A time to laugh, a time to cry amid football's triumph and tragedy
You couldn’t help but smile, even as you could imagine others recoiling at what they would regard as a gross trivialisation of the recent horror visited upon Paris. What possible meaning or significance, they would feel entitled to ask, can a mere football tournament have in the face of such grotesque barbarity and suffering?
On the face of it, none at all, is the obvious answer, until you pause to consider what it was that sent the IS bombers and shooters to the Stade de France and the Bataclan last Friday night. To paraphrase the good god Shanks, sport and music might not be matters of life and death – and, no, they’re certainly not more important — but the millions who have fallen under their spell can testify from ample personal experience that both are life-affirming and life-enhancing, sometimes magically so.
The brutal, bloody evidence of last week suggests that nothing could be more offensive to your standard fanatical death cultist than the idea of people cheering, singing, dancing, smiling, laughing, hugging and kissing, whether at a football match or a rock gig or, for that matter, just sitting around a table savouring the simple but profound pleasures of good coffee and even better conversation.
Which is why a determination to simply carry on doing those things seems to me to be not just the right thing to do but also the best and most meaningful way of paying tribute to the murdered and the maimed.
Unfortunately, the solemn tribute of a minute’s silence at last Monday’s game at the Aviva was disfigured by isolated but audible shouts from the crowd. For those of us who were there, it was clear that the interruptions emanated exclusively from the Havelock Square end where the Bosnian supporters were gathered.
For the record, it’s important to stress that the vast majority of the visitors, some 2,000 of them, scrupulously honoured the silence – at most, I would estimate the hecklers at half a dozen — while the response elsewhere in the stadium was no less impressive: after attempts to first shush them failed and then a round of booing sounded a distinctly discordant note, the crowd spontaneously broke into loud but respectful applause to ensure the tribute moved to a close without further incident.
Being charitable, I’m assuming that there was probably some kind of political context to the handful of protesting voices on the night – as opposed to mere drink-induced blackguardism. To take part in a guided walking tour of Sarajevo on the morning after the draw in the first leg in Zenica was to be forcefully reminded of the apocalypse which the capital of Bosnia endured on a daily basis for nearly four years during the siege of the early to mid-90s – and also to understand anew why many of its people felt they were simply abandoned and left to their appalling fate by the West.
Eventually, a NATO bombing campaign helped lift the siege but, given that by then there around 14,000 dead, including nearly 6,000 civilians, and that much of Sarajevo lay in ruins, I could hardly argue with the local who, having lived through the terror as a young boy, all these years later still characterised the belated intervention, with almost a shrug of resignation, as “too little, too late”. But there’s a time and a place for everything – and a minute’s silence in a stadium in Dublin while bodies were still being identified in Paris was neither the time nor the place for political protest, if such it was.
Just as the hours immediately after the slaughter were most definitely not the time for trigger-happy tweeters looking to alert the presumed ignorant to the bigger picture of “France’s role in the militarisation of the planet”. The darker the times, perhaps, the more that people are entitled to take their pleasure where and when they can. Seeing the excitement and passion of the home crowd in Zenica last Friday, I can only imagine what a thrill it must have been for the people of Bosnia, after all they had been through, when their national team qualified for their first World Cup finals just over a year ago. You only have to remember Italia ‘90 to appreciate what that experience can mean to a country.
But, unhappily for them, Bosnians will have to wait until another day for their first European Championship qualification. Ireland saw to that on Monday at the Aviva and, even if Martin O’Neill’s team got a huge helping hand from officialdom on the night, the reward of a place at Euro 2016 was ultimately nothing less than they deserved for the way in which they had broadly gone about their business over the full 180 minutes of the play-off.
In the second leg, in particular, there was a maturity about the Irish performance which, especially in the input of Robbie Brady, Jeff Hendrick, James McCarthy, Seamus Coleman and Darron Randolph, suggested a kind of coming of age for this still developing team. And in Jon Walters, of course, there was the birth of a new old hero.
In truth, there’ll be more than enough time before next summer to tease out the many purely footballing issues relating to this team and to Martin O’Neill’s stewardship. The joy, for now, is that the debate can take place, not as a gloomy post-mortem of the where-did-it-all-go-wrong variety, but secure in the knowledge that the players and management have already done enough to earn the right to have their credentials put to the biggest test on Europe’s highest stage.
And joy, I think, is not an inappropriate word. What people who dismiss sport as entirely trivial tend to miss completely is its capacity to generate so much undiluted and infectious happiness. And, notwithstanding the club game’s claims to the contrary, nothing still does that better than major success in international football.
You couldn’t miss it on Monday as euphoria erupted all around the Aviva at the final whistle. It was there in the footage from inside the dressing room as the players ole’d and Dick Redmond turned into Superman. Seamus Coleman caught it perfectly when, sounding as much like a fan as a pro, he candidly admitted: “When Jonny’s second goal went in, I was nearly close to tears. It was one of those moments. It was something I wanted all my life.” And the following morning it was radiating from my own little daughter, for whom the discovery that her new overnight favourite player – Darron Randolph – hails from nearby Bray, merely confirms what a world full of wonders she lives in.
And she does. As we all do, despite the worst efforts of the dark forces, in whatever guise they choose to turn up.
So, yes, say it loud and say it proud: f**k Isis, we’re going to France.
