Slipping Into Darkness

The sequence has been burned into the memory in a way that may be difficult ever to erase. Three minutes of normal time to go. The cross coming in from the right hand touchline. What they call a nothing ball, far too close to the keeper to cause any anxiety. Ninety nine times out of a hundred even a half decent amateur league No.1 would stretch up and pluck it from the sky. But if you were the superstitious type, you’d say that what happened next was written in the stars.

Peter Cech stepped forward. The best goalkeeper in the world. That’s what everyone said just two years ago. Still up there or thereabouts, most pundits would have agreed. No better man. Easy for him. Reached uuuup…
The horror. The horror.
All in an instant. Made contact. Ball falling now. A figure in red: the colours of the Czech Republic, but also of their opponents Turkey. Tonight Cech’s team-mates are wearing white. It’s the Turkish No.8, Nihat Kahveci, just there, exactly where he needs to be under Peter Cech. Ball hitting the floor. On the bounce, Nihat rakes it towards the goal. The net shimmers. We are witnessing history in the making.
Step back. Freeze the frame. Watch it in slow motion now. A nothing ball. Should have been caught. Could have been punched away. Even fluffed, it needn’t have fallen on that precise foot of grass that suited Nihat perfectly. But it happened the way it happened. This is the story that was waiting to be told. A hero laid low. Everything in that moment falling so precisely against Cech, against the Czechs, the script couldn’t have been constructed in a more punctuation-perfectly hostile way. Two all.
And then a long ball. A suspicion of offside. Only Peter Cech between Nihat and a third Turkish goal. Time for a Redemption Song from Cech, perhaps. No. Instead a finish so sweet diabetics had to hide their heads and bolt for cover. Off the underside of the bar and in.
Think of the physics of it. In this kind of equation every millimetre counts: power, angle, speed, spin, curve, arc, impact – and, finally, the precise deflection at which the slightly dis-formed sphere comes off the bar, down and over the line. Measure that suckers!
How remarkable to have been Turkish in that moment! “Amazing. Brilliant,” one friend from beyond the Euphrates texted, a master of understatement.
But amid the Turkish jubilation, standing there, the lonely figure of Peter Cech, looking like a ghost. An entire career spent working towards this moment: the moment when his greatness would abandon him.

Europe: what does it mean to you? A football championship embracing all of the nations, down to little San Marino and Andorra? A festival of soccer in which free-flowing football finally gets a chance to flourish? A place of which Turkey should really feel itself a part?
Or what it must have felt like to Peter Cech in those dramatic moments when it all went horribly wrong: a graveyard of dreams? I couldn’t help thinking of the phrase as the results of the referendum on the Lisbon treaty came in. There was Brian Cowen looking disconsolate: not in the Peter Cech league quite, but a wounded man all the same. What did this say about his capacity to lead?
Whatever side of the argument you were leaning towards, it was clear that the Yes side made a hames of the whole thing. But that was only part of the story. Bill Clinton famously said it: “It’s the economy stupid.” More than anything that’s what did for the treaty on this occasion. With the boom years in Ireland looking increasingly like the mirage history is likely to show them to be, people are feeling spooked. They thought they were ar mhuin na muiche, or at least a goodly proportion of them did. Now they’re wondering if they’ll be in a job in six months time. And if they’ll be able to pay the mortgage that keeps going up. And up...
So they took the conservative option. If there’s nothing in this for us, why play ball? Things are bad enough as they stand. Why risk making it worse? What we have we hold. Of course the vote won’t stop the banks hiking up the interest rates. Indeed if anything it’ll encourage them. Create uncertainty and the banks screw you. It’s an iron law.
The establishment failed miserably to get any kind of a campaign together. In fact just how absurdly off the pace they were is reflected in the fact that the Referendum Commission itself only got it together to organise a tender for their advertising and PR campaign as late as February 2008. The contract was only awarded on May 9 – just over a month before polling day. How? Why? It’s the kind of incompetence over which, in a different country, heads might roll. The date may not have been fixed, but the Commission knew that a referendum was coming. Why didn’t they have their campaign in place months ago, with a proviso that if a period of a year passed they might have to put it out to tender again. The politicians may have fucked up badly, but the Commissions performance was disgraceful.
And so, as the football played gloriously on, there was the sight of the big shots converging on Brussels to decide what to do next…
While the politicians try to figure out how to move forward, one thing is worth remembering. The European Union arose out of the disastrous conflict that engulfed Europe and then the world in 1940. There may be a lot wrong with the system and how it works, it may be big and unwieldy and remote, but this much is certain: it is the outcome of one of the greatest peace projects in the history of the world, perhaps the greatest. And the prosperity which Ireland has been enjoying over the past decade – flawed as it undoubtedly is in so many respects – is entirely a result of our involvement in the European project.
Sometimes, it is easy to forget just how much we take for granted. Northern Ireland has just finished what people call the Long War, in which thousands of civilians died. In the 1990s the Balkans erupted in a ferociously bloody conflict, the likes of which we had scarcely believed possible among European countries. There are rumblings still in the Basque region, where another terrorist campaign is being waged. Step back a little further and Spain and Portugal were Roman Catholic fascists dictatorships.
I know that there are good, intelligent and progressive forces who voted ‘no’ for sound ideological reasons, but it says something nonetheless that the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland is being greeted as a victory by fascists and reactionaries all over Europe. It has the potential to stir up a fresh outburst of xenophobic nationalism all across the continent. In the mix, somewhere – and I believe it was a determining factor in the Irish vote – is the nucleus of a poisonous anti-immigrant feeling.
It is too early to say, but we need to remain aware of one thing at all times: it would be foolhardy for anyone in Europe, including the Irish people, to rely on the presumption of peace. It is possible to go backwards into the future. Strip away the veneer, and – as we know far too appallingly well from the North – savagery on a colossal scale can be unleashed.
It is for this reason, more than any other, that narrow, sectional interests and concerns should always take second place to the spirit of integration and of shared hope that inspired and shaped the union in the first place. Where we go from here remains to be seen, but we desperately need to ensure that we do not all end up looking as haunted as Peter Cech – but for reasons that have far greater importance and resonance than any football tournament, no matter how dramatic…