STOP THE TOMMY ROT

AN RTE radio reporter had the temerity to ask Jackie Charlton whether he thought that four goals were enough against Liechtenstein, a place of comparable size to a region of Tallaght.

Jack was characteristically rude, and said, “how many do you want?”. It was a remark which had a subtext of “stupid fuckin’ hack don’t know nothing about nothing”.

In fact, this was a totally legitimate question, and if Charlton was not the braggart that he is, he would have realised that the correct answer was, “no, four goals were not enough against a team of this stature. I think we made a few basic errors.”

When he barked “how many do you want?” then the obvious answer was “twelve, even fourteen would have been realistic”.

But the reporter was not naive – or brave? – enough to confront Charlton with the reality of his foolishness. He left it.

Twelve goals against Liechtenstein would have been a deeply modest proposal. It is important to remember that this is the worst international team in the world. A team of such outrageous fucking awfulness as to defy the sheer lunacy that they should be on the same pitch, in the same country, in the same continent, as the millionaire professionals against whom they were pitted, like stuck pigs.

Niall Quinn strained a point by saying that they were “very fit lads”.

Niall is blameless in this shambles, because he played his usual blinder, in spite of the fact that the sum total of his colleagues’ endeavours was to hoof the ball in his general direction, where three or four fit lads would surround him and do their best to choke any future developments.

Very fit lads they may be, but there was a fatal flaw in their make-up as a football team, and this was the fact that they were useless at playing football.

Dear God, they were shite. (I like the sound of this, Declan – Ed.) They were making errors which I, during my period at the cutting edge of Hot Press Munchengladbach 1891 extraordinary footballing endeavours would have abominated. They were doing things that I used to roar at George Byrne about, and vice versa.

It is important to realise what a fucking amazingly bad side Liechtenstein are, and then to place this numbingly stupid performance of the Republic’s in its proper context.

Given the crass, insensitive, arrogant and totally fucking disgusting decision of those FAI swine (Now we’re steaming – Ed.) to deny us live TV coverage of the match, the least we deserved was a turkey-shoot of the proportions which reason demanded.

We scored twice in the first four minutes. Against that background, to spend the best part of an hour not scoring against the worst team in the world amounts to a national scandal on several fronts.

In a way, the crudity of the FAI’s decision about live transmission reflects the fact that they and their increasingly bizarre supremos are losing touch with certain realities.

High on the madness of it all, the omniscient Jack decided that he wanted to “have another look at Tommy Coyne”. But Jack was in Vienna.

Perhaps he prefers to look at Tommy Coyne while Tommy is in Ireland and he is in Austria. Indeed, perhaps we would all like to do this, in an ideal world. The way things are going, “having another look at Tommy Coyne” could become the sub-title of this impending football tragedy.

He has already seen Tommy Coyne on many occasions, not least during the recent World Cup tournament in the United States. And unless he is suffering from some as-yet-unidentified class of sickness of the mind, he will have gleaned that Tommy is not in the same hemisphere as John Aldridge or even Tony Cascarino – who on the occasion of our joust with Liechtenstein was left languishing in Marseilles in order to save the FAI a thousand pounds.

Aldo has made an art out of scoring heaps of goals against the joke nations, and this occasion might have been invented specifically for him.

Watching him brooding on the bench while his favourite blood-sport ensued, gave an insight into the real meaning of perversity on a grand scale.

Both he and Cascarino are currently scoring goals like there is no tomorrow, and here was a setting in which the contemptible attitude of the FAI regarding TV coverage might have been assuaged to some degree by goals being scored like there is no tomorrow.

With Alan Kelly injured, Charlton couldn’t avoid playing Packie, his favourite playmaker, but even by Packie’s recent standards, he had a stinker of substantial proportions.

It is just no longer acceptable in international football to be hoofing the ball into the great blue yonder in this fashion – particularly facing the worst team in the world. In the context, the magnificent Quinn aside, John Sheridan was the one player attempting to deploy a smidgin of intelligence.

McAteer was reckless, Staunton was playing Gaelic along with Packie, McGoldrick was ridiculous, McLoughlin was ineffectual, Kelly and Irwin never asserted themselves against the ignorance of Packie’s long ball game, Babb was playing it for laughs, and Kernaghan was busy being Kernaghan . . .

The feeling of creeping depression induced by Packie’s unrelenting and hopeless barrage reminded me again of why we lost so badly to Holland in Orlando. I never blamed Packie for his goalkeeping error, I blamed him for the stupidly of hoofing the ball into Holland’s lap until they couldn’t believe their luck, a ‘tactic’ which of course comes courtesy of Manager Jack and his One Big Idea.

While Sheridan and Quinn attempted to impose some wit and wisdom on the proceedings, Norn Iron were picking Austria’s pocket, using their brains; and us losing 4–0 to fucking Liechtenstein with lobotomised football.

Jack was over there. Does this mean that he needs to have another look at Tommy Coyne?