More than one Moscow miracle

MORE than the luxury hotels, upmarket stores, eye-popping skyscrapers, top-of-the-range cars and crippling prices, perhaps the most dramatic measure of how much Russia has changed over the past 20 years is that Moscow is a tough place for an atheist like myself to be these days.

And that’s not just because the delightful St Basil’s Cathedral down on Red Square is the only place of worship I’ve ever seen which resembles a bouncy castle. No, tantalising evidence of the supernatural seemed all around us in the Russian capital, and that’s before we even get on to the subject of Richard Dunne performing his many miracles in the Luzhniki.

Exhibit A: colleague Paul O’Hehir was standing outside our hotel one evening when a blacked-out limousine screeched to a halt in front of him. The rear window rolled down and the man inside began shouting aggressively at Paul in Russian. When that didn’t get the desired response, he switched to English, barking ‘Porter! Porter’, ordering Paul to ‘Come here! Now!’.

But before my startled colleague even had a chance to think that, hey, there might be a big tip in this, the real porter came rushing down the steps of the hotel in a most palpable state of panic, opening the car door with shaking hands as the bully within continued to rant and rave.

And then came the beautiful bit that would make you think there must be a God after all. As the sharp-suited oaf got out of the car, he caught his foot in the seat belt — and fell flat on his face on the pavement.

Now, once you’ve stopped cheering, flash-forward, if you will, to the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s game. Up against the tightest of deadlines, we’ve raced down from the press box minutes after the final whistle and have just taken our seats in the press conference room for the imminent arrival of Giovanni Trapattoni and Dick Advocaat.

Beside me, another colleague is still putting the finishing touches to his match report when, suddenly, his laptop slides off his knees and crashes to the floor.

When he picks it up to examine the damage, the blood drains from his face and a terrible animal-like sound emerges from the depths of his being: the screen is blank; his entire match report has disappeared. Frantically, he begins jabbing at different keys and then, just as suddenly, his report reappears on the screen.

At which point I see him slowly and silently bless himself, the full sign of the cross, something which, in over 30 years of working in the pagan field of journalism, I think I have only ever seen once before — and that was when someone was about to submit an especially imaginative expenses claim.

Moments after this near-catastrophe, my colleague is back in business, joining the rest of us in lashing out the words of Trapattoni and Advocaat straight onto the screen. And what do we find ourselves typing?

“St Patrick was looking down on us,” says Trap. “God was not on our side tonight,” responds Dick.

Is someone trying to tell me something? Of course, the centrepiece of the supernatural chain of events in Moscow was the game itself. In my own match piece, I opted to describe Ireland’s great escape as a “minor miracle”, although I know others felt I’d understated the case. But I stick by my immediate reaction. After all, the match ended in a draw, not the confounding of all logic which an Irish victory would have represented.

Had the embattled visitors somehow d taken three points, then I’d have had no hesitation about upping the miraculous status of the event to ‘major’. Indeed, on mature reflection, I reckon the ‘luck of the Irish’ angle does a slight disservice to the men in white, even if Trapattoni was among the first to put it into the public domain.

For sure, as Andrei Arshavin later conceded, a tad more composure in the box on the part of the Russian strikeforce and the home side’s total dominance would have been reflected in a healthy goal count. So, to that extent, Ireland certainly had the benefit of the breaks. But, otherwise, it wasn’t as if the visitors were saved by the repeated intervention of the woodwork or by a sequence of jammy deflections or even by critical refereeing decisions.

That Ireland ultimately kept their goal intact was — credit where it’s due — down to superlative defending even if it was mainly of the last ditch kind: bodies hurled in front of shots, powerful clearing headers, well-timed interventions and immaculate tackles inside and outside the box; and Shay Given proving his reputation as one of the world’s great keepers.

At the heart of it all, of course, was Big Dunney. By the end of the night in the Luzhniki, even the unbelievers amongst us would not have been totally surprised to see him ascend into the sky through a piercing shaft of heavenly light accompanied by a host of angels (and at least one physio).

What to make of it all? Well, as I’m determined to continue to find the meaning of life in the real wonders of science and logic and reason — not to mention love and laughter and the songs of Bob Dylan — as we now begin to turn our attentions to the penultimate game in European 2012 qualifying, I’m reminded that the scars of one hellish night in San Marino are still not fully healed.

So, just wondering: Andorra’s not all that far from Lourdes, is it?