Back to reality. By now, all the post-mortems have been written, the dust has long since settled on Euro 2012, and all concerned will probably want to forget the entire experience as quickly as possible. I could heed my better half’s advice and just give up football, and devote this fortnight’s space to contemplation of the unfolding All-Ireland series, the imminent Open Championship or the grisly death of Glasgow Rangers. But I can’t let the summer pass without reflecting on the great epic adventure that defined it.
The last time we touched base in this space – four weeks ago, though it seems like a lifetime – Foul Play was still reeling from the solar-plexus blow inflicted by those cunning Croatians, waiting on a 5am flight to Warsaw, and doing my level best to not dwell too deeply on all the horrifying torments we suspected might lie in store against Spain and Italy.
So devastating was that first match that I think it’s fair to say that even then, with two games still to play, we knew in our hearts the game was up. It wasn’t just that we’d lost; we’d been shown up in front of millions as basically unfit to grace the tournament. We had been well aware in advance that Ireland weren’t remotely likely to boss the midfield, carve out heaps of chances or string together too many extended passages of fluent passing play. And though mildly troubling, this awareness really didn’t bother us too much: the assumption appears to have been that Shay or Dunner would bail us out when the going got tough.
Perhaps lured into a false sense of security by a 14-game unbeaten run in the lead-up to the finals (and more specifically by the fact that we’d escaped from Moscow with a point after suffering the mother of all football lessons), a widespread delusion took hold that, somehow, by hook or by crook, all would be all right on the night; that the football gods would smile on us; that you’ll never beat the Irish; that even if those silky foreigners found a way past Shay, the woodwork would come to the rescue. That, at the very least, we would be bloody hard to beat and any goals scored against us would be hard-earned.
To lose then to no less than three horribly soft goals, two of which would almost certainly have been stopped by Shay Given as we once knew him, shattered all those assumptions. The danger of an extended unbeaten run is that you start to think you’re unbeatable, and are more easily persuaded to overlook glaring evidence to the contrary.
Hindsight now suggests that the 180 minutes of our two qualifying jousts with Russia should have served as a serious wake-up call. As it turns out, we could have lost the Moscow game 10-0 and still reached the play-offs; and perhaps it would have been better if we had. The scoreboard never lies, but it can certainly deceive; the 0-0 draw on that occasion effectively camouflaged what was an evisceration of gruesome proportions.
Confronted by Croatia then, the first genuinely good team we’d locked horns with in nine months, all the luck we’d enjoyed in qualifying deserted us. We were rudely reminded very early on that it isn’t against the law for the opposition to score, and things swiftly went from bad to a whole lot worse, the false dawn of St. Ledger’s equaliser notwithstanding. It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say they played us off the park; in truth, they didn’t need to. Our own inadequacies did the job for them more than amply.
Though I’d elected not to bang on about it in print, I had taken note of a worrying decline from Shay’s usual standards of reliability in the 12 months or so prior to the finals, with bloopers against Armenia and Estonia stirring fears that he might no longer be the immense force we’d come to trust so whole-heartedly.
Even so, it was a horrible shock to see his powers atrophy so dramatically, spending much of the tournament doing a convincing impression of one of those comedy Scottish goalkeepers you’d see on an ‘80s episode of The Saint & Greavsie. Not that it would be remotely fair to lay all the blame at his door, with the entire back four being shown up horribly, again and again, most notably the drastically limited Stephen Ward at full-back.
I don’t think I’ve ever entered an Ireland match with less hope in my heart than I did in the run-up to the Spanish encounter. And yet, I awoke on the morning of the match in an unfamiliar room in Gdansk’s docklands with an extraordinarily heightened sense that this day was bigger than any Christmas ever experienced as a kid: schoolkids were chattering away in Polish outside the window, I’d had a fantastically vivid dream of teaching Spain’s array of world-beaters how to play Gaelic football, and the minutes seemed like hours as the clock ticked down towards an occasion so immensely huge as to defy description.
Obviously, the excitement co-existed with an unspeakably deep sense of foreboding that the match itself would not provide much cause to celebrate. And sure enough, the worst came to pass, spectacularly so. The breathtakingly brilliant nature of Spain’s subsequent coronation as champions may be some consolation, but you couldn’t possibly make a case that we did ourselves justice. It was the equivalent of descending the staircase on Christmas morning and being brutally beaten up by Santa Claus himself; the occasion, awaited so eagerly for so long, was one of pure unremitting torment.
Did the fans disgrace themselves, as has been widely implied, by reacting so good-naturedly to such an out-and-out humiliation? On balance, you’d have to say that getting obscenely drunk and singing and dancing all night long is far more admirable behaviour than getting obscenely drunk and smashing up other people’s city centres in rage.
Our Polish hosts appeared to adore us, and there was general bewilderment at the sheer good humour of the Irish fans in the face of appalling travails on the field of play. Nonetheless, it irritated me a little to see so many lads plainly ‘here for the beer’ and visibly unconcerned by losing 4-0. There came a point when I realised I could happily live without ever hearing another verse of ‘Stand Up For The Boys In Green’ or ‘Fields Of Athenry’, and by the fifth day of the trip, myself and my two travelling companions (Mrs. Foul Play, perhaps wisely, stayed at home) were basically going out of our way to avoid anywhere that had too many green shirts on display.
The unimaginable horror of the football served up by Trapattoni’s men has begged the question of whether, in retrospect, it would have been preferable to fail to qualify for the Euros in the first place.
In truth, while not wishing to downplay my extreme heartache at the football part of the trip, I’ll always be glad I went: I discovered the wonders of three enchanting cities I would otherwise have been highly unlikely to ever visit, I met some extremely sweet people whose help and hospitality was a great comfort, and overall, I’d have to take issue with those who state that the Irish fans ‘made great sacrifices’ to be present. In all honesty, how much of a sacrifice is it to treat yourself to two weeks on the rampage in Poland?
Anyway. It’s all over now, and all that remains is to hold onto the memories and blank out the football. Meanwhile, the countdown to the World Cup has already begun. Kazakhstan, here we come...