Working in the toy department

The worst of times…the best of times. Liam Mackey reflects on an extraordinary 31 days in the Far East, from the depressing pall of greyness that hung over the Irish camp in Izumo through the drama of Ibaraki and onto the swansong in Suwon.

THE PHRASE that kept coming to mind throughout the World Cup of 2002 was the one U2 used to put up in lights during their Zooropa tour, the one with the Orwellian ring:

Everything You Know Is Wrong.

In Niigata, on the eve of Ireland v Cameroon, three of us went in search of a bar in which to watch the tournament’s opening game. For all the fervour of their supporters inside the stadia, Japan was not exactly on a nationwide World Cup footing at that point. Our garbled instructions to a friendly taxi driver resulted in the inevitable misunderstanding: as he had doubtless done for a thousand foreign males before us, he dropped us right in the heart of the downtown red light district, and with an encouraging wave, left us to fend for ourselves.

It was, to say the least, an unusual tableau: three males, with only one thing on their mind, sprinting past the beguiling smiles and beckoning fingers of impossibly beautiful girls, pausing now and again to add to their manifest bafflement, by staring them soulfully in the eye and pleading, “Bar? Football?”

If there was anyone in Niigata more astonished than les girls, it was les boys when, having finally found a near-deserted restaurant boasting a TV tuned to the footie, we settled down to watch, with growing amazement, as the world and European champions France were mauled by the splendid young lions of Senegal.

The World Cup of 2002 had begun as it meant go on, with the old order crumbling and the new kids on the block kicking up a storm. One by one, the game’s kingpins were bowled over - France, Argentina, Portugal, Italy, Spain - while rank outsiders like South Korea and Turkey went from strength to strength. Yet, when the dust had finally settled, two of the traditional superstars were still found to be intact.

But even a final involving Brazil and Germany, for all its classic dimensions on paper, had an air of novelty about it. If you had placed a bet then on the prospect of the two meeting in Yokohama on the last Sunday in June, your profits would have been so handsome that I reckon you could just about have afforded to pay that hotel laundry bill I got in Tokyo. (Now, there was a real World Cup shock).

There were those who bemoaned the elimination of thoroughbreds along the way, but not me. Once Brazil are playing like Brazil, I’m happy for a World Cup to follow any old course it chooses, and if that means underdog bites dog, then all the better for added drama and entertainment value.

That die-hards found it harder to stomach was obvious in the rash of daft conspiracy theories which trailed South Korea’s swashbuckling progress to the semi-finals. Yes, there were a couple of vital decisions that should not have gone the co-hosts’ way but nothing you could call unprecedented when viewed against the backdrop of that long and inglorious tradition in international football, whose guiding spirit would be the Simpson they call Homer. If you’re still unsure, ask Eoin Hand about it.

The much more important issue raised by sub-standard officialdom concerns the need, now more urgent than ever, for football to employ the instant video replay. It is simply a nonsense that one of the world’s most sophisticated sports should continue to go about its business with a self-applied blindfold.

It should be witheringly obvious by now that not even a Pele among linesmen – a superhuman official with freakish peripheral vision – could hope to simultaneously keep one eye on the ball and another on the movement of a player or players further up the pitch. And more so at the game's highest level, where attackers and defenders alike are trained to spring or set the offside trap with split-second, hair-trigger precision. When you really think about it, the most astonishing thing about the work of the referee’s assistant is not that he gets it wrong a lot of the time, but that he ever manages to get it right at all.

The standard objection that the use of video evidence would routinely disrupt the play simply doesn’t hold up. As things stand, the uproar which inevitably follows a contentious decision not only stops the game but, as we’ve seen yet again in this World Cup, can lead to the sort of heated exchanges which produce red and yellow cards, a poisonous atmosphere on and around the park and even, when the final whistle has blown, the kind of rumbling, mean-spirited recriminations, we’ve witnessed being taken to ludicrous extremes in Italy and Spain.

If FIFA don’t finally get with the modern age, and make use of the simple technology that television commentators and even viewers can so readily avail of, then they might as well go the whole hog in primitivism and demand a return to kimonos for goalposts.

While they’re at it, the boys in the blazers need to urgently review their ticketing procedures, the sight of empty seats in what should have been packed to the rafters stadia, an unsightly stain on the face of what was otherwise a largely unblemished tournament, from an organisational point of view.

For that, we must extend a special thanks to our gracious co-hosts in Japan and Korea. The Japanese people were endlessly patient and kind, and did their best to make all aspects of the trip – from inside hotels to inside the grounds themselves – a painless experience. Yet, a certain reserve, coupled with the fact that Irish camps tended to be located well away from the main areas of World Cup activity, meant that our day-to-day experience of the tournament unfolded at an odd remove.

But there was no such dislocation in Korea. Landing in Seoul plunged us straight into the core of planet football, and an experience those of us who were there will never forget. On any given morning, a short walk from the team and media hotels, a coffee house breakfast could be taken in the company of

Brazilians, Mexicans, Turks, Irish and whoever happened to be passing through en route to their own places of footballing definition.

Then, come match day for the Koreans themselves, and every other colour in the World Cup rainbow would be drenched in red. On the afternoon of South Korea’s game against Portugal, I recall standing on the vantage point of the steps of the team hotel, looking down towards the huge plaza of City Hall square, which was already rocking to the sound of live music and the thunderous chants of hundreds of thousands of people gearing up for the main event.

Just then, Matt Holland, returning from a shopping trip, moved into a view. “A bit lively, eh?” I said. The Ipswich man looked back over his shoulder at the vast red tide of humanity, and simply shook his head in speechless astonishment. And that was just the warm-up. Hours later, after the final whistle had blown, Seoul erupted into the most joyously good-natured explosion of people power I have ever seen. Cheers, tears, chants, hugs, fireworks, drums, all multiplied by a factor of thousands – this was the antithesis of the red mist, a whole city of people gone happily berserk. And still they found time to carefully tidy up their litter before they went home.

To be fair, the Irish fans didn’t let their side down either in this World Cup. For a team that, 7,000 miles from home, couldn’t entirely be sure if the country was for ’em or agin ’em, after the near civil war engendered by the Roy Keane affair, the uplifting impact of the huge ovation which greeted their arrival onto the pitch for the first game in Niigata, can hardly be overestimated.

And that’s how it remained throughout the month, up to and even after that final Spanish penalty was converted in Suwon, a solid green platform of support that touched see-it-all-before veterans like Niall Quinn deeply, and which added a new meaning to the rejuvenated terrace anthem ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone.’

In a tournament of surprises, perhaps Ireland’s biggest contribution was that they overcame their own dispiriting preparation to such triumphant effect. While the view of events from home may have been black or white, in lovely Izumo it was just grey – a dismal, disheartening, depressing gloom, that seemed to go on forever and looked certain to secure for Ireland’s World Cup 2002 campaign, a special place in the annals of great sporting cock-ups.

THUS, ONE of the stranger ironies of the whole adventure: while the top man, Roy Keane, remained centre-stage, even if only in spirit, the whole campaign seemed to be destabilised; yet once he had finally ruled himself out of the picture, Ireland’s World Cup bid thrived. As the Americans say, go figure.

What is for certain is that, with a series of gutsy and often quality performances taking them into the last 16, this Irish team proved that they are most definitely not a one-man band. In Damien Duff, a superstar was born; for Robbie Keane, the goal-den touch

returned; the faithful found new heroes in Gary Breen and Matt Holland; and the old soldiers, Staunton and Quinn, bowed out with dignity and a touch of class.

The truth is that no one had more belief in the players than the players themselves. While the fans hoped and the critics doubted, the players dug deep, decorating displays of enormous application and spirit with passages of composed, creative football. If they seemed to prefer the uphill route – conceding a goal before taking control – then the lesson that needs to be learned from that, is that they need to show future opponents nothing less and nothing more than the respect they have now earned for themselves.

For Mick McCarthy, what was, by his own admission, one of the worst times of his life, was transformed into one of the best. It was nothing less than he deserved. While it’s

entirely legitimate that questions should be asked about such tactical matters as his continued preference for Ian Harte, the initial absence of Steve Finnan and his insistence on starting Damien Duff upfront, the overall balance sheet reads substantially in his favour.

The Keane saga and the heartbreaking manner of their exit notwithstanding, Ireland’s World Cup 2002, in a vivid reversal of the 1990 adventure, will finally be remembered by football people for the high quality of the performances, and the blooding of a young, emerging side as a real force in world football. And for that, the manager deserves his portion of the acclaim.

The coming book wars are bound to open rather than heal wounds, and the FAI inquiry looks certain to see official heads roll. In the short term, defeat may even be snatched from the jaws of victory, Ireland’s 2002 World Cup rewritten as a chapter that ends as it began, in rancour and chaos.

But the tapes of the games themselves will tell a different story, as will those of us who were lucky to be there in Niigata, Ibaraki, Yokohama and Suwon. And when push comes to shove, and we are invited to choose just one incident that made it all worthwhile, it will have to be that utterly sensational moment in the dying seconds in Ibaraki, when time seemed to stand still but Robbie Keane kept going, and then the ball was in the corner of the German net and, suddenly, everyone was leaping and dancing and singing and crying and hugging and punching the air, and all you could hear were people shouting, over and over, “I can’t believe it, I just cannot believe it.”

For making kids of three and forty-three believe, these boys in green deserve our everlasting thanks.