Longing for the Good Old Days

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Irish Voice Sport

Longing for the Good Old Days

February 14, 2008

By Cathal Dervan

AH, the good old days. A couple of Saturdays ago, the night of the Ireland-Italy rugby match at Croke Park as it happens, a DVD jumped off the shelf at me as I prepared to dismantle the contents of a nice bottle of Rioja. The plastic wrapping was still on the cover of said DVD, a Christmas present from two years previously that bore the simple title The Jack Charlton Years.

Truth be told, the Colm Meaney-narrated tribute to big Jack had been staring at me for some time but on every occasion that I thought about watching it something else came up, like the American golf live on Setanta or Match of the Day or even a rerun of The Quiet Man.

I happen to be a big fan of the John Wayne classic, by the way, and have done the tour of Cong in its honor, but more of that another day.

For now let’s rewind to my DVD viewing on said Saturday, when a very enjoyable 90 or so minutes were spent in the company of Jack and Colm as well as a series of guest faces, everyone from Jimmy Magee to Eoin Hand to Frank Stapleton and even the great Charlie O’Leary, kitman to the greatest Irish team of them all.

A smile came across my face frequently that night, a smile that my good wife swears appears every time Big Jack appears on the television screen. You know something? She’s right.

There is a huge part of me than hankers for those far off days when we were the great innocents of world football and everything was an adventure, for the team, the management, the fans and for me, a young and novice journalist learning the ropes in places like Germany in ’88, Italy two years later and America in ’94.

It was all new to us, all fresh to us, all exciting to us. We were still wrapped in the naivety of sporting youth, still warriors to the cause, still addicted to the adrenalin rush of watching your team blaze a trail from the Neckarstadion in Stuttgart to the Giants Stadium out in New Jersey.

Of course, like everything else in life, it all comes to an end eventually. My raw enthusiasm has been replaced by a bullish cynicism about everything to do with Irish football.

My sheer emotion has been ousted in favor of a cautious and at times caustic optimism about those we ask to manage our national team, and those we ask to play for it.

I have borne the brunt of too much heartache, too many scandals, heard too many lies to believe in the fairytale nature of football anymore but still, as I did that night almost two weeks ago now, I hanker back to the good old days.

They will never come back of course. The Ireland I grew up in is no longer the Ireland I live in.

Try getting a simple cup of coffee in any of the many cafe bars that adorn our fair and green land. In my day — and I’m still only 43 for another three weeks — a cup of coffee involved a cup, a spoon and a jar with Nescafe written all over it.

Now you have to stipulate the size of the cup you want before they start playing with their espresso/cappuccino/frapuchino machines, and then they hand you a piece of wood instead of a spoon. Progress me arse, as some down my way might say.

The search for a cup of coffee is just one sign of the changing Ireland. The fact that our national soccer team is about to be managed by a 68-year-old Italian who can’t speak English, aided and abetted by a failure of a manager called Brady, is the final proof that Ireland is no longer Irish.

Like our coffee, our football is about to go all continental with Giovanni Trapattoni at the helm and Liam “I took Celtic to fifth in the Scottish League” Brady by his side just in case he needs someone to mess things up in true Football Association of Ireland (FAI) style.

I’m not impressed. Sure, Gio Trapattoni has a great track record and has won more titles than I’ve had hot lattes, but his glory days were back in the late ‘80s, back in a time when Ireland were able to compete on the world stage with a manager who spoke the same language as us, even if he came from a different part of the world.

I cannot for the life see how Trapattoni, as one Italian journalist suggested on RTE radio on Tuesday morning, is a great guy for a bit of craic and storytelling in the dressingroom when the likes of Stephen Hunt and Damien Duff won’t be able to understand a word he is saying.

I cannot see how a man who will spend at most five days a month on average with his Irish players is going to motivate them to perform as well as the great players he handled with Juventus, Bayern Munich and even the Italian side he failed to take beyond the pool stages in the 2002 World Cup or the 2004 European Championships.

Yes, Trapattoni is a great name and I am sure he is a great man, but we have missed him in his prime and we will ask him to take charge of our team with no more second chances available to Duffer, Robbie Keane, Shay Given, Lee Carsley, Kevin Kilbane and Richard Dunne as they face into their final World Cup qualifying series before old age catches up with them.

The FAI — as usual, considering they should be called Failure And Ireland — have stumbled across a man who was once a great manager but is now well past his sell-by date in terms of his practical use to Ireland, simply because he will not be able to get his ideas across to the Irish players in time to hit the ground running for the games away to Georgia and Montenegro in September.

That’s when the “s***uchino” will hit the fan, excuse my Italian, when Signor Trapattoni fails to win both matches and suddenly discovers the English for outlandish criticism in the press.

The fact that the FAI are also considering a *1 million donation from an outside source to fund this deal just adds to the web of intrigue surrounding Trapattoni’s appointment, an appointment that makes me believe the famous “process” set up when Steve Staunton was sacked was a fraud from start to finish.

There are many questions to be asked of the FAI and their incompetent blazers when they face the media to announce this appointment on Wednesday night, not least the depth of Brady’s involvement in the alleged process.

And I can promise the questions will be asked. I may even ask a few myself, but there is one question even I can’t dodge any more –- Is Irish football living in the past?

Personally speaking, I probably am living in the past captured so perfectly on that DVD now back on the shelf beside the widescreen TV in our front room.

If I’m honest I’m still trying to live in the days of Big Jack, so maybe for once in my life I should put my doubts and my prejudices to one side and give Gio the Geriatric a chance.

I’ll try, I will, but I can’t promise how long I can keep this particular Lenten vow. Sorry, but that’s just the way this old timer is!

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