter in Copenhagen saw us drenched with freezing rain.
On the sad passing last year of Con Houlihan, I recalled how he’d tried to ward off the elements by draping a white hotel towel over his head. The fact that he’d used it earlier to mop up blood from a shaving cut only added to the thoroughly startling effect, making Con look, as I wrote at the time, like a cross between Mount Rushmore and the Shroud of Turin. Meanwhile, our Irish press colleague Charlie Stuart was trying to keep his landline phone dry under an increasingly soggy cardboard box.
Other greybeards plumped for another game in the Charlton era when Ireland played Wales on a skating rink in Wrexham while more recent arrivals recalled that the Faroes had been well nippy and Estonia a bit on the Baltic side. It was also mentioned that, since the advent of summer soccer, it appears to have become an unwritten rule that the FAI Cup final has to be played in near-Arctic conditions.
It was such home thoughts while abroad which suddenly produced a clear winner, and from only a couple of weeks ago at that. Even Brian Kerr, a man who has endured more than a few sharp frosts above in the North Atlantic, had to admit that he feared he’d never thaw out again after standing on the exposed television commentary platform for the duration of Limerick’s recent draw with Cork City in Thomond Park. It was said that, with the wind-chill factored in, the temperature had hit minus 9 which, having spent most of the match running on the spot, I can well believe.
The sight of snow blowing horizontally down the Shannon that weekend had locals and visitors alike stretching for superlatives, even if the result was no more than a light dusting on cars and streets which didn’t linger very long. But then, in our neck of the woods, that’s pretty much all it takes for talk of a ‘big freeze’ to dominate conversation.
Flying into Stockholm on Thursday was to encounter a proper black and white world, the scene from the air reminiscent of those Sky News helicopter shots of bleak midwinter in Blighty, a spectacle which is invariably accompanied by a news-reader speaking gravely of white-out, lockdown and massive disruption on all fronts.
In Scandinavia, where sub-zero temperatures are pretty much a given from November through to April, they snort derisively at such hysteria. Yes, snow blanketed every inch of land in Stockholm this week and the lakes were still frozen but traffic continued to move freely on pristine roads and there was no risk of slippage for the unwary pedestrian on bone-dry pavements. Being prepared also means the locals know how to layer up to cope with the extreme shift in temperature between indoors and out. As the saying has it: there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. Which may be true but, as we gentle persons of the press are happy to attest, it helps to have a roof over your head too.
