Colin Sheridan: They took the summer's World Cup from us. We think we care less because we have more to actually care about, but we still care
Dreaming of summer World Cups.
“A lot of wasted time…a lot of push ups…”
- Carltio Brigande, Carlitos Way.
SPEAKING to an older brother the other evening, talk turned to a strange sporting summer, and the conspicuously absent World Cup.
His own memories of tournaments past overlapping and merging like rush hour traffic; the rise and brutal fall of Algeria in Spain ‘82, the grace of Alan Giresse, the madness of Paulo Rossi. Maradonna in Mexico. Carecas goal against France. Manuel Negrete sending the Estadio Azteca into delirium.
Each memory represented by a place, a long lost friend, a misplaced bike on a Mayo street. A village at the edge of Europe whose children, for one month every fourth summer, threw down jumpers as goalposts and divided themselves according to adopted teams. World Cups taught us more about geography and geo-politics than school books ever did.
It is true that the significance of these events changes as we get older. The very jumpers that were once goalposts are left, abandoned in nightclub cloakrooms. The innocence of youth cedes to the distractions of our late teenage years and college summers.
Still, even then, there’s enough room in the recesses of our sporting hearts to remember where we were when the greatest player in the world, Roberto Baggio, missed his spot kick, when news of Saipan broke, when Robbie Keane equalised against Germany, when Zidaine headbutted Materazzi.
We think we care less because we have more to actually care about, but we still care. Every fourth summer.
Now, without any of us asking for it or wanting it, the summer of 2022 has a World Cup sized hole in it. The reasons for same are ridiculous. No amount of spin can validate the “growing the game” argument, no amount of money can wipe the blood of the dead and injured migrant workers from the hands of those who plotted the plan for Qatar, or those who chose to give it to them.
For those of us privileged enough, World Cups provided a cadence, a rhythm and a rhyme. A soundtrack to our summers. It happened to us, so we wanted the same for our kids, and for the kid within all of us. Watching Spain play South Korea at 11am on a Thursday morning is a rite of passage. Sticking around for the hour of analysis afterwards an indulgence so rich, it could induce sporting gout. But they took that from us. The bastards.
However sorry we may feel for ourselves, surrounded by family and friends and favourite watering holes, spare a thought for the women and men of the Irish Defence Forces serving overseas, for whom a World Cup summer means more than almost any other demographic. A World Cup falling smack bang in the middle of deployment offers a form of escapism incalculable in its value. Each game, however obscure or inconsequential, brings those women and men ninety minutes closer to seeing their kids and loved ones again. In an environment where days seem short but the weeks are unfathomably long, having a global tournament of universal interest offers a bookend, a mark on the calendar, an accelerant which propels time forward as if by some cosmic force.
If you think you’d have just a passing interest in Croatia versus Morocco if it were happening this morning, imagine being stuck on the Golan Heights, in between a gruelling patrol schedule, in criminal heat, away from your children, on fathers day.
Trust me, that game would be the highlight of your weekend.
There’s a scene in Brian de Palma’s classic Carlitos Way where Al Pacino's love interest Gail asks Carlito what prison was like. “A lot of wasted time…a lot of push ups…” he says wistfully. I think of that line whenever I think of being overseas. A lot of wasted time. A lot of push-ups.
The time wasted is not the time spent patrolling the hills of South Lebanon, not the time spent engaging with the local people, building relationships and forging trust. It's not the time spent ensuring a safe and secure environment for those same people. No, the wasted time is the seemingly endless spectrum of minutes and hours that fall either side of your professional duties, after you’ve eaten and trained and called home and shot the shit with your colleagues and rewatched The Wire for the umpteenth time.
Time appears from nowhere, spilling abundantly from a bottomless well of time. You think you’ll fill it by learning a language or writing the great Irish novel, but when you’re there, worn out by the patrolling and the merciless summer heat, still unable to sleep, learning languages and penning great novels are the last thing you want to do. Even if you somehow did do them, some more time would impossibly appear from somewhere else.
More time to fill.
So, if you are lucky enough to deploy on an even year during the summer months, you’ll at worst get a European championship. Double that up with an Olympics, and you’re practically knocking two weeks off your trip. A World Cup, though…that’s the holy grail. Endless games at all hours meaning it doesn’t matter if you're coming off a 24-hour duty or a two-day patrol, you’ll catch a game. Ninety minutes of football between two teams you don’t really care about, that somehow give you moments and names you will forever remember, because of where you were and who you were with when they happened. Two hours, normally so brutally difficult to fill, disappear in a heartbeat. Two hours closer to the next game. Two hours closer to the end.
Conversations with colleagues, Irish and international, with shopkeepers and children on the street, all become easier. Sport as a universal language sounds cliche, but it’s undeniably true.
Spare a thought, then, for your brothers and sisters keeping the peace in Syria and Lebanon, Mali and Congo, and all the other remote corners of the earth, for whom Portugal v Ghana offers a panacea to the bottomless pit of time that never seems to be full. Theirs is a Bermuda Triangle of perpetual adolescence, where jumpers are still goalposts, and World Cups still matter.
