I still have the edition of Shoot and possibly Match that immediately followed Ireland beating England in Euro '88. I also have the programme from that day. If I get a chance I may fire up some photos of these before the end of this tournament.
People said Ireland was not an association football country before Euro â88 (or the European Nations Cup) as my oulâ fella exclusively referred to it but that was bollocks.
Falling in love with Liverpool F.C. was my formative association football experience, and I understood I didnât have a choice in being a follower of Celtic, but Ireland followed on from this. Quickly.
I may have watched some of the 2-2 draw away to Belgium at the start of qualifying where Brady scored the penalty right at the end, but I donât recall it, but being vaguely aware of it happening rings a slight bell.
The 0-0 between Ireland and Scotland in October â86 flew completely over my head. I had no knowledge it was on and had no knowledge it had happened, despite my oulâ fella attending it.
I watched the 1-0 in Hampden Park in February '87 alright. That was the first time I consciously watched an Ireland game and had a proper memory that I had watched it. Shortly after this I was given my first two football magazines, one was Match and the other was Shoot. I liked Match better.
I was aware that Ireland were playing Bulgaria away, but I didnât know what time of the day it was on or whether it was on television, and I picked up the phone after the match to be met with my oulâ fella on the other of the line having gone back to work, fuming that Ireland had been fucking chiselled out of it by the referee. âAh did ya not watch it, I told you it was on.â However I did somehow have the radio on that night and was keeping up to date with England beating Northern Ireland 2-0 in Belfast. Or maybe it was Sportsnight on the telly. The fearsome figure of Mark Hateley was prominent. I always feared this man from then on.
My oulâ fella attended Ireland v Belgium on April 29th, 1987. I didnât watch it because I didnât know it was on television and found out the 0-0 result only when I saw him walking up the street returning from it as I was out kicking ball on the street.
Then the big one - my first ever Ireland game - Ireland v Brazil on Saturday May 23rd, 1987. Brazil in my understanding were the poor relation of South American football to Argentina, an impression which has never really changed in my mind. I made my first holy communion that day and went along in my finery. East Stand Upper. We won 1-0 and Liam Brady scored. The crowd was not good. There was no trouble at all getting tickets.
I saw the last 20 minutes or so of Luxembourg v Ireland on Thursday May 28th. Only the last 20 minutes because myself and my oulâ fella had just returned from my first ever trip to Cork, a day trip on the train with discounted prices from collecting tokens off the back of Kelloggâs Corn Flakes packets. I loved the narrow streets of Cork, a love that has never faded, even if it has only ever been fleetingly consummated in the years since. My oulâ fella bought two lovely green packets of football stickers for the Daily Mirror sticker album I was collecting stickers for, which was much better than the Panini one I wasnât bothering with, because unlike the Panini one the stickers were action shots of players and they were bigger stickers. John Aldridge got a disallowed goal. âFinally heâs scoredâ, roared my oulâ fella. Aldridgeâs wait for a goal for Ireland would go on for a good while yet. We won 2-0, not 3-0.
Then my second ever game - Ireland v Luxembourg in September, a Wednesday early evening about 5 or half 5. We got the DART out from Tara Street. Big mistake. I was nearly crushed to death on the DART, Iâd never felt as scared, my head mercilessly pressed against the hips of men twice my size. We went 1-0 behind. It looked like we werenât going to win. Then Paul McGrath came to the rescue and we won late enough, 2-1.
My oulâ fella promised to bring me to our last qualifying game, Bulgaria at home. But he couldnât get the time off work. I held this grudge against him for many years, mostly jokingly, occasionally with a bit more spite to it. I didnât see the game at all, even on telly.
The night of Bulgaria v Scotland, it was already dark by the time the game started. RTE were showing it. Michael Lyster was in studio. The studio to me looked very plush and southside Dublin. It had lots of potted plants, probably artificial, perhaps trellises too, it looked like a subterranean garden. I always remember the studio looked like a subterranean garden. My oulâ fella had got off work an hour or so early to watch the match. But he wasnât holding out much hope. I watched the first half hour or so. Then, no more of that, it was off to recorder practice down in the boysâ national school. Lots of colouring in little notes. âWhatâs the difference between the flute and the recorder?â I still donât know.
My mam gave me a lift home. She didnât even know there was a match on. I got back home at what must have been a very short time after the final whistle. My oulâ fella was stamping around with a very purposeful look on his face. Immediately he shouted âyou wonât believe it! Scotland WON!â There were a load of smiling faces on the TV screen and Michael Lyster drinking a bottle of champagne. Jesus, it was true. Deadly.
What was this tournament we had qualified for again? âItâs like the World Cup but only for European teams. Itâs in Germany. No, Maradona wonât be in it.â
Some time later the news came in that our first game would be against England. This seemed exciting, but also terrifying. They would surely beat us and prove they were a better country than us and they would laugh at us forever more and the nasty Loyalists in the North would laugh at and taunt our people up there forever more and kill them. We would be humiliated and made to feel we didnât matter.
This game against England loomed all winter and spring and early summer. I collected stickers for three sticker albums that spring - the Daily Mirror one, the Panini one, and the Panini Euro '88 album, which had a picture of a giant fluffy rabbit in a headband on the front. This was Berni. The Daily Mirror album had a feature on the European Nations Cup, with a full two page spread ground level photograph of the Olympic Stadium in Munich bathed in glorious sunlight, looking up towards the ICONIC glass roof. It looked amazing, awesome. Ireland didnât get to play here. The Panini stickers of the German host cities were an education in themselves. Pictures of Cologne Cathedral, the railway bridge in Cologne, a bridge in Hamburg, a cathedral in Hamburg. Bridges and cathedrals everywhere, basically. Barges on the Rhine. Overhead pictures of stadiums, all of them with running tracks. These were proper football stadiums because they had running tracks.
We went to Ireland v Yugoslavia in a friendly at Lansdowne Road and we won 2-0. Mark Kelly scored for us. Or maybe he was just playing for us. I mainly remember that game for Mark Kelly, anyway, I donât think I ever heard any more from him. My oulâ fella bought me a hot dog from a chap walking up and down the steps of the East Stand Upper. The view was fantastic.
We played and beat Poland and John Sheridan scored and I didnât attend this because I was attending Dublin being hammered by Meath when Liam Hayes fee fi fo fummed his way through most of the pitch and burst the net from about 30 yards and he meant every bit of it. I smell the blood of a Dublin man.
Liverpool lost to Wimbledon and all my heroes now had to play against each other in Germany. I wanted Barnes and Beardsley and McMahon to lose again, and Whelan and Houghton and Aldridge to beat them. The tournament began on a Friday night. West Germany v Italy. The two biggest teams in Europe. I was up for Italy. I didnât like the Germans. Roberto Mancini gave Italy the lead 10 or 15 minutes into the second half. West Germany equalised when they scored a free kick after Walter Zenga had run too far with the ball or something very silly like that. Brehme nailed it. It seemed unfair. But anyway, this was class, this was the first time I was ever seeing big time international football.
Spain v Denmark the next day in the rain of Gelsenkirchen. I loved that name. There were horns everywhere and it was class.
The big day arrived and it was sunny. 2:30pm was high noon. Football had to be played on the street first. I told Ryaner weâd win. And I felt pretty fucking smug about it after six minutes. It was the most ridiculous goal. Kenny Sansom hooked the ball up in the air just like he had done for Maradona. Donkey Adams had his hand up for offside. We were laughing at them. Jack Charlton had his hand on his baldy head. I knew the Irish could conquer Europe. Iâd seen Johnny Logan do it in the Eurovision Song Contest the previous year, though that was ten years ago in the life of an eight year old. Stephen Roche had won the Tour De France. Now we were conquering Europe for real. It felt tense but it felt great. Lineker kept missing chances and Pat Bonner (âwhy is George Hamilton calling him a Paki?â) kept saving. I kept laughing. Then Glenn Hoddle came on and it started getting very tense. My oulâ fella kept talking about 1957. We were going to be caught again. I didnât know what he was talking about. I donât know Bonner stopped that last header by Lineker. It was war-like. We won. Ryaner knocked on my door. âYeeeeeessssssssssss. I told ya!â
On the Wednesday England played Holland. I wanted Holland to win. They had lost to the Russians, who I didnât know at the time were actually the Ukrainians. The Dutch kit was strange looking. I didnât like it, it was different to what they had in their stickers. I was familiar with all the Dutch players from watching Dutch football on Sky Channel, which used In The Name Of Love (that was the name of the song as far as I knew) by U2 and from PSV Eindhoven winning the European Cup. This game was the archetype of the slick continentals blitzing the try hard English. Marco Van Bastenâs hat trick remains the best Iâve ever seen in football. The Dutch supporters were up standing on the wire fencing inside the stadium swinging their scarves and flags. Bryan Robson got the most Bryan Robson goal ever to equalise, a 1-2 and then he bullocked his way through almost horizontally and poked it home before being sent flying into the air by Hans Van Breukelen. Robsonâs look after scoring was the look of the British Army after theyâd shot the three IRA men and woman in Gibraltar. I loved that England lost. I hated them.
We played the Russians that night - (âWhy do they have a sponsor on their jersey? What does CCCP make?â) and Ronnie Whelan scored. It felt like a storybook dream and I ran onto the street cheering along with every other child who lived on it. John Aldridge missed a sitter of a volley to out us 2-0 up, and then the Russians scored.
So we had to get a draw off the Dutch. My oulâ fella thought there was a way England could get qualify through âthe back doorâ. I told him to look at table. They were out. The Russians would beat them.
West Germany played Spain in Munich on the Friday night. I remember four things about this game. The German kit. Christ it looked amazing. Rudi Voller. Jurgen Klinsmann coming off late on to adulation. And the TV tower looming over the stadium. Is there anything which makes a stadium more than a TV tower looming over it? The Allianz Arena will never be a patch on the Olympic Stadium in Munich.
The Dutch game was unbearably tense. It was as fine a setting for an association football match as has ever been seen. Blazing sunshine. No shadows. A cauldron, a furnace. A futuristic stadium (which would very soon come to be seen as obsolete, but it wasnât). The teams used escalators to descend onto the pitch. This was amazing. Proper big time. I donât remember what the weather was like in Dublin but I imagine it as blazing sunshine too.
McGrath nearly scored, but to me it never looked like it was going in. The Dutch seemed to have something ominous about them. I felt they were ominous because Iâd watched PSV Eindhoven for the last year and a half and they never lost, and Gullit and Van Basten had beaten Maradona. They were better than Maradona. Imagine that. I knew theyâd score. They did score. Wim Kieft, who I was very familiar with because Sky Channel constantly interviewed him for their Dutch football highlights programme, scored a header that had such spin it defied science. It could only have made that way by God. God didnât like us because we were Irish. God made this bobbly spinning header because we had to know our place. We had to be taught who we were. We were taught, sort of. Oh, it was so disappointing, and so upsetting, and so Irish. We loved our team. They had beaten England, and they done little Ireland proud, and really that was all that mattered.
I saw the team the next day. We waited opposite McGraths pub on Drumcondra Road. It was damp and Kilkenny were playing Wexford in the Leinster hurling semi-final. The team came along. The road was not thronged. But the bus stopped. Chris Hughton beamed down and me and looked me in the eye. I specifically remember Chris Hughton. He looked right at me and I waved. Wexford won. Dublin lost to Offaly, but I wasnât disappointed at that, because Dublin were shit at hurling.
West Germany played Holland in the semi-final and one of the bigger, older, potentially bullying boys on the school bus told me West Germany only needed to draw to reach the final. âAre you sure?â I asked him? Yes, he was. I didnât argue, but I knew he was wrong. The Germans took the lead with a penalty. Matthaus. Then the Dutch equalised with a penalty. Koeman. I didnât know that this was the exact inverse of a very important game that had happened 14 years previously. I wanted Holland to win. Van Basten then knifed the Germans right at the end with a devastating goal. I was mesmerised by the sight of it and the sight of the stadium and the Dutch fans.
On the day of the final my oulâ fella brought me and my six year old brother to Killester. We parked up beside the station. We got the DART to Bray and walked around a bit. Then we got the DART to Howth, and walked around a bit. Then back to Killester, and back home. We missed the first 10 or 15 minutes of the final. My oulâ fella really liked the Dutch. He had great admiration for that âbig black attackerâ, who he sometimes called âRude Hullitâ. He had followed AC Milanâs progress to the Italian League title intently through the Monday morning newspapers. The big black attacker then scored a powerful headed goal full of joy. Everything about it was joy - his power, his grace, his movement, his style, the Dutch celebrations throughout the stadium. It was the sort of goal that was a statement that said nothing was stopping us today.
The second goal was an even bigger statement of all that. I knew as soon as that volley left Van Bastenâs boot it was in, and he meant it. The Russians got a penalty a few minutes later and surely the crack striker Igor Belanov would score. He didnât score because Hans Van Breukelen who always saved penalties saved this one as well. That was it. Everybody knew it and the last half an hour was a celebratory procession. My oulâ fella told me the manager was the same fella who had been the manager when the Dutch had lost the World Cup final 100 years ago in 1974 against Germany and now he was back and now he had beaten Germany and now he was going to win the European Nations Cup in the same stadium he had lost in before.
The big black attacker my oulâ fella loved lifted the Auhh-ree Delauney Cup under the glorious glass roof in glorious sunlight. And we in little olâ Ireland had only lost to the winners, and so we were winners too.
A couple of years later, we went to Germany, we went to the Olympic Stadium in Munich. You could pay a small fee to walk around it. We went to the Neckarstadion in Stuttgart. We went on the S-Bahn. We walked up to it and asked could we get in to see it. We explained we were from Ireland. âYes, of course! Come on.â A very nice German man with a moustache showed us around and brought us up onto the terrace and explained to my German speaking Mammy how he had been there that day and wanted Ireland to win. I donât think my Mammy even knew Ireland had beaten England. But she translated anyway.
What an introduction to international football. What a tournament.
