Larry Ryan: Is there anything more beautiful than a goal?

SWEET DREAMS: Marseille's French midfielder Dimitri Payet celebrates scoring in the Europa Conference League quarter final match between Olympique de Marseille (OM) and PAOK Saloniki at the Velodrome stadium in Marseille

How do you reckon Dimitri Payet slept Thursday night, after that goal, that beautiful goal for Marseille against PAOK, that you ought to look up now if you missed?

Even after all the sweet goals Dimitri has accumulated in his life so far, you’d imagine he drifted off easily in a kind of bliss, rewinding it. From his exclusive angle, despite all the cameras mounted in the Stade Vélodrome. Maybe he was lucky enough to stir awake in the middle of the night to briefly retrace its delicious arc before floating off again. Knowing true, fleeting contentment.

It’s surely still flickering into his mind Saturday morning, while stretching maybe, ahead of Montpellier coming to town Sunday. When reality may bite a little and the act of scoring a goal, that he made look so straightforward and inevitable, becomes a puzzle once more.

But then a goal as good as that one is locked away for safekeeping — a currency that will never devalue. A treasure to be taken out and polished.

Might it be the only means of ever achieving world peace, to somehow give everyone a goal every two or three days?

How did David Clifford sleep last Sunday night? His replays will look different to ours. He can’t see the boy O’Hora waterskiing behind him, locks flowing in the wind. Can Clifford watch it all back in glorious slow motion? Or is he like the mortals who occasionally pull off a worldy, and wonder what out of body intervention made them lift the shot just so? A puzzle you could happily lie awake all night trying to solve.

Is there anything more beautiful than a goal? Is it the missing sauce for Waterford? The gravy that sweetens all that running up and down they must do.

There is a rich culture of missionary work in Tipperary. Along some boreens, there is hardly a house that didn’t make a contribution to the efforts in Africa back in the day. And that fine tradition continues with the strides Liam Cahill and Mikey Bevans have made in exporting our zest for the goal.

How did it feel? It is the question most asked and most lie. The most important thing is the three points. It doesn’t matter who scores. It’s all about the team. The usual rubbish.

Some, like Troy Parrott, after the late one against Lithuania, muster what simple honesty they can. “The best feeling ever.” 

Even amid the current movement in policing celebration, with Ruben Neves and Ashley Young at the vanguard, it was among Roy Keane’s wronger contributions to suggest that Ireland overdid it that night.

Even if he’d scored it in a five-a-side back in Belvo, Troy was entitled to knee slide as far as he liked.

Some, like Wayne Rooney, a man whose intelligence has always been undervalued, have managed to go some way to capturing how it works for the elite.

“The initial feeling is like you're playing football underwater. When you score the goal it's like you come up for air and you can hear the crowd, the atmosphere, for that four or five seconds. It's a mad feeling.” 

But as long ago as Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby assured us that doses of this drug were in supply far away from the world’s great stages.

“I’m no good at football, needless to say, although happily that is also true of the friends I play with. We are just good enough to make it worthwhile: every week one of us scores a blinding goal, a scorching right-foot volley or a side-foot into a corner that caps a mazy run through a bewildered opposition defence, and we think about it secretly and guiltily (this is not what grown men should dream about) until the next time.” 

Is that what has agitated a man like Matt Le Tissier, a scorer of so many beautiful goals? That there is no next time. Is that what has taken him down so many strange rabbit holes, that the memories have faded? That even when he gets out the DVD, he can’t quite watch from his exclusive angle. Maybe unravelling conspiracies is coming closer than golf and languid punditry managed in replacing the buzz.

I’m thinking about goals, because this week drew the circle of life in our house.

The small girl got her first in a ‘real match’. Her twin had got there a bit before her, has already opened his savings account. And last Saturday was her turn.

She'd craved one. Though there was no extravagant celebration, it wouldn't be her style. Just the widest smile and a shy little clench of the fist. And next day she told me she’d scored it again in her dreams.

Let's hope she enjoys chasing that feeling, for however long. And that it never maddens her.

I can easily withdraw the first lodgment in the bank, from a 'real match', longer ago than Fever Pitch. A race with the keeper, who must have been slow. A half-slide and a little prod that somehow diverted the ball round him. A collision that wasn’t painful at all because the view from the ground saw it scuttling over the line.

Over the years, no matter how lowly the stage, they have all been rewound secretly and guiltily, occasionally in slow motion.

Will there be a next time? This week both the doc and the physio were advising strongly against it. They were talking knee replacements and threatening pilates. They were warning about the six-a-side cage like it was the most dangerous block in the hood. They were offering cycling and maybe a small bit of tennis and the carrot of being able to walk up the stairs at 60. There was nothing in their prospectus about goals.

Initial reaction: what a waste of Lenten chocolate abstinence. And straight home to an early Easter egg.

We’re at the stage now of assessing the cost and figuring what compromises could be made. Once a month? Grass only? Walking football?

What would one more goal be worth?