After the ball is over

We’re watching Damien Duff on a Tuesday afternoon, and mouths in the front bar of the Temple Bar Music Centre are actually doing that newly-patented Mick McCarthy thing of hanging comically open. The man bowls himself down the pitch like a cannonball. He falls, repeatedly, an unwitting trademark if not actually a modus operandi. When he does, he tumbles for another ten feet after he hits the ground, an avalanche wearing itself out. You watch him and think of the stories you learned in school, about how the Romans used to say that thunder and lightning were caused by the gods having a fight. With Duff on the rampage, you almost begin to feel sorry for the Saudis.

It doesn’t stop being impressive in the replays. Hours later, the sweaty dismay of the first half is forgotten, the missed opportunities forgiven: and the moments of glory, given a few beer-assisted hours to set in the collective memory, have increased positively geometrically in gloriousness. A pubful of green-shirted blokes and women with paint on their faces, heads tipped upward toward the telly, bellow at each goal as if the war has yet to be won. It’s tipsy recent-past nostalgia, and it’s something else: a kind of necessary, important epilogue to what’s happened, a tribalistic call-and-response with the absent heroes, a ceremony equally integral to loving The Boys In Green as actually watching the matches themselves. Goal. Yeaaaaaaahh! Cut. The highlights flash forward. Goal. Yeaaaaaaahhh!

After the match, the analysis: still essential even without Eamon, still attended closely even with people chattering over it, even with the waves of euphoria flowing palpably through the city’s barrooms, a much stronger tide than mere drunkenness would have been. Interesting that, now, three matches in, people are drinking far less, celebrating in a new way, now that it’s not about what Fintan O’Toole called “heroic failure” but about self-aware, professional, qualified success, with a hard core, a desire to work harder next time. There’s Steve Staunton, frowning and grumping his way through the post-match interview, deconstructing the side’s shortcomings and squandered chances and tiny lazinesses, heroic in his refusal to accept the laurels of heroism. There’s Bill O’Herlihy, calling him, “like we say in Cork,” in a voice brimming with undisguised jubilation, “a great bit of stuff”. (At which, the clouds lifted momentarily, and Staunton smiled.)

After the replays and the commentary, the Herald, and tomorrow the Times: pub counters are littered with evening papers, discarded bits of tabloid colour supplements, and we eat them up greedily. It’s all, all of this, part and crucial parcel: a mini-culture’s dialogue with itself, a chance to agree or disagree, to re-view or reconfirm what we think. It’s a way to make a match last longer than 90 minutes, to allow us to revel in the glory for slightly longer. Anyway, this fierce, proud tribalism feels familiar; we recognise this desire to stretch out the pleasure; to compare notes, get other people’s point of view; to lovingly fold and unfold our own remembered experience, and look at it again and again. This is the sort of thing music obsessives do.

We’re watching Damien Duff on a Tuesday afternoon: and it’s the most exciting thing this person has witnessed in the Temple Bar Music Centre for quite some time. In normal circumstances, as a music journalist, and as a music fan, this would be a deeply troubling thought. But for now, this month, this week, today, the World Cup is on.

Right, let’s look at that again from a different angle.

Given that the matches are broadcast at such weird times – early morning, during workday lunch hours – it’s near-impossible to watch them with one’s non-work mates. One happy result of this has been the rare pleasure of interacting with the normally anonymous people with whom we share this city: partaking in the gregarious camaraderie of strangers who, within nanoseconds, drunk or sober, are friends. Another thing that happens is that the mobile phone becomes scarily all-important.

Mid-match. Ireland are up, but are taking it far too easy. Text messages fly back and forth across the nation, giving out, Dunphyising, joking, like filthy haikus. “What the fuck / was that”

“They’re not even / trying they’re / asleep”

Damien scores, magnificently; and bows like an emperor as Robbie Keane and the rest pounce smack! atop his shoulders at fifty miles an hour. Telly-watchers nationwide go apoplectic. Mobile services are pushed to their insane, overworked, text-messagey limit. Message Not Sent This Time. You thought coverage at Slane was bad.

“GO OOOOOOOO / OOOOON”

“HOLY SHIT!!!!!”

“Ole ole ole ole / ole ole”

And the undisputed text-messaging Man Of The Match: “My sister just sd / shed take sparks / out of duff”

On the way home, in the streets of Dublin, there is a sexual boldness afoot that puts a Saturday night at Witnness to shame, a tang more sharply unmistakable in the night air than on the most drunken and lascivious of bank holiday weekends. Men in dark-jade jerseys, possibly full of drink, definitely full of a new potency that wearing that green shirt endows, meet your eye with a full-blooded, positively Mediterranean directness.

Post-match matchups aside, a girl’s heart goes out to blokes, who have to watch football without the amusing wee extra dimension we get (however blasphemous this concept might be to men, who audibly grit their teeth over the gay chirrup of female telly-viewers cooing over Matt Holland’s “lovely smile”). But if football has traditionally been considered far too important to be reckoned in terms of such sidebar frivolities, that’s probably largely because there exists an idea - not at all restricted to football - wherein to watch great feats of superhuman prowess in any field, and to acknowledge that your gut is just as impressed as your head, is to diminish a talented person’s tremendous gift.

With pop music, the strictures are far looser: everybody knows there’s something intrinsically sexually potent about watching someone render themselves majestically larger than life, reach beyond the limits of the merely human, push body and spirit towards a best and almost unimaginable version of themselves. To witness someone attempt such a feat of self-faith and crazy bravery, and then to watch them triumph, and on such a massive scale, is totally electrifying in every way: recognising that isn’t frivolous, it’s honest. Of course it’s sexy. It reminds us we’re alive.

“Are you kidding?” comes a spat enquiry early on in the tournament. “You should never watch a match in a pub. It’s impossible to concentrate.” Whaaat? Of course you can! More significantly, why, how could you pass up the lunatic camaraderie of the public experience, the magic that happens? Would you want to watch your favourite ever band play the set of their lives all by yourself, in a completely empty venue?

But then, what would I know? What a follower of independent Irish music feels in the mainstream-cultural realm is probably akin to the scoffing frustration with which a football fan views, in a word, people like me. That is, people who appear, molelike, once every two years (the Euro tournament, remember) and go just as mad watching the television as the football-widow’s husband does, who knows every player’s annotated history and who watches relentlessly, comprehensively and with a soul-passion at least twice as fervent as that which he feels for his own wife and children. It can’t be far different. It’s not enough to only get excited for Slane, I recall grumpily thinking during last August’s hysteria, midway through the most exciting year in Irish music in a decade. “Well yeah there are good bands in this country,” I remember hearing leave my mouth a month ago, as if nothing could be more patently obvious, when a stranger expressed her pleasant surprise (innocuously, she thought) on our way out of Dublin Castle.

More to the point, as any kind of a music fan, it’s hard not to be envious of sport in a month like we’ve just had: a month when football can capture the national imagination in a way that never really happens with music, in an everything-else-stops kind of way. Only U2 playing Slane last year was able to even come close. You consider this, and you remember that famous photograph of the Beatles, standing in a row, snapped just as Muhammad Ali lands a mock knockout punch to George’s cheek, pop’s fabbest four leaning backward in pantomime overreaction like four cheerfully mugging, helpless dominoes. Culturally, that’s still happening. That cheerful, deadly punch is still effortlessly finding its mark.

But it’s not a competition: anything – music, sport, whatever - that pulls us together the way this World Cup side have done, that lifts us out of ‘pragmatic’ short-sighted reality, that creates a tribe of us and makes us passionate, is particularly in 2002 to be welcomed, enjoyed, celebrated. They’ve reminded us that what pessimists and middle managers and pundits say doesn’t matter, that leaps of faith are important, that hard work and commitment pay off, that passion is rewarded. Countless Irish musicians have proved this for us locally; and now the Ireland side have proved it for everybody else, and on a global scale. And particularly in a national culture veering increasingly dangerously toward the blank-eyed and the imagination-free, the cash-obsessed and the spiritually bankrupt, where intangibles like bravery and beauty and imagination are given little value because they can’t be banked - having this re-proved, being reminded of the infinite possibilities embedded in the depths of the human spirit, is nothing short of a gift.

Another, very different day, another music venue, Doran’s, and another telly is broadcasting the homecoming party. The mood is grim. The green-shirt count is as high as ever, but there’s no face paint, no excited clatter of pint glasses and conversation. Wonderfully, the camaraderie of the last few weeks is still present, although now it’s all about wordlessly nodded heads, cadged cigarettes and subdued grumbling about how a parade would have been better.

A parade would have been better: but this thing that we got instead is a bad idea for reasons that, as we watch, are only beginning to become clear. The suspiciously high pitch of the screams in the Phoenix Park make you realise with some horror that the aforementioned sport-is-more-popular-than-music Universal Law Of Pop-Cultural Physics, is, today of all days, ironically and somewhat cruelly suspended. The Irish side have the misfortune of having to take the stage (and in much less flashy matching suits) after the Official Suppliers Of Pop To World Cup 2002 leave it, and thus are playing from a much more extreme underdog position here today than they ever were in Japan or Korea. Joe Duffy does not precisely work to address the imbalance: what we are witnessing is closer to the sporting equivalent of Thom Yorke being interviewed by the Boyfriend Tips Editor of Mizz! magazine. The crowd response, suitably enough, is something that can be best summed up by the word “ROBBIEEEEEE!”

That’s when you realise that no kind of party in the park would have done. What we wanted, and what they wanted as it turns out, was this: no interviews, no opening pop juggernauts, no “What do you think of the supporters,” as if our accomplishments are what we’re here to celebrate - just the team and the fans cheering at each other like maniacs, bouncing mutual love and pride back and forth through the green-and-gold strewn streets of the capital. Aside from being well-deserved, it would have been our last chance to celebrate this new, passionate, vital Ireland the boys in green have unwittingly created in us these last few weeks, and to thank them for it, before we disband and return to the nation’s normal mid-grey preoccupations, to cities once again unshared, to lives individually, not collectively, lived. Our last chance, that is, until 2004. In the meantime, we’ll retreat to our smaller sub-groups and cultural mini-tribes, and go back to our beloved primary obsessions and usual sources of inspiration, back to our first loves. That is, we’ll return to the music venues to actually watch music.

Epilogue. Dame Street, Dublin. On the way to the Music Centre, earlier that day. Ireland v Saudi has just begun: not quite eight minutes in. The familiar crowd noise of a match blares out from the pubs and the cafes, the old Phoenix Perk and the Mercantile. One of those tourist Viking-ship buses, loaded with schoolkids and swathed with tricolour pennants, dominates a thoroughfare surprisingly logged with traffic. Suddenly, there is a tremendous, almighty roar: it’s as if someone has simultaneously turned the volume up of every television in Dublin. Someone has scored and in the quarter second afterward, traffic stops dead and pedestrians freeze, whirl about, sizing up instantaneously where the nearest television is, and realising they don’t have time to get to one, whip around and around, panicked: a goal, but whose? Whose? Another quarter second passes and the crowd noise turns into an unmistakeable full-throated shriek of utter exultation that seems to come from every direction: this is what it sounds like when an entire city goes completely spare at once. Ours. It’s us. IT’S US. YEEAAAAHH! Car horns honk, pedestrians jump up and down, bellow their heads off, throw their arms around each other and the kids on the duck boat go mad, screaming hilariously, a hundred smallish arms flailing out windows with tricolours. Madness. We’ll miss this. Ole, ole ole ole.