Give us this day our Daly bread

THEY say that life doesn’t owe you a living but I still maintain that Irish football owes me 50p.

The debt was incurred on the occasion of Ireland’s celebrated 3-0 win over the Soviet Union at Dalymount Park, a game remembered for Don Givens’ hat-trick, Liam Brady’s debut and the rare sight of an Irish team administering a footballing lesson to the kind of East European heavyweights who, in 1974, were invariably described in back page parlance as “crack”. But, on a profoundly personal and, yes, bitter note, I also remember it as the day I was left penniless.

The catastrophe happened on the way into the ground, when myself and a schoolmate found ourselves trapped in a slow moving mass of humanity, as it seemed as if the whole of Ireland tried to access Dalyer at the same time. I had 50p pocket money stashed away securely in a trouser pocket. Or so I thought.