Flickering screen lit fire that can never be put out
IT WAS the Da, the Ma and three older sisters versus the European Cup — and there could only ever be one winner. If I was something of a late-developer as a football fan, only falling hard for the beautiful game after eight years on the planet during which Batman and The Virginian had vied to be the main objects of my hero worship, then I’m afraid I have to blame the family.
Not enough to warrant years of therapy, you understand. I mean, I loved them all dearly, but the Da was strictly a GAA and horse-racing man, the Ma only expressed an interest when Cork were doing the business and, apart from the odd bit of camogie at school, the girls were not exactly what you would call sporting fanatics.
In short, sporting role models for the football nut-to-be were in short supply in our house, to the extent, indeed, that there was one point in my childhood when I believe I expressed a wish to be Arkle when I grew up.
And, then, just like that, it all changed. The 12 months between May 1967 and May 1968 were my annus mirabilis, a journey out of the darkness and into the light.
The first indistinct memory of that time is of the Da watching a match on television. I was watching him more than the match because even a cursory glance at the fuzzy black and white pictures on the screen was enough to confirm that they were coming from some place much further away than Croke Park.
It wasn’t hurling and it wasn’t Gaelic football and it definitely wasn’t one of his beloved point to points — so what was it that had him sitting on the edge of his seat? I know now, though I don’t recall him explaining it to me at that time. And even if he had, I wouldn’t have understood. My age of enlightenment was still to dawn. But, yes, of course, it can only have been the European Cup final of 1967, Celtic v Inter, Jock Stein and his Lisbon Lions making history as the first British side to lift the trophy, the team of homegrown Glasgow boys turning the tables on the continental sophisticates of catenaccio, and securing their immortality in the process.
I presume that, for the Da, Celtic must have represented the acceptable face of soccer — the Gaelic wing, if you like — and, even if it meant stepping out of his comfort zone, he wasn’t going to miss the grand old club’s ultimate date with destiny.
Within 12 months I understood all that, and more. Falling in with the right crowd, a gang of football-mad kids who were my neighbours in one of the new housing estates in Tallaght, I experienced a crash-course in the greatest game on earth. You learn quickly on the street and in the schoolyard, crucial lessons like the realisation that, no, Liam — deep sigh — there is no team called Manchester (though it took me a little longer to achieve my higher diploma and learn, much to my disappointment it has to be said, that neither was there a team called Patrick Thistle).
One year later, I had my degree in my pocket, and by the time May came around again, I’d replaced the old man on the edge of the seat in front of the telly, the curtains drawn against the evening sun, giddy with excitement at the prospect of watching the European Cup final of 1968, Manchester United v Benfica, live from Wembley.
It’s the first game I can remember in its entirety, from beginning to end, every little detail savoured and suffered. When Bobby Charlton, famed for his shooting but not his heading ability, opened the scoring with a flick of his threadbare bonce, I rushed into the kitchen to tell the Ma the startling news. “Bobby Charlton has scored — with a header!” “That’s nice, love”.
Then straight back into the living room to endure the shock of Benfica’s equaliser and that heart-stopping moment when Eusebio was clean through and Alex Stepney held his cannonball shot (and, in a lovely act of sportsmanship, was rewarded with a congratulatory pat for his efforts from the great man). After that, it was extra time — and, oh, recall the luxury of that, like Christmas coming twice, in an era when live football was so severely rationed on the box.
And the extra half-hour was nothing but ecstasy heaped upon ecstasy, as Georgie rounded the keeper to score as only Georgie could, the kid Kidd nodded one in on the rebound and, fittingly for one of the men who had come through Munich with Matt Busby, Charlton whipped in his second at the near post to make it 4-1 and confirm Manchester United as the first English champions of Europe.
There was no going back after that. Oddly, United didn’t become my team — Shamrock Rovers took care of that — but Best and Charlton and the rest had shown me how great this game could be, instilling a love bordering on obsession which would only be deepened by grateful exposure, two years later, to the unparalleled fantasy football of Pele and Brazil at the 1970 World Cup.
Closer to home, the European Cup remained the pinnacle and a continuing source of inspiration and education.
No less than myself, the European Cup has gone through some changes in the many years since, and not all for the better.
I appreciate that this view won’t cut much ice with the financiers for whom the rebranded competition has become a gold mine, but I still recoil from the fundamental illogic of the idea that finishing fourth in a domestic competition can qualify you for something called the Champions League.
And especially when that fourth place assumes such holy grail proportions that the quest to achieve it only diminishes the standing of another storied competition, the FA Cup.
But, as politi-cians insist on telling us these days, we are where we are. And, as another mouth-watering clash between Manchester United and Barcelona looms at Wembley, we can at least be grateful that, when it comes to the final crunch, Europe’s premier club competition reverts to the classic narrative of one night’s decisive drama.
And never more so than in Istanbul in 2005, which happened to be the first of three finals I’ve been lucky enough to be paid to cover as a journalist.
Long-delayed it might have been but the baptism could hardly have been more fiery. Many people regard it as the greatest game they ever saw — and they clearly have solid grounds for that view — but I remember it more accurately as a night of professional angst, as Liverpool not only staged one of the most remarkable comebacks in the history of the game but also effectively shredded all the careful prose I’d crafted and all the apparently definitive judgements I’d formulated during the half-time break when, with Milan already three-up, the game was obviously as good as over.
The rest of the night I remember as a blur of a frantic deleting and rewriting, even as I attempted to keep one eye on the latest improbable twists and turns down on the pitch which continued all the way through to the penalty shoot-out and right into the following morning, Istanbul-time, by which late hour, the mobile phone was on the blink, the battery in my laptop was running out and the only sound louder than that of the crowd inside the raucous, disbelieving stadium was the roaring noise the deadline made as it whizzed past my ear.
“I saw it with my own eyes and I still can’t quite believe it,” was how my report in the morning paper began and that was certainly true enough.
But it was only later that I could properly reflect on and relish the wonder of the night in something approaching tranquillity, and even begin to contemplate what the old man, who had passed away many years before, would have made of his son being present in the press box for such a blue moon night in such a far-off land.
At an advanced stage in his life, he’d unexpectedly developed an interest in football and, even more oddly, a particular affection for Liverpool — perhaps, I suspect, because it was the only place outside Ireland which, back in his youth, he’d ever visited. The Ma once explained his late conversion to me on the grounds that he felt that if he hadn’t converted to what he’d always called soccer, he’d have ended up with virtually nothing to talk about with his only son and heir.
Which was a bit of an exaggeration, let me say for the record, although maybe not that much. There’s a period where young boys tend to have one-track minds before the revelation dawns that there are other things in life to become equally one-tracked about.
That was all a long, long time ago, of course, but, happily, the essential spirit of the things and people you love best endures, even when they are no longer physically around. So when I take my place in the press box tomorrow night, by now the grizzled veteran who’ll doubtless find some critical organisational glitch to moan about — “What do you mean the free sandwiches are all gone?” — I intend to take a moment to savour in my mind’s eye the image of a nine-year-old sitting in front of the television and looking on enraptured, as Best and Busby hugged, like father and son, down on that Wembley turf all those years ago.
As Creedence sang: the big wheel keeps on turnin’.
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