Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch Page B

stand up, mad with anticipation and since I was
only a child, my view would be entirely blocked. I could only listen, either for the orgasmic roar or the sigh of disappointment. So I never saw Ireland scoring a goal, but I heard them scoring a
few.
    Never enough, it seemed.
    Twenty years later, even against a football nation which was clearly in decline, a draw in Hungary would seem reasonable — after all, they were in decline from such heights and we were
rising from such depths, maybe we were just meeting them in the middle.
    It was also somewhat troubling that we had scored no goals in the first three matches of the group, though this could also be rationalised — we had been away from home, against a very good
team, a useful enough team, and Northern Ireland.
    And having played the first three games away, even if we hadn’t been impressive, we were still alive. Normally, at this stage, we would have expected to be dead.
    So there was a sense that the worst was over us, if you discount the lingering spectre of Northern Ireland still waiting for us in the last match of the group — ah, we had many, many miles
to go, on this journey.
    Even the idea of playing the first three matches away from home was a new concept for us, hopefully another example of Jack’s original thinking, which would yield the same success as his
most original thinking of all, which was to play football without actually playing football as such. At least, not as anyone else was playing it in the civilised world.
    We were still not free of this ingrained sense of foreboding, even though we could finish second in the Group and still qualify automatically.
    Assuming that Spain would win the Group and Northern Ireland would get beaten often enough to do them down and Malta would get beaten by everyone, it was effectively between ourselves and
Hungary, the not-so-mighty Magyars.
    Not the most awe-inspiring task.
    Still we feared the worst.
    Still we feared ruin.
    It takes more than just a few good football results to get over that ancient feeling, so we feared all the things we have always feared, until the day that Spain came to Lansdowne.
    I went to that match with George Byrne, the controversial rock journalist. We would later see deep significance in the fact that the last match we had attended together was the final agony of
the Eoin Hand era, a famously wretched 4-1 defeat at home to Denmark in 1985. And we had even missed seeing the Republic’s goal. We were only arriving into the stand at the moment that Frank
Stapleton headed the first goal of the match, early doors.
    The rest would be a débâcle, with the stadium full of mad Danes wearing Viking helmets with horns celebrating the best team they would ever have, bound for the 1986 World Cup in
Mexico while we looked on forlornly, excluded from life’s banquet.
    It was but a small consolation that we hadn’t paid in to that match, because I had been given two free tickets by the PR company putting together the match
programme, who used an article of mine from Hot Press , a piece in the Foul Play column on the fabled RTÉ football commentator Philip Greene. They also gave me
£25, as I recall, along with the two tickets, and we were undoubtedly drinking that money in the International Bar later that evening when the well-known folklorist and professional Dubliner
Éamonn MacThomáis walked in and declared in his usual heart-of-the-rowel style, ‘Ah, Brian Boru was the only fella who could beat them Danes!’
    At that moment, we knew we were in hell, that we were at the point known to alcoholics as rock bottom — and still we had a lot of drinking to do on that night and in the nights to
come.
    ——
    So it seemed meaningful that four years later, in April 1989, George and I were marching on Lansdowne in a much different frame of mind. It might be a portent of the worst kind,
our presence ensuring some similarly nightmarish outcome, or it might be a good omen, a reward for