Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch

accept. Because it is, after all, the truth.
    So the slaughter in Seville, at one level, felt a bit like nature taking its course. We could live with that, as we have always lived with it. And maybe we felt we needed to be reminded of the
eternal verities, to submit ourselves to the tyranny of fact.
    At Euro 88, we had played three, won one, drawn one and lost one.
    We had not qualified from the group. It was a breakthrough just to be able to compete, but there was another breakthrough which had eluded us. Perhaps because, for all our undoubted charms, we
just weren’t good enough at football.
    Yes, we had beaten England, but they had battered us, and on another day they would have scored. Yes, we had played something that looked remarkably like football against the USSR , but high on the improbability of it all, we hadn’t got the result. And they, with their innate Soviet know-how and cunning, had qualified. Not us. And while that late goal
in Gelsenkirschen had made us curse the baleful gods, it hadn’t fooled us into thinking that we were actually as good as Holland, either on that day, or on any other day.
    So we were in a new place in the aftermath of Euro 88, an exciting place but a dangerous place nonetheless for Paddy.
    Having established that everyone liked us, was it possible that they might also come to respect us?
    ——
    It is one of our great character defects, this desperate desire to be liked.
    ‘What do you think of us?’, we openly ask, when foreigners come to Ireland, and they seem to understand that we don’t really want an honest answer. We don’t really want
them to provide us with a detailed assessment of our good points and our bad points, we just want them to say, ‘You’re great’.
    Which they usually do, the way that you’d humour a child. We know they’re only telling us what we want to hear, but we don’t mind that. And we don’t exactly respect
ourselves for this, but then we are not asking to be respected. We are only asking to be liked.
    At Euro 88, we had been liked. At least we assumed we had been liked and very well liked, because we had done everything in our power to achieve this happy state. We had behaved ourselves so
well, we had brought scenes of great joy to the terraces, with our green wigs and our bodhráns and our gas characters; we had been able to hold our drink.
    At least that’s how we saw it, so we trusted that’s how everyone else saw it. Certainly a few English broadsheets weighed in with their usual generosity towards us and their loathing
of their own kind, the hooligans who can’t behave themselves like good old Paddy.
    So there was some sort of official confirmation that we had been liked. So great was our need in this regard, we found it hard to imagine that the citizens of other countries might have gone
through that tournament without thinking much about Paddy at all — that they might indeed go through their entire lives without thinking about the Irish, let alone forming a view as to our
likeability, until they are asked a direct question — do you like us? — to which there can only be the one answer.
    There would be a particularly poignant example of this acute self-consciousness towards the end of the Charlton years, when we had qualified for the 1994 World Cup and there was much speculation
about the possible venues for the Republic’s matches. It was widely suggested by well-respected commentators (well-liked at any rate) that the Irish were so popular all around the world, and
especially in America, that they were bound to end up playing in one of the great Irish-American cities such as Chicago or Boston.
    Essentially, it was being proposed that FIFA , the football’s world governing body, would rig the draw for our benefit because we’re such great fellows and
they like us so much. In our imagination, we could see the top brass of FIFA addressing this matter of overwhelming importance, discussing at length how best to