Greening In The Years

For the first time in a decade, Ireland has qualified for a major international soccer tournament. With memories of the Ole, Ole years flooding back, Foul Play reflects on what Euro 2012 qualification means for a nation under the economic cosh – and identifiess the teams and players likely to make an impact in Poland and Ukraine.

Craig Fitzsimons, 08 Jun 2012

OK, here we are. The moment we’ve all been waiting for: Ireland at a major tournament, for real, in front of our eyes. Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride: this could just turn out to be the most unforgettable summer of our sporting lives.

Sure, we are not entering completely uncharted waters. Ireland have participated at major tournaments before, the bulk of them during a glorious six-year spell (1988-1994) when it briefly seemed as if these summertime adventures might become a regular feature of our lives. The awareness that we were living through a Golden Age in Irish football history wasn’t lost on anybody at the time, but for those of us old enough to remember, it is still gobsmacking to look back on USA ’94, eighteen entire summers ago, and realise that we’ve made it to the finals of just ONE major tournament since. And though in many ways Ireland acquitted themselves quite wonderfully in Japan in 2002, the memory is still entirely dominated by the horrible saga of Roy Keane’s epic temper-tantrum and subsequent walkout.

The lean years have been far leaner than we’d feared: eight qualifying campaigns, seven of them failures. In the dying embers of Big Jack’s reign and the early days of Mick McCarthy’s tenure, Ireland were in transition, with our players either too old, too young or not good enough, and it is maybe for the best that we missed out on Euro ’96 and France ’98. There was no excuse for not getting through two years later, when failure to defend a corner kick against Macedonia in stoppage-time was all that stood between Ireland and a place at the Finals. We plumbed some real depths during the qualifying campaigns for 2004, 2006 and 2008. And the cruellest cut of all came two-and-a-half years ago, when the Thierry Henry incident prevented us from joining the global party in South Africa. At times, many of us will have wondered privately whether we’d ever live to see Ireland reach the summit again. But... here we are.

Do you, dear reader, ever experience vivid REM dream sequences in which you are watching Ireland play at a World Cup or Euro finals, before the alarm clock intrudes and your wife elbows you in the ribs to remind you to get up and go to work? Foul Play most certainly has done. Not every night, you understand, or even every few weeks, but I have been periodically beset by such visions down the years, and I’m quite sure I’m not the only one. I will admit to being far more emotionally engaged with sport than most sane people, with Man City and Hibernian having put me through a psychic roller-coaster for the last nine months in very different ways, but NOTHING is more important to me than the Ireland national team. I mean no offence to my three children when I point out that Ireland’s win over Italy on June 18th 1994 remains, to this day, an extremely strong contender for The Happiest Day Of My Life (admittedly, there may have been other reasons; it was the summer of Doves and Buckfast after all). Indeed, I’ve often had ample cause to doubt that it would ever get that good again.

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Craig Fitzsimons

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