All around the word

IN Tirana for Ireland’s World Cup qualifier against Albania back in 1993, I came across the kind of book you don’t find in Eason’s every day.

It was a small history of Albanian football, in Albanian, which I bought for one dollar from an elderly man who was flogging a few copies of the badly printed tome outside the ground on the day of the game.

Back home, I thought it would make a fitting present for an old friend, Drogheda United and Leeds fan Arthur Mathews, a man with a well developed taste both for the beautiful game and the peculiar. A few years later, Arthur, who is as close to being a comic genius as anyone I have ever met, would earn fame as the co-creator of Fr Ted, and I always thought it was something of a missed opportunity that he didn’t find a cameo role for that strange little book on Craggy Island.