Days of miracle and wonder
One week ago, it was all Barbies, Furby and Mallory Towers; now it’s all Match Attax, games in the back garden and, er, Liverpool. (Although a comeback by the Barbies can’t be ruled out; they haven’t gone away, you know).
The Match Attax collecting bug took hold in the schoolyard, was accelerated by a gift of a big bundle of ‘spares’ from a veteran of eight and has already reached the giddy stage where the Stoke City squad is almost complete. Not since Trap, I would imagine, hasanyone been so excited to see Glenn Whelan turn up.
The games in the back garden have been facilitated by the lengthening evenings, producing an unbroken sequence of ding-dong if statistically improbable 10-9 defeats for the old man.
(But at least I’m creating chances. I’d be worried if I wasn’t creating chances. So I take the positives and move on).
As for Laila’s club allegiance, I suspect that this might have something to do with the fact that when she decided to join me on the couch in front of the telly recently, the game in progress happened to see Liverpool leading Newcastle 2-0. I’m not entirely sure her commitment to the Reds is steadfast, however, since at one point she did propose waiting until the final whistle to decide which team she should really support.
Needless to say, I was quick to interject with some wise parental guidance at this juncture, pointing out that although we Irish are world leaders in the field, bandwagon-jumping is not actually a recognised sport.
Anyway, these recent days of miracle and wonder have turned my thoughts to my own football initiation, as well as to general contemplation of the sometimes mysterious process by which young ‘uns choose a team to support, entirely innocent of the possibility that, in so doing, they may be laying the foundation for a lifetime of brutal pain and abject despair.
I couldn’t honestly pinpoint the moment when I fell under football’s spell but I do know for certain that my annus mirabilis was between May 1967 and May 1968 — or, to be more precise, between Celtic’s European Cup triumph in Lisbon and Manchester United’s at Wembley.
Of the former, I remember virtually nothing, except for a vaguely surreal image of one day seeing my father watching what, to my young eyes, was a frankly alien spectacle on the box: some sort of football match, yes, but one in which the goalposts didn’t reach to the sky.
A Clare man, with a passion for hurling and horse-racing, he was usually indifferent to ‘soccer’, so I have a strong suspicion that what he was watching that day almost certainly had to be the Lisbon Lions marching into history, his one-off interest presumably engaged on the basis that he would have considered Celtic to be as close to a Gaelic football club as the game in Britain allowed.
What I do know for certain is that, by the time a further 12 months had elapsed, I had learned enough on the streets to know that there was no such team as ‘Manchester’, that George Best was a god who walked the earth and that it was quite an event when Bobby Charlton found the net, not with a trademark thunderbolt shot, but with a header, to send United on their way to that landmark 4-1 victory over Benfica.
Two years later, Mexico ’70 sealed the deal — once a fragile, eggshell mind was exposed to the luminous brilliance of Pele and his pals, there could be no going back to ‘The Virginian’ or ‘The Man From Uncle’.
And no settling for any lesser sport either.
But quite how and why I ended up, at about the age of nine, exclusively nailing my green and white colours to the mast of Shamrock Rovers remains something of a mystery to me. Was it, I wonder, a kind of compromise — supporting an Irish club rather than an English one — to placate the Da?
Maybe mixed with a bit of bandwagon-jumping of my own, considering that I was climbing on board just as Rovers were coming to the climax of their famous six-in-a-row cup run?
In any event, before I was even taken to see my first games at Milltown, I was wearing the shirt in kick-abouts on the local green and cutting out pictures from the papers to stick in a scrapbook, while my substantial collection of toy soldiers had been decommissioned and pressed into fresh action as the mighty Hoops on the dining room table, with results that, admittedly, would have looked pretty bizarre to the untrained eye.
By which I mean that a Red Indian with his tomahawk raised was now Mick Leech and a sailor with one foot on a rock Frank O’Neill.
Furthermore, the ball was actually a small Lego brick and although, again to the uninitiated, it might have looked like I was playing against myself — complete with demented commentary — I can attest even now that the games were actually all hotly contested affairs against arch-rivals Waterford.
But then, where would even the greatest real-life footballers be without the power of imagination, eh? And now, some 45 years later, I see that, as John Fogarty sang, the big wheel keeps on turning.
Indeed, as I write, I’m reminded that even as, sadly, he endured a long illness before his death, my father discovered a belated interest in football and in the fortunes, in particular, of… Liverpool.
No time to tease that one out now: the sun is shining again, Laila is eagerly waiting in the stadium in the back garden and, you know, I really think that if I keep mistakes to a minimum, I can turn her over this time.
