GDANSKING WITH TEARS IN MY EYES

What a year. As the great Persian opiate poet Hassan ibn Sabbah once put it: “Who would be such a fool to trust the universe?”

Okay, I won’t lie. It was a year of unmitigated heartbreak, overshadowed above all else by the meteoric fall (there is such a thing, is there not?) of the Irish football team. This time 12 months ago, basking in the post-Estonia glow of having booked a place at a major finals for the first time in a decade, we were allowing ourselves to think ridiculously grandiose thoughts about conquering Europe.
We hadn’t quite grasped the very real possibility that we would be horribly eviscerated three times and shown up as hopelessly inadequate by rampaging hordes of vastly superior footballers: and if we had privately stopped to think such dire thoughts for so much as half a minute, we were able to quickly dismiss them. A lengthy unbeaten run, involving a remarkably impressive number of clean sheets, had convinced most of us that, whatever happened, we would not be disgraced. Any failure would be a relatively heroic one.
At about 11pm CET on June 14, trudging miserably alongside the tram-tracks leading from the PGE Arena to Gdansk’s city centre with hordes of other speechless, shattered and stupefied Irishmen in the aftermath of the Spanish inquisition, I can’t have been the only one who thought of Schindler’s List and the long road to Auschwitz (which is also, I believe, in Poland). Obviously in the great scheme of human suffering, it is obscene to equate a football tournament with the organised extermination of millions of men, women and children, but you get the general drift.
In my youth, I have endured one or two soul-shattering romantic rejections and it’s safe to say that Euro 2012 was every bit as painful. Certain similarities are quite striking: the heady mixture of sheer excitement and trepidation invested in the outcome, mingled with a certain powerlessness and a realisation that you’re not exactly in full control of your own destiny. The ‘only a game’ myth has never seemed less accurate. As Shankly once said, football is not a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that. I don’t think he was joking.
At this point, the glass-half-full side of Foul Play’s psyche feels duty-bound to intervene and reflect on what a wondrous thing it was to have actually qualified for the whole shebang in the first place, how priceless those six months of feverish anticipation felt, how spectacularly enchanting the three cities I visited were in their various ways, how many lifelong memories of mad midsummer nights ensued, and how much worse it must have been for those watching at home. And now, there’s also the unspoken fear that we might never get to participate in such an event again. If the summer’s performances were shambolic, the turn of events since then has felt apocalyptic.
Dousing the flames of terror for a while, a glance at the World Cup qualifying table reveals that, with a tally of six points from three games, and potentially treacherous assignments in Kazakhstan and the Faroes having been cleared, Ireland are theoretically in no worse a position to qualify for the global showpiece than was the case two years ago (if you recall, our Euros campaign had not begun all that auspiciously, with Russia razing us to the ground in Dublin). And yet, the sense of utter hopelessness enveloping the team right now is more pronounced than at any time during the lowest ebb of the Eoin Hand and Steve Staunton years. The memory of Germany’s recent visit, where a 6-1 scoreline didn’t come close to conveying the monstrous extent of Ireland’s inferiority, is one that might take many centuries to exorcise.
In a sane world, it ought to have been unthinkable that the manager who presided over such a sequence of catastrophic setbacks was allowed to keep his job, but nobody ever said the world was sane. The FAI’s recent vote of confidence in the 73-year-old fossil (‘dinosaur’ is now far too kind a way of putting it) was very obviously motivated more by financial considerations than footballing ones, but the monumental short-sightedness of the decision still beggars belief. Our last friendly outing, a tame 1-0 surrender at home to the less than stellar Greeks in front of yawning seats at a half-empty Aviva, may have been exactly what Leonard Cohen had in mind when he wrote the line, “I have seen the future brother, and it is murder.”
You may have gathered by this point that optimism is not exactly coursing through Foul Play’s veins at this present point in time, and I am looking forward to developments in 2013 with something short of hope in my heart. Still, the cause is not yet defeated, the road to Brazil remains open and there is plenty of football left to be played, though ‘football’ would probably not be the most accurate description of the stuff Ireland have been serving up recently.
Stockholm, here we come. Zlatan Ibrahimovic must be licking his lips.