Matters of Life & Death

And so, the worst came to pass. Five points up on Cork with twenty minutes left in an All-Ireland semi-final, the giddy delirium co-existed with a nagging unease, which swiftly gave way to a sudden frightening chill, a sense that this one might slip away from Dublin. It seems the players — who, until that point, had been downright heroic — also felt themselves engulfed by the same sense of dread.

As Pat Gilroy pointed out, they gave it everything they had — for 50-odd minutes. The inescapable reality is that they then threw it all away in a blind panic — conceding a daft penalty, a few unforgivably soft frees, and perpetrating some insanely careless shooting at the other end. Sports psychologists refer to this phenomenon as ‘fear of success’. Oft-cited examples include Newcastle’s agonising implosion from an unassailable position under Kevin Keegan in 1996, Richard Pitman’s nag Crisp being inexorably reeled in by Red Rum in the ‘73 National, and Jean Van de Velde’s psychotic meltdown on Carnoustie’s 18th hole in 1999.
The legendary fight trainer Cus d’Amato (mentor to Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson) held it as an article of faith that a fighter isn’t merely knocked out; he wants to be knocked out, his willpower fails him, he questions whether he’s truly worthy. He succumbs to The Fear.
By now, Dublin carry so much crippling psychological baggage from years of narrow failure that they appear to have embraced it as their birthright. During the epic 2006 semi-final against Mayo, after a beautiful summer of uninterrupted blue skies and sunshine, we led by eight entire points and it seemed that no force on Earth could stop us – sure enough, that one slipped through our fingers too.
A similar near-miss against Kerry in the ‘07 semi was made bearable by the realisation that, really, Dublin had played out of their skins and they were just that bit better than us. Grisly quarter-final mutilations at the hands of Tyrone (‘08) and Kerry (‘09), however painful, were so thumpingly comprehensive that they left no room for what-ifs. But this one... it’s a great big deep bloody gaping cut to the heart. It was there for the taking, so close you could touch it, and a Final against whoever wins the upcoming Kildare-Down joust would have been perfectly winnable. Dubliners as a species have a highly developed capacity for the melancholic mood, especially after a pint or two of stout, but this was one of those occasions where I think we can be forgiven a spot of introspective wound-licking and an evening of listening to the Lukemeister in sad reflection. It begins to seem as if Dublin will never win the All-Ireland again: after a stunningly turbulent summer which embraced both the sublime and the ridiculous, it’s all over, we’re all another year older, and the prize is no closer now than it was in May. But we know we’ll be back for more.
Life will go on, if only because it must. Three imminent events serve to focus the mind: on the Friday afternoon of Electric Picnic weekend, Ireland must pick up the pieces in their first competitive assignment since the Thierry Henry outrage, a visit to distant Armenia. This, we hope, will warm us up nicely for Andorra’s visit to the spanking-new Lansdowne Road on the Wednesday.
In between, on the Sunday, Tipperary and Kilkenny go nose to nose in the All-Ireland hurling final, a re-enactment of last year’s showpiece, which turned into an out-an-out classic, with Kilkenny eventually prevailing after spending the best part of an hour playing catch-up.
While I’d love to think that this year’s instalment will be similarly gripping, all the evidence points to only one outcome. Do you, dear reader, honestly think for a minute that Kilkenny will fuck up the five-in-a-row bid at this stage? Me neither. True, there’s a strong probability that they may have to do without Henry Shefflin, the greatest hurler of his generation and possibly of all time. True, Tipp’s tails are up, and they’ve improved with every match since being brutalised by Cork on opening day. True, the laws of Newtonian physics dictate that Kilkenny’s dominance will have to come to an end some day, whether it’s in 2010, 2020 or 2050. (There is a Scottish shinty team called Kingussie who pulled off the feat of winning 20 national championships in a row: I’ve no doubt that Brian Cody knows all about them and has every intention of emulating their achievement, if not surpassing it.)
On the big day, while Tipp will sweat every last drop, it won’t be enough, as the Cats’ steely ferocity and ruthless bloodlust may well shock Tipp rigid and leave the affair effectively wrapped up before half-time. At present, the bookies are offering 4/11 Kilkenny and 11/4 Tipp, which I suspect vastly under-estimates the gulf between the sides.
Bookies are often too cautious with the Cats, and plenty of high-rolling punters have done very well out of this in recent years. In fact, I think the price of even-money for Kilkenny to overcome a four-point handicap is one of the bargains of the century. I don’t doubt they’ll manage it, and I don’t think it’ll take them 70 minutes or even 35. You have been advised.
And what of Trapattoni and the Green Army, as we set out to conquer Europe and definitively prove once and for all that we are the pre-eminent footballing force on the planet and would surely have won the World Cup if it hadn’t been for a certain ex-Gunner and an unsighted referee? Well, that hypothesis will certainly start to look a little shaky if we fail to master the Armenians, and it will be blown to smithereens if we can’t eke out some sort of victory at home to Andorra, whose record of zero points from their last 24 competitive internationals suggests that perhaps they are lacking in one or two key areas.
The Armenia gig is trickier. Our record away from home in the last decade-and-a-half is lamentable, though there were definite signs during the last campaign that this was being rectified (our best displays were in Bari, Sofia and Paris). The Armenians are an unknown quantity: I am aware that the Turks gave them a bit of a hard time in the early 20th century, that the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh remains fiercely disputed, and that chess genius Garry Kasparov, tennis player David Nalbandian and idiot-celebrity Kim Kardashian can trace their lineage to the motherland. I also know that it’s on a geographical fault-line that renders the place prone to catastrophic earthquakes, one of which hopefully won’t erupt at the precise moment that we’re playing them in Yerevan. As for the football team, I’m largely in the dark about them.
Their results, of course, are there for all to see, and they paint a mostly grim picture (four points from ten games in the World Cup qualifiers). They lost twice to the Turks in matches that may have carried an intimidating historical resonance, took one point from two games against the none-too-mighty Estonians, claimed the scalp of Belgium – not quite the scalp it would once have been – and gave the Spaniards a seriously hard time in Yerevan, eventually succumbing 2-1.
If they’re capable of giving Spain a hard time, it’s fair to assume that they’re almost certainly capable of making us sweat if we catch them on one of their better days. In 2007’s Euro qualifiers, they beat Poland (courtesy of a goal by the wonderfully-named Hamlet Mkhitaryan) and held Portugal and Serbia to draws, which hints that they have to be respected as a not insubstantial proposition on their own turf.
The truth is that a draw may not be the end of the world, though it would be nice to think that they’ll be left mesmerised by our bewitching pace, trickery, incisive passing and lethal ruthlessness in front of goal. A 3-0 or 4-1 victory would signal a serious statement of intent as the continent begins to quake before the might of Messrs. Foley, Green and Fahey. But needless to say, I’d bite your big toe off for an ugly 1-0 win.
As for Andorra, I’d certainly expect to see a few goals being rattled in, and I trust they will all be at the Andorrans’ end, though their last visit to Lansdowne was one of those occasions which give the lie to Pele’s definition of ‘the beautiful game’, and for a couple of minutes, the scoreline read ‘IRELAND 0 ANDORRA 1’. We may not have improved significantly since then (in fact, we were in pretty rude health in 2001, with more top-level operators than we have at present) but, on all known evidence, neither have they.
Fingers crossed...