Pardew must be brave if Magpies are to continue flying high

Originally published on various websites in early September, I forgot to post it here.

Prior to Newcastle’s recent meeting with Aston Villa, Alan Pardew warned his misfiring front pair, Demba Ba and Papiss Cissé, that their places in the Magpies’ starting XI were far from assured – despite the apparent dearth of viable alternatives that Pardew has at his disposal.

The comment was probably designed as a motivational rallying-call to reignite the spark that has been so sorely lacking in the duo since pre-season training started in July. In stark contrast with last season’s superb performances, Cissé and Ba have contributed one solitary goal between them so far this term and, far more worryingly, have looked blunt, listless and off the pace. Pardew now needs to show that his threat was not an empty one.

Perhaps their complacency is to be expected given that Newcastle are currently bereft of any other attacking options. “There’s only two Ameobis!”, has become a favourite chant of the St James’ Park faithful since Sammy joined his brother Shola in the first team squad in early 2011 but fans and staff alike are probably thankful for that at the moment given that the only fitting use of the word ‘prolific’ in any sentence involving the pair would be in describing their respective injury
records.

To be fair to Shola, he has often proven to be an able understudy in times of need but his presence in the dressing room is unlikely to have Ba and Cissé quaking in their boots, while Sammy is still far too young and inexperienced to be called upon in a game of high stakes.

While neither really set the world alight, both Leon Best and Peter Lovenkrands were reliable professionals with international experience who could do a job when required and their respective departures during the summer have left Newcastle dangerously short up front. Forgotten men Nile Ranger and Xisco remain on the club’s books but are about as likely to feature for the first team again as Peter Beardsley is.

Indeed, the only non-Senegalese striker to appear for Pardew’s side so far this season has been the 17-year-old academy prospect Adam Campbell who made his debut against Atromitos as a makeshift Newcastle side limped to a 1-1 draw in Athens on their way to sealing qualification for the Europa League group stages. Those in the know are making all the right noises – praising Campbell’s ability and attitude and tentatively speculating about whether he will prove to be the North East’s next
great footballing luminary. However, one is inclined to wonder whether his involvement in the first team set-up has been fast-tracked out of necessity.

One gets the feeling that this summer presented Newcastle with the perfect opportunity to build on last season’s achievements and to consolidate their position as a ‘Top 6’ club by adding reinforcements to what is already a strong and cohesive team. Curiously, however, Newcastle chose not to invest in another striker during the transfer window – a move that one hopes will not come back to haunt them in the coming months; defeating Atromitos has added a further six European
fixtures to the 20 league games scheduled between the season’s start and the re-opening of the transfer window in January.

The possible return of Andy Carroll was an intriguing prospect but one always assumed that Liverpool would sooner keep him warming their bench than admit defeat and allow him to return to the North East for a fraction of the £35 million that they forked out to prise him away from Tyneside in the first place.

Newcastle have a growing reputation for keeping transfer targets under wraps until they’re signed, sealed and delivered and this, coupled with the excellent work that Head Scout Graham Carr has done since joining the club in 2010, has given fans a new-found confidence in the club hierarchy’s ability to deliver in their time of need. Selling the likes of Carroll, Barton, Nolan and Enrique was seen as a suicidal move at the time, yet Newcastle stuck to their guns, ushered their replacements in
with little fanfare (and modest transfer fees) and have since gone from strength to strength – all the while playing a more free-flowing and expansive brand of football than has been seen at St James’ Park since Bobby Robson’s charges were genuine title challengers in the early 2000s.

All of this only serves to make the decision not to bolster their limited attacking options all the more baffling. Ba and Cissé were both unstoppable on their day last season but, sadly, Ba’s outstanding early contribution to Newcastle’s cause petered out after Cissé’s arrival and a 2-1 victory over Aston Villa in early February was the only time that the pair ever scored in the same match. As the season wore on, Ba was shoe-horned into an unfamiliar position on the left side of a front three in a
formation that allowed Hatem Ben Arfa to come into the fold and paved the way for Cissé to blaze his trail and hit 13 goals in his 14 league appearances last term.

While Cissé and Ba stroll around looking lost and lethargic, making up for lost time and quickly becoming the club’s new talisman is the magnificent Hatem Ben Arfa, who has finally made the successful transition from bit-part luxury player to indispensable match-winning maverick. He embodies the boldness, craft and cunning that Newcastle fans have long cherished – from the great Jackie Milburn through to the tempestuous Laurent Robert via Malcolm Macdonald, Kevin Keegan, Peter Beardsley, Paul Gascoigne, Chris Waddle and countless other fleet-footed magicians.

The terrible injury Ben Arfa suffered when he clashed with Nigel De Jong in a game against Man City in October 2010 kept him sidelined until the summer of 2011, when an ankle injury delayed his anticipated return until the new season was well underway. Even then his involvement in the first team was fleeting as Pardew was reluctant to entrust him with a starting berth, believing that he didn’t work hard enough for the team. He was used largely as an impact sub but gradually started to
win Pardew over with his improved work-rate and appetite for the ‘ugly’ side of the game, whilst still displaying his own brand of Messi-esque wizardry by conjuring up sublime solo goals against Fulham, Blackburn and Bolton to name but three.

Newcastle have been disappointingly stagnant and toothless so far this season – “a ghost of a trace of a pale imitation” of their former selves, as the song says – and Ben Arfa has been the only stellar performer in an oddly one-dimensional and unimaginative side.

Pardew believes that mischief-making agents are partly to blame for Newcastle’s slow start with Yohan Cabaye, in particular, and possibly Ba, Cissé and Cheick Tiote all believed to have had their heads turned by enquiries from Champions’ League clubs in England and beyond. There may be an element of truth in what Pardew says but all of that is out of his control and there is nothing he can do about it now; what’s done is done. More importantly, however, what has been said has been
said and Pardew has painted himself into a corner.

The only way out now is for him to deliver on his promise and to take the bold decision to dispense with the static and lacklustre 4-4-2 that Newcastle have stubbornly tried to make work and, accordingly, to relegate one of his big hitters to the bench and to wholeheartedly embrace the more fluid 4-3-3 (or, at least, some derivative thereof) that brought so much success last season.

An outsider looking in may see dropping an enormously talented – though, admittedly, goal-shy – striker as a negative move. The truth is quite the opposite. Ba and Cissé haven’t ever complemented each other to great effect for club or country and there is a growing belief that they are too similar to prosper in unison. Placing them in direct competition with one another for the central striking role may just shake them out of their lethargy and reinvigorate them, while simultaneously allowing Pardew to remind everybody that he is in control and is not afraid to make big decisions.

There is a sneaking suspicion in some quarters that a leopard can never change its spots and that this team are merely a reflection of their manager; over-confident, smug and believing their own hype after confounding all their critics last time out and finishing the season in a vertiginous 5th place. To be fair to Pardew, however, he has handled himself impeccably since being installed as manager in December 2010 against a backdrop of bewilderment and incredulity. Replacing somebody as popular as Chris Hughton was always going to be a tough task and he has passed the test with flying colours; fine-tuning a functional side and gradually encouraging them to play with more flair and flamboyance.

Having under-performed at Charlton and then been sacked by Southampton in August 2010, Pardew seems to have learned from his mistakes. He cuts a more humble and well-rounded figure since his return to top-flight management. He remains self-assured and still possesses a steely determination but the brash and flashy over-confidence that seemed to characterise him in his days as manager of West Ham has been replaced with a quiet poise and a dignified belief in his own ability.

Pardew did a tremendous job last season as evinced by the fact that he won both the ‘Premier League Manager of the Season’ and the ‘LMA Manager of the Year’ awards. Building on that remarkable achievement will take some doing but the ball is now in Pardew’s court. Sticking with Plan A in the hope that the glories of last season can be replicated is a dangerous ploy, while ‘fixing’ something that many people may not necessarily see as being broken is sure to raise a few eyebrows too…

Pardew had nothing to lose when he arrived at St James’ Park precisely because he had nothing; he was a forgotten man and expectations were non-existent. Now, however, he has it all and therein lies the problem.

Foxy Lady

I've been tidying out my room and throwing out lots of old crap this week. I found this little gem. It's an essay I wrote in school when I was 17. We had to write a short story based on the image below. It's a little weird and melodramatic but I was vaguely impressed reading back over it.

My mother died when I was 15 years old. All these years later I can still recall every minute of her funeral. It was a relatively small affair – around one hundred people.

The majority of these people were familiar faces: aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours and so on. However, to my surprise, when it came to the time for tributes and words of praise, nobody volunteered to voice their affection for my recently-departed mother. So, being a caring son, I stood up, dusted off my crisp black suit and headed for the altar. The sound of silence was deafening and each of the one hundred mourners looked at me like I was demented. (Of course, if I was demented it was hardly surprising, given my mother’s mental state).

Addressing the congregation, I proceeded to tell them about my mother’s life. The bored faces suddenly became interested and they stared and listened intently. It was almost as if they were watching the words leave my lips – and leave my lips they did. I did a lot of talking. I had to. Everybody in that vast, echoing church had been hurt by my beloved mother in some way. Not least of all me – but I had learned to cope down through the years.

I spoke at length about the frailty of the human mind and, indeed, the frailty of humankind. My mother was a manic depressive. She used to say that she had a “car crash personality” – unfortunately this “car crash” managed to ruin many lives. Families had been torn apart, little children had been scared half to death and buckets of tears had been cried as a result of my mother’s erratic behaviour.

After my father left, my mother sought solace in other men. This kept her happy for a time but it seemed that the men came and went with the seasons. Frustration then crept in and she went through dozens of periods of bleak depression. However, there were other times when a letter from her sister in America or a kind word from a stranger would bring a smile to her face. The smile would gradually fade away as the awful reality of her life would creep up on her and drag her down into the doldrums once more. For every high there was a low twice as bad and, unfortunately, there were plenty of highs.

While I was making my heartfelt speech, my eyes met with those of several of the congregation. Their faces were blank, dull and familiar. All of these faces had knocked on our front door at some time or another to give my mother a piece of their mind. There were also some kind, understanding people who spoke to my mother with the intention of providing her with some peace of mind. One such person was Frank, the butcher. He had incurred the wrath of my mother several times and he understood her better than most.

Frank was my mother’s last partner prior to her untimely passing. At 45, he was the same age as her and, being a man who cut up dead animals for a living, he was used to plenty of bloodshed. He was more than a match for my mother and she knew it. That’s why she liked him.

Indeed, years before, while in an unstable frame of mind, my mother had toyed with the idea of becoming a butcher herself. It was just one of the many phases she went through. I recall sitting on the floor with my brother watching television late one evening. Mother had not yet come home from her daily excursion and we had not eaten dinner.
Upon hearing the key rattle in the front door, I anxiously anticipated my mother carrying in fish and chips or some such delicacy for the three of us to devour.
You cannot imagine my surprise when she staggered in, wearing a blood-stained black dress, holding up a dead fox. I think that image will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Frank listened intently for the duration of my speech, his attention focused on every syllable. He looked very grief-stricken. It was obvious that he loved my mother very
much. He appreciated and understood what I was saying and when I had finished he was
the first to stand and applaud. Thankfully, the others followed suit.

As I left the altar to a rapturous ovation, I placed a single red rose on the coffin and slunk back to my seat. The sun - that had been stuck behind a threatening grey cloud - appeared and shone fantastic beams of light in through the stained-glass windows. The bleak, bare church was brought to life with the fabulous montage of colours. It was very fitting.

I gazed at the box in which my mother lay. Her plain pine coffin had transformed into a kaleidoscopic chariot; its brass handles glimmering and shining like gold.
My mother was happy again – I hoped that it would last.

Poland in a Nutshell

14th June 2012: Gdansk, Ireland 0 -4 Spain

15th June 2012: the journey home

As the train chugged determinedly onwards, I fell back into my seat with a lumpen thud – like the proverbial sack of spuds. We were in one of those individual private compartments that you see in 1930’s espionage films. Eight seats. Only really big enough to fit six people. The two window seats were occupied by an elderly Polish couple who didn’t look all that pleased to see a group of hungover football fans invade the peace and privacy of their little carriage… well, sorry Boris; tough shit, Magda, I paid for this seat!

My fingers fumbled feebly with the zip on my jacket. It was stuck. A couple of minutes later it was still stuck and I was growing increasingly frustrated. The Ireland flag that I proudly wore at the previous night’s match had become irreversibly entangled in the zip and was now limply strewn over my thighs as I sat there fidgeting like a helpless toddler; lost in my own little world, oblivious to on-lookers.

Only when the elderly Polish lady offered to help me did I snap out of my little trance – the zip was a bit too close to my crotch for my liking, so I thought that I’d do well to avoid a diplomatic incident and decided to stand up and step out of the dashing jacket and flag combo as if it were a skirt. However, in doing so, a boiled egg that I had drunkenly secreted away at breakfast time hit the floor of the train carriage with a crack and a ripple of laughter from my three friends and the septuagenarian Poles…and what else could I do but join in? Not for too long though. All that laughing was making me thirsty and I was eager to leave before I embarrassed myself further in front of real humans.

As I stomped and clomped my way through the train carriages, I got knowing looks from other Irish people, amused smiles from upstanding elderly citizens and nods of approval from tough-looking Poles who seemed very envious of the fact that I was still completely pissed from the night before and about to top up again.

I finally reached the dining carriage and waddled unsteadily up to the bar – my hands digging feverishly in my pockets in search of some shiny pennies. A mound of till receipts, tickets stubs and chewing gums wrappers were fished out and flung away before I finally found the fistful of dollars (well, złoty) that I needed.

I sat alone at a high table thinking lonesome thoughts, watching a steady stream of weary compatriots queue up to buy teas and coffees; seemingly unable to do further damage to their already pickled livers by following my lead and biting off a big bushy mouthful of the hair of the dog.

Twenty minutes later I sat there finishing my second beer when a no-nonsense Pole insisted that he had to buy me a drink to celebrate the sterling work that I had done the previous night during Spain’s masterful and mechanical dismantling of the Irish team as they cruised to an all-too-easy 4-0 win.
We gluttonously swallowed the beers that my new friend had bought before diving headlong into another pair of pints that I was compelled to buy to reciprocate his generosity.
The man sitting at the table beside us sensed a bit of mischief in the air and he promptly joined us just as my three travel companions completed their pilgrimage through the rattling carriages in pursuit of thirst-quenching piwo.

There we sat, four Irishmen and two Poles, all in high spirits, guzzling imperiously and chatting frenetically - with animated hand gestures, user-friendly pronunciation, wide-eyed incredulity and exaggerated enthusiasm; forging a firm but ultimately meaningless friendship.

Our travelling companions were two very different beasts. The first man was a sad and tired-looking young man in his early 30s who ran an Irish bar in Gdansk (and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Ireland’s Italia 90 team), while our latest recruit was a 50 year old dentist who worked in Berlin. Alcohol being what it is, it blurred my judgment and the younger man was slowly phased out of our conversation and he disembarked the train at some godforsaken stop with a shy whimper as the dentist took centre stage…

In hindsight and under the unbiased scrutiny of sobriety, the dental man turned out to be rather more of a mental man but we weren’t to know that at the time.
He had great teeth; pearly-white movie star teeth. That gave him a great air of trustworthiness and respectability – assholes just don’t have perfect teeth, do they?!? He was charismatic and full of life too; eager to make up for lost time - married and divorced twice (with two kids to show for his trouble) - but now he was well and truly free and single and, dare I say it, ready to mingle.
He was headed all the way to Berlin too and it went without saying that we would spend the whole journey together, cementing our friendship and regaling each other with the quixotic tales that drunk people keep locked away in the dusty recesses of their minds for just such an occasion. You suddenly remember every hilarious hi-jink you’ve ever engaged in and recount great tales of bravery, debauchery and virility – neglecting to mention that your life is really more tae, beans and shite than Arabian Nights.

After a couple of hours of fraternal drinking we arrived at our stopover in Szczecin. I bounced off the train in a fit of drunken delirium and, if I may say so myself, I was at the top of my game.
I went to the information desk in the station and got a city map and made a bee-line for a group of thick-looking cunts sitting outside the station bar. My dental friend had taught me a few choice phrases during the first leg of our trip and I was eager to try them out.
I did my best ‘lost tourist’ face and leaned in to ask Thick Cunt #1 if he could tell me how to get to Ulica Sezamkowa - Sesame Street to you and me…
He gritted his teeth and shook his head sourly with a mixture of anger, annoyance and grudging respect for my gall. Wisely, I left him and his friends and moved down the road a little and poked my head in the window of a taxi to repeat the trick. It went a little better this time and the driver laughed and even got a friendly poke in the face from my novelty over-sized foam hand for his trouble, the lucky divil. I was leppin’ around the street like a pissed fairy then; the one-man show in full swing and men, women and children alike feeling the full force of my drunken tomfoolery – and, thankfully, taking their tickles and prods with good grace.

Nevertheless, my friends made the wise decision to take me out of harm’s way for the rest of our 90 minute stopover and set about finding a place to sit, have a beer and watch France play Ukraine. Our dental man had been to Szczecin many times before and said he knew just the place, so off we marched.

We had just finished ordering and were getting settled into the nice outdoor seating area when our Polish friend discreetly informed us that the local lads beside us, who had watched us like hawks as we came in, were ‘hooligans’. He advised us to behave ourselves and try to avoid getting involved with them. All well and good in theory…until the waitress arrived a few minutes later and brought us all two beers each - along with our food and informed us that the locals had sent us over a round of drinks as a (now customary) show of respect for our singing during the Spain match.
We waved over to them and thanked them from the safety of our seats but they beckoned us over to join them. So much for keeping a low profile…

More handshakes, backslaps and animated smiles as we loaded our small-talk guns and prepared to riddle the breeze with a magazine full of bullets.
The meanest-looking of the group intimated that he liked my leprechaun hat (or the ‘piece of resistance’ as my friends and I had christened it). It had been an inspired purchase, setting me back a mere €2 and it had seen more than its fair share of action. It capped off the ‘demented-Irish-dickhead’ look very well indeed and I was loth to part with it. Nevertheless, I overcame my reluctance and decided that giving our new ‘friend’ the hat was the best way to avoid the possibility of any hassle later on. A wise move. So, the hat was now in Polish hands (or, well, on Polish head to be precise) and I would not leave empty-handed either. They proudly presented me with a hideously-coloured scarf of the local football team. Hardly a fair swap for the best hat in the world but I suppose it’s the thought that counts…
Only one thing for it, so: a presentation photo! Huge cheesy grins, bright eyes and magisterial handshakes were the order of the day. The handshakes grew more vigorous with each passing second and next thing, what bounced out of my pocket only the cheeky little boiled egg that had made a name for itself on the train!

We all nearly lost the plot laughing and I came up with the fabulous idea of sharing the egg with the hooligans to cement our bond and show that ours was a lasting and meaningful friendship. A few triumphant mouthfuls later, the egg was no more. A few beer-sodden minutes later the friendship that the egg symbolised was no more either. The time had come for us to leave the pub and head back to the station.

I didn’t engage in much eejitry on the way back as we were short of time and beer and needed to stock up before getting our train home. We pooled our pennies together and left our dentist to do his worst. Piwo! Wahey!...and back on to our rolling locomotive for a quiet ride back to Berlin. Wrong again…

While fishing in my pockets for my ticket I found my tricolour facepaints and suddenly had another inspired idea. I topped up my own war paint and went off in pursuit of new recruits for the Green Army.
‘Snoozing’ people pretended not to see me, others just said ‘no’ and some stopped me in my tracks with a stern look before I even got to suggest anything to them. It wasn’t going too well.

Thankfully, I found a few half-dead Irish people in one of the carriages and I broke my duck. Confidence slowly crept back and I got brave. Brave enough to put a big green, white and orange stripe all over a sleeping bald man’s head. Others who saw this were laughing so hard that they were unable to resist my charms. I was on a roll now – making progress slowly but surely. Then I met the driver in the end carriage. She was a very serious-looking Turkish-German woman with a crew cut and trendy thick-framed glasses. She wasn’t in the mood for any messing and told me to stop and sit down. I begged and pleaded with her and asked her for one good reason why I couldn’t paint her face and she said that her husband wouldn’t be happy.

Somehow I used this to my advantage and managed to convince her that she needed to be painted so that she’d have some evidence to back up the story of the Irish bollocks on the train – a story that she said she would be telling her husband and her friends. So, not only did I paint her face, she took a photo of me on her iPhone for good measure. Oh, the sweet smell of success!
Further emboldened by this, I turned around and marched purposefully back through the four carriages and painted every single person on the way back to my seat. All of them: babies, geriatric old farts, drunken Irishmen, nervous housewives and timid postmen alike.
The only ones left without my seal of approval were the three people sitting in the seats behind where my friends and I had stationed ourselves. I asked the dentist to explain the situation to them and help me complete my collection but he was reluctant. He said that two guys playing dominoes were kind of neo-Nazis (since when have Nazis played dominoes?!?!?!) and he didn’t advise interrupting them for the sake of indulging my silly shenanigans.
As for the third person – well, she was an Indian girl sitting alone with tears in her eyes. When I asked him what was wrong with her, he laughed and started mocking her – it seems they had had a row while I was off gallivanting and he had come out with some nice racist remarks that upset her. None of us knew what he had said but we knew he’d been a naughty boy, so we told him to apologise. He screwed up his face scornfully, waved his arms at us with disdain and indignantly trudged his way to the toilets to smoke an illicit cigarette - disappointed, no doubt, that we hadn’t turned out to be his partners in bigotry despite what the day’s drunken buffoonery may have led him to believe.

So, my friend John spoke to the ‘Nazis’ and explained my need to them and they grudgingly obliged me. Meanwhile, Donal spoke to the Indian girl and her mood improved and she let me complete the set! Wahey! You can’t spell persistence without ‘pest’! Everybody on the train painted! A total of 70 or 80 people; a modest enough number but still a great achievement in many ways. My work was done and I could rest easy.
I flopped back into my seat with a serious sense of accomplishment and the sudden realisation that I was more drunk than I had thought humanly possible. The train rolled on into the murky German night and I closed my eyes and let the gentle rhythm rock me to sleep.

The Beautiful Hames

Roy, Roy, Roy. Everything you said made sense but the timing was wrong.
It’s like making a speech at a wedding and reminding everyone about divorce statistics and saying how the groom’s first girlfriend was really his true love.
There are some things that people just don’t want to hear and there are times when you just shouldn’t interrupt the ceremony.



However, maybe the reason that Keane’s comments annoyed people was because we know that he’s right. On one level anyway. The tournament was an unmitigated disaster for us and the gulf in class between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was all too apparent. Depressingly so.
With almost half of the first match still left to play, we knew the game was up and that this would be the tournament that would show us up for the pretenders we are – no hope of a giant-killing, era-defining moment to rival Ronnie Whelan and Ray Houghton’s goals in Euro 88 and USA 94.

They (whoever ‘they’ are) say that the league table doesn’t lie – well, unfortunately, FIFA rankings do. It is nonsensical for us to be 18th in the world when we haven’t beaten anybody ranked above us since September 2001. Lucky clean sheets and workmanlike victories against poor opposition have helped to paint a distorted picture of the ability of this Ireland team.
The old argument that we’d be more up for the fight than our opponents and scrape a result through sheer grit and determination just doesn’t ring true these days.

As many commentators have pointed out, there’s no chance that Glenn Whelan works any harder than Luka Modric, Andrea Pirlo or Andres Iniesta. Iniesta is one of the most celebrated and decorated footballers of his generation for a reason - that reason being that the grit and determination that some people foolishly believe can tip the scales in Ireland’s favour against more technical and skilful opponents such as Spain are the starting point of his exquisite array of talents, not the sum total of them.

‘They’ also say that fortune favours the brave. Conversely, however, it also rings true that the brave are often prone to getting slaughtered if they don’t have a coherent plan of action and it is clearly the latter, more pessimistic attitude that Trapattoni buys into. Granted, his selection pool is limited in terms of talented personnel (indeed in terms of both talent and personnel), yet he has made some very negative decisions during his four years at the helm – decisions that have deprived the team of imaginative and inventive players just when we need them most.
Trapattoni however, is a great believer in pragmatism and he preaches a mantra of keeping things simple and compact and never strays far from the tried and tested 4-4-2 system that has served him so well throughout his managerial career. Prior to the tournament, the Irish players talked the talk and the record books showed off our impressive defensive record. Accordingly, fans were almost expecting a heroic shut-out akin to the miraculous clean sheet that we recorded during the 0-0 draw with Russia last autumn. Maybe we could even sneak a goal or two and then our dream of progressing from the group stages might be looking more like a reality…

Managers who promote a more expansive and expressive playing style than our steadfast Don Trap will always maintain that attack is the best form of defence: if you’re on the front foot, in possession of the ball in your opponents’ half, then they can’t hurt you. It makes sense and we all know it.
Unfortunately, what we also now know is that defence can never be the best form of attack. Keeping things tight and hoping to nick a goal on the counter or from a set piece is all well and good in theory but that plan relies on the assumption that you can actually keep a clean sheet. However, when you find your team conceding goals in the opening minutes of each half and have no Plan B then it’s going to be a long night and a depressing and deflating defeat is inevitable.

The Irish fans ironically sang about ‘a team of Gary Breens’ but what we really need is a team of Roy Keanes. Unfortunately for us, however, Roy was in the TV studio and the wrath and ire that were so inspirational and effective whenever he took to the playing field in an Ireland shirt were somewhat misplaced and misunderstood and, accordingly, his comments were misinterpreted as an attack on the fans.
I’m sure that Roy Keane was as proud as anybody of our fans’ poignant performance during the closing stages of our Spanish mauling. What he was speaking out against was what he saw as the small-mindedness, the ‘sure, aren’t we great to even be here’ attitude and the celebration of mediocrity that has long characterised our country. He is right to speak out against it and to dream of a better future; one where we possess a winning mentality, where we demand to be taken seriously and where we harbour genuine hopes of making an impact on the pitch rather than in the stands.

However, what he was wrong about was saying that the fans themselves harboured no ambition and were happy for the team just to be there. We were not patting our under-performing players on the back and embracing our mediocrity - far from it. We were celebrating ourselves and our country.
As the third Spanish goal went in, I looked around the stadium and saw literally hundreds of Ireland flags draped over the stands and thousands upon thousands of fans decked out from head to toe in green, white and orange, complete with painted faces, inflatable rubber hammers and leprechaun hats. The whole stadium was a sea of green, drowning out the small pools of Spanish rioja that had poured into witness the masterful matadors put our lumbering, cloven-hoofed bulls to the sword with their swift and incisive artistry. I wondered what our support would be like if we had cause for genuine optimism or ever had something to actually celebrate and I felt an immense sense of pride in Ireland and its people.
A similar feeling appears to have permeated every Irish person in the stadium (and, ultimately, simply every person in the stadium) and what resulted was simply one of the most beautiful shows of spontaneous patriotism ever witnessed in a sporting arena – somehow managing to be heart-warming in both its boisterousness and its poignancy.
The media around the world marvelled and every single person in that stadium that night knew that they had been part of something truly unique and spectacular.
That’s what happened, Roy. Or at least that’s how I saw it… I was singing for myself and I was singing for my country and I have never been more proud to be Irish despite our pitiful performance and our meek retreat from Poland. Football didn’t really come into it. It was simply a time to celebrate ourselves. As Keane’s great guru, Bob Dylan, once sang: “when all else fails/ I’ll make it a matter of self-respect”.

An out-and-out winner like Keane will always share Bill Shankly’s belief that football is much more important than life or death. Such a mantra may imbue players with a sense of power and purpose and help them summon up every last ounce of energy and strength when they take to the pitch. Fans, however, can’t directly affect what happens on the field and, as such, have a different role to play and this is something that Keane seems to have glossed over in his comments. For, if football really were a matter of life and death, we’d all have died a thousand times over at this stage.


A group of Spanish fans that I spoke with after the game told me that while many Spanish fans are renowned for their passionate and vocal support of their teams, they are also notoriously fickle and will march out in disgust if their team goes two goals down. It seems that they often epitomise the ‘only sing when you’re winning’-style mindset of fair-weather, bandwagon-jumping fans. That is why they were so awestruck by our unwavering support and joined in themselves.

So, even though the praise for Ireland’s fans has ranged from the saccharine to the down-right condescending via the in-between where the truth really lies, it remains comforting to know that while the Spanish may have mastered the beautiful game, it’s fair to say that nobody does a beautiful hames quite like the Irish.

Interview with a Picnic

16th December 2004, 2:15am

20 years ago I had breakfast. I now require a snack. I am the man. If an ambulance comes along, I'll have a nice, boring fish pie.

Privatise me Granny. As I lie on the floor I think of the days when baby me surprised himself by filling up his nappy with piss. A penny for your thoughts. 400 sweet yellow tulips sit on my lap. I would open the door, only I can't and I won't ever open the door again.

Bang the sheep and ban the jeep. Horrible shite. I can't believe my ears. I'm famous in two circles as a result of my frivolousness...trailing off is just...too appealing.

They say it's a terrible thing for a parent to outlive their child...

Well, on this sad day, spare a thought for The Virgin Mary.

Poor Jesus, dead and gone. His mother will be lost without him.

Still, I suppose the Resurrection will be an ease to her...

Michael Parkinson's Disease...

...slowly turning into a chatshow host.