Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch Page A

arrange the
tournament so that Paddy gets all that Irish-American support. We were ‘the best supporters in the world’, after all, so it wasn’t just that they liked us — that was a given
— hell, they needed us.
    So it was utterly inexplicable, and bordering on the perverse, to discover that we were just thrown into the draw along with all the other countries, and that we would be forced to play in
frigging Orlando, in the blazing heat, against Mexico. You would almost think that we were just another team, that we were not the most-liked. And as for respect, you would have more respect for a
dog than to be dragging him from New York to Orlando and back again — yes, the Irish did get to play in New York, in front of their own people, but that could also be construed as a gift to
the Italians, so it didn’t count. It was down to the hot-house of Orlando and back again to New York for the third match against Norway.
    You would hardly wish such a thing on someone you hated, let alone on the best supporters in the world.
    Mind you, we would have gratefully accepted all these perceived slights, and a lot more, after the slaughter in Seville back at the end of 1988.
    To maintain at least some of the morale that we had gained in Germany, we could reflect on the undoubted fact that in Seville, we had been without four very important players — Houghton,
Sheedy, Whelan and McGrath.
    We had also given Steve Staunton his first cap, with Kevin Moran in front of him in midfield and David O’Leary beside him at centre-half — yes, Jack was desperate enough on the
night, to play O’Leary — all these things, by any standard, constituted a perfectly valid excuse.
    So we still had hope.
    But that, too, is a dangerous place for Paddy. We have sat looking into enough glasses of whiskey to know that hope is never too far away from ruin, in the order of things. Hope and ruin, the
old reliables.
    Indeed the fact that the group also contained Northern Ireland seemed to exacerbate this sense that everything was still in the balance, that it could all go either way. We had no consciousness
of anything but bad things emanating from our relationship with Northern Ireland and we assumed that this would be no different.
    Appropriately, after three games in the group, we had only two points, one of them garnered against Norn Iron in a match in Windsor Park which most of us have forgotten entirely — every
aspect of it, down to the last detail, has been entirely expunged from our memories.
    Most people to whom I have spoken still have vivid and horrendous recollections of the match in Windsor Park in 1993 which sent the Republic to the 1994 World Cup, but in the case of the
scoreless draw back in 1988, when there was still a war going on, denial set in almost immediately, leading quickly to total amnesia.
    There was also a scoreless draw with Hungary, in Budapest, in March 1989, which again raised the issue of our self-esteem. Because despite having supped the fine wine of Euro 88, we could not
see ourselves as the sort of people who might be disappointed with one point instead of three. After all, Hungary, as the Mighty Magyars back in the 1950s, had featured in one of the Ten Great
England Defeats. So we would naturally have a healthy respect for them. Or perhaps an unhealthy respect: for sure, they weren’t the Mighty Magyars any more, but from where we were looking,
they still looked mighty enough.
    Hungary was the first international team I ever saw in the flesh, playing at Dalymount on a Sunday afternoon back in the late 1960s. I recall that the stars of Hungarian football at that time
were Ferenc Bene and Florian Albert, who exuded class, and that they won with a late goal, as was only to be expected. In general, they seemed to be much, much better at football than we were.
    My memories of such matches are clouded by the fact that I never saw Ireland scoring a goal. When it looked like they might score, everyone would