Sing when you’re losing

Roy Keane, eh. Is he out of step now with our times? Or just always cross?

It’s 10 years now since he became our first citizen to truly master assertiveness, since he single-handedly led a vein-popping crusade to eliminate the phrase ‘Ah sure, it’s grand’ from our vocabularies.

Chefs across the land cursed him as dud dinners found a way back to their kitchens for the very first time. Club treasurers shook their heads as every request for more balls, more cones, more hurleys, more bottled water was couched in the new language of progress. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

It was a reboot we probably needed although you wonder if we really had to uninstall our sense of humour in the process.

But isn’t it all so 2007 now? We’ll stop short of blaming Keano for the madness that drove us to the wall. But we’ll give him some credit for the era of demands and bad manners and restlessness that wound up with us barracking and ridiculing Steve Staunton, a decent man who had served us so honourably.

And maybe we had a right to be angry then, but what purpose would anger have served in Gdansk the other night?

“I think the players and even the supporters, they all have to change their mentality,” railed Roy on ITV, after the Fields of Athenry rang around the BGE Arena in the closing stages of our chastening defeat.

If he was just demanding a new song book, Roy might have had a point, but if he wanted instant recrimination and bile to spill onto men we felt had let us down, maybe it’s just as well he doesn’t quite hold us in his palm like he used to.

If Adrian Chiles had an ounce of Bill O’Herlihy’s ability to stir, he would have found out exactly what reaction Roy wanted from the fans. Would a chorus of boos have been sufficient? Should they, to be on the safe side, have ripped out a few seats and rained them onto the failures below? Maybe we need to start waving white hankies to signal our disgust. Proper handkerchiefs mind. No fishing long expanses of toilet paper out of our poc kets like we did before 2002.

For his part, should Keith Andrews have parked his dignified, thoughtful recognition of the support, put aside his exhaustion after a gallant but futile shift and simply mooned them for their simple-minded acceptance of defeat?

In truth, many of the travelogues coming back from Poland this week have been tiresome, ‘Temple Bar on tour’ stereotypes. But when tough times at home have increasingly turned us on ourselves, it was heartening to witness warm, collective generosity and defiance in the face of an impossible situation. Maybe Roy doesn’t fully appreciate how much of that spirit we might need yet, well away from the pitch.

In many ways, tournament football is a curious beast for lesser lights like ourselves. With ultimate victory out of reach, it’s all about returning home with a reason to feel good about yourself. In 1990, we didn’t win a game, staged a fix, mugged the enterprising Romanians and came back as heroes.

This time the team haven’t been good enough to give us a story, but nobody yet has let us down and the fans, at least, have made us friends.

Of course there were mistakes and certainly there is sadness. If there was one former world-class Ireland midfielder you felt for on Thursday night it was John Giles. On television at least, Gilesy has been a reserved, rather detached figure during these championships, wishing us well but slightly baffled at what we have become.

When he talks about guile and cleverness in Irish football, he does so wistfully. Gilesy didn’t want recriminations on Thursday night, but you knew everything he loves about football was only on offer in Spanish red.

Maybe in that great ovation the Irish players received, there was some acknowledgment that this was the end of the line for several who got us there. And, who knows, perhaps our next great player will be another member of the diaspora tempted over by the compelling show of pride from the stands.

But while we wait for a time when we again trust players with the ball and while we wait to discover a John Giles or a Roy Keane we can trust it with, we don’t need to abuse Keith Andrews for not being that man.

He prepared. And I suppose he failed. But we can still be proud of him. And sing when we’re losing.