Jumping through oops and dropping Dostoyevsky

THOUGHT for a minute there that I’d come up with a wizard idea for this week’s column. Letter From Tbilisi, I was going to call title it, beneath which I’d pen the single word, ‘oops’.

Could there be a more pithy and, in its own way, profound comment on the tangled web of war and peace and political football which has brought us to where we are today? Indeed and there could. Or, as the Commander-in-Chief quipped good-naturedly: “I’ll give you oops upside your head if you don’t file 900 words from wherever the hell you are.”

So here, then, is a Letter From Mainz, although that’s not quite right either, since the Irish squad and its media camp followers have actually pitched tents about 15 kilometres away from the venue for today’s game, in the leafy spa town of Wiesbaden. It is, to be sure, an elegant place, with its abundance of greenery, wide streets and spacious squares but, for what should be fairly obvious reasons, it can’t be denied that the old town is entirely lacking in the kind of big match atmosphere which normally attends our manoeuvres on foreign fields.