The hands that rocked the nation

STUTTGART, June 12, 1988. Ray Houghton’s goal. Packie Bonner defying Gary Lineker and everything else England could throw at him. The full-time scoreboard reading ‘England 0 Rep of Ireland 1. And, beneath it, the Green Army going positively bonkers.

To those indelible images from one of the greatest days in Irish sport, must be added two more. And they both revolve around the same man: silver-haired physio Mick Byrne. Before the game, it was Mick who was seen by millions of television viewers stepping off the team bus outside the Neckarstadion and, in broad Dublinese accentuated by a clenched fist, shouting to some nearby Irish supporters: “We’ll do them for yiz today, lads.” And after the game, it was Mick who was photographed down on his knees in prayer on the pitch, another shot which went around the world.

Or, as veteran reporter Peter Byrne so memorably put it at the time: “I could visualise Ireland beating England and I could even visualise Ireland winning the Championship. But in my wildest dreams I could never have pictured Mick Byrne following The Pope, General De Gaulle and Ronald Reagan onto the front page of The Daily Telegraph.”

Twenty-four years on, and on the eve of Ireland’s long-awaited return to the Euros, Mick contemplates those golden memories from a position of comfortable retirement at his home is Ashbourne.

“We’ll do them for yiz lads,” he says again. “Yeah, there were Irish supporters hanging over the railings above us when we were going into the stadium and I was feeling the emotion of it all, seeing everyone with the flags. But I believed it too. I really did. I believed that with the players we had, we could beat England.”

But not before having to endure 84 minutes of heart-stopping tension after Houghton had put the ball in the English net.

“After scoring so early, we had to go through torture,” Mick remembers. “Packie was brilliant that day because Lineker was all over the place. But looking back, we had such big players at the time, players who took charge when they went out — Kevin Moran, Mick McCarthy, Ronnie Whelan, Paul McGrath, Frank Stapleton. It wasn’t just through luck that we got to those finals. We had a great team. Jack Charlton had a great saying: ‘when they cross the line, they’re on their own’. It was up to the players then. But Jack was also a brilliant coach. He knew how the opposition tied their laces. I don’t think he gets the credit for being the great coach he was. And the other thing I’d stress is that, even though people talk a lot about the craic we had, I can tell you that we couldn’t have been better prepared professionally for that tournament.”

It was in the moments of happy bedlam after the final whistle in the Neckarstadion that Byrne fell to his knees on the turf, a very private moment in a very public place.

“You know, I’m an Irish Catholic and I have my faith and that was just me giving thanks,” he says now. “I saw grown men roaring crying everywhere, there were fellas sobbing on my shoulder. It was that kind of a day.”

And the celebrations were only getting under way. After the game, dope tests for Chris Hughton and Tony Galvin meant that the exhausted squad were left sitting on the team coach outside the stadium awaiting their comrades.

“We’d never leave without all the lads, we’d never leave anyone behind,” says Mick. “So there we all were, sitting on the coach and it was steaming hot. And Jack said to me, ‘Is there any way we could have a drink?’ I got off to go and see and I spotted these two fellows in blazers going back into the stadium. So I followed them up in a lift two floors, down a corridor and into this big room — and there was a magnificent bar in it. So, straight away, I race back out onto the coach and I say to Jack and the lads: ‘C’mon, I’ve found a spot’. We all went up and then the singing started. The players could look down on the fans outside the stadium and the fans could see them up there — and they were singing songs to each other. Unbelievable times.”

Byrne was the physio to Irish squads under a succession of managers including John Giles, Eoin Hand, Jack Charlton and Mick McCarthy. And when Steve Staunton took over from Brian Kerr, one of his first moves was to bring Byrne back into the fold, something which came as a happy surprise to the players. As Damien Duff revealed at the time: “The first I knew he was back was when he sneaked into my room, jumped onto my bed and started kissing me. It was a nice way to wake up. He is a special man and you can’t help but love him.”

But Byrne wasn’t just held in affection; along the way, he also earned the trust and respect of some of the game’s most demanding characters, including Alex Ferguson, Kenny Dalglish and Roy Keane.

Andy Townsend tells a great story from the build-up to the World Cup quarter-final against Italy in 1990. On a slow day at the team’s small family-run team hotel in Rome, some bored players were lounging around when Byrne took it upon himself to cheer everyone up. Especially for the benefit of the London-Irish boys, Townsend and Tony Cascarino, he began singing ‘The Lambeth Walk’, complete with dance movements, and was so caught up in his performance that he failed to notice he was moving perilously close to the magnificent model ship which held pride of place on a plinth in the middle of the small lobby.

Helplessly, the players watched the inevitable catastrophe unfold as Mick accidentally brushed against the ship causing it to tilt and although, with one despairing lunge, he managed to get his finger-tips to it, the precious heirloom eluded his grasp and smashed into a thousand tiny pieces on the marble floor.

At the terrible sound, the hotel owner rushed in and, when he saw his beloved model ship reduced to smithereens, promptly went into hysterics. As a red-faced Mick pleaded, “I so sorry, I no mean it,” the owner was joined by his wife and she too proceeded to lose the plot, the screeching decibel level of the pair now entirely drowning out the mortified physio’s repeated apologies.

In his more avuncular moods, Mick might always been the one in the Irish camp to dish out hugs and kisses and an arm around the shoulder but the Dublin docker’s son has a vein of toughened steel running through him too.

And after five minutes of Italian operatics, he finally snapped. “Look,” he said, now white in the face, “I said I sorry. I no sorry any more. Fuck you – and fuck your boat.”

And with that he stormed out, leaving Townsend and Cascarino, as Andy later put it, “rolling around, gasping for air and trying not to wet ourselves — he couldn’t have done any better to break the monotony.”

As well as tending to aches and pains and knocks and strains - “Kev’s tweaked a hammer,” he once typically confided, after Moran had pulled up suddenly - Byrne combined the roles of Mr Fix-It, Minister For Morale and Court Jester in the Irish camp, his responsibilities extending far beyond the treatment room.

He gave me one example when I interviewed him for Hot Press in the run-up to Italia ’90. It was his job to select the movie the squad would go to see on their regular outing to the cinema when they were in Dublin. And, he further revealed, the players would give him ratings for his efforts. I asked him how the most recent one had gone.

“Ah, that would have been ‘Red October’ and I didn’t do too bad actually,” he replied. “I got a few nines for that. But they were the intellectuals - the rough and tumble gave it three.”

But he was also visibly moved in the same interview as he tried to describe his feelings on the return to Dublin following the heroics of Euro ’88.

“Something else,” he said. “I’d never witnessed anything like it. I mean, I broke down a couple of times because it was so overwhelming. I remember when we passed O’Connell Street, I looked down the quays, where I used to play in my bare feet, and here we were, coming back as national heroes after putting on tremendous displays for the country.”

Byrne says he’d love to be able to turn back the clock and travel to Poland with Ireland this month.

“Ah, don’t you know that,” he says. “I loved every minute of it. I loved the players. They’re the ones for me. And I have no fear for them going to Poland now. I think we can handle Croatia. And we’ve always given Spain a hard time.

“But, this time, I’ll be watching at home with the grandkids. I’ll cheer with the grandkids, I’ll cry with the grandkids and I’ll run out onto the street when we score. You know what? When I was in the dug-out, I used to be singing all the songs along with the fans. Singing ‘The Fields Of Athenry’ in the dug-out! And Jack would be looking at me, laughing. I know I had a job to do and I did that job but, in my heart, I was a fan. And I still am.”