The most prevalent of insights about statistics are lies, damned lies, and cliche. Among the more ubiquitous examples of the latter is the claim that you can use statistics to prove anything.
The problem here is that statistics don’t prove anything beyond that which they explicitly state. The demand of the human mind to look for patterns and meanings where none exist is what gives rise to the spurious worth with which statistics are valued.
An example: Pats have conceded less goals this season to date than at this point last year. The simplistic interpretation is that St Pats now have a better defence. There are however many other variables, and other questions which need to be answered before you make that assertion. Has the defence been playing against inferior strikers? Is goalscoring generally down across the league? Have the Shed End Invincibles intimidated referees so much at Richmond Park that they are reluctant to give decisions which may result in goalscoring chances against St Pats? None of these theories can be empirically proven, they are playthings of a subjective mind and the fuel for discussion among those with sufficient interest.
The crux is that stats are not to be interpreted. They should not be used to ‘prove’ anything. They are to be accepted as ‘what is’.
So, the stats DON’T say Pats aren’t good at winning the FAI Cup. People say it.
What the stats DO say is that Pats last won the Cup in 1961, and have failed in 51 subsequent attempts. (Pedantic point number 1: Before you cry dunce at my mathematical ineptitude you should note that the League of Ireland season and the earthly calendar did not remain in perfect sync across that period).
Of course, it would be hard to argue down the hoodoo with any Pats fan who had set off on Cup Final morning with a song his heart and a feeling in his gut that this would be their year on any one of the half a dozen days since 1961 when the red and white ribbons were chucked in the bin while the Saints went marching off with runners-up medals. (Pedantic point number 2: Red and white ribbons would in fact have been used on the Cup when Pats were defeated by Derry in 2006 and also Shelbourne in 1996).
Pats’ cup record has been a reliable stick for opposition fans to beat them with. Rubbing salt in the wound is the fact that Sporting Fingal were formed, won the cup at their second attempt and disbanded all within a few years while Pats fans looked on shaking their heads at their ongoing inability to regain the trophy.
Realistically, such records entirely are for the edification of media and fans. The record is ultimately a quirk of variance. It makes an easy reference point for the media when previewing or reviewing any FAI Cup game involving Pats. For the players, the management and the owners - I expect - club history matters very little. Most would be media savvy enough never to say such a thing in public, but you must ask yourself “What is a football club?”
It is difficult to reconcile that the Chelsea FC that I remember as a kid are now European champions. I think of Kerry Dixon, Pat Nevin, David Speedie and Gordon Durie, a decent side from the European Ban days who had their gems picked by other clubs and soon found themselves in the old Division 2. So too is it difficult to reconcile the struggling Manchester City teams - Mick McCarthy and Perry Suckling - with the star-studded Premier League champions. Surely these football clubs - though having the same names as decades before - are completely different entities?
The football club is different things to different people. For footballers and managers it is a vehicle for their ambitions, an opportunity to succeed, a stepping stone to further their career. Fundamentally their motivation is selfish. For owners, it is either an investment to turn a profit, or a rich man’s plaything, or rarely perhaps something more philanthropic. All the above are transient however, the only permanent fixture - in varying numbers - are the fans, the patrons, the supporters. They make the whole thing viable. The fans are the club. But they can’t pick the team, set the tactics, kick a ball, sell a player, implement a youth structure or impact the results one iota. We’ve all seen defeats where it looked like the fans hurt more than the players. (Pedantic point number 3: When the fans own the club this dynamic changes somewhat. Still investors are needed and day to day decisions are made by boards appointed by the fans rather than the fans themselves explicitly)
The League of Ireland transfer carousel is so absurdly active that the squads are almost reset each season. Year on year continuity of personnel is rare. Many players with FAI Cup winners medals have passed through Richmond Park over the decades, many have left St Pats and gone on to win their FAI Cup medals elsewhere. So too have managers left the club to win elsewhere the cup they could not bring back to Inchicore.
Cup winning teams have a looser correlation with quality than league winners. It’s broadly accepted that the best team wins the league, but to win a knockout competition, “class” is less important. Few would argue that Greece were the greatest football team in Europe in 2004, nor were Denmark in 1992. What you need aside from a competent group of footballers is a few breaks, and a little bit of luck to come your way. The wind of variance in your sails is of more value than any world class striker.
Using a few convenient though sturdy enough approximations, let’s say Pats have been among the top 9 teams in terms of class every year since they last won the cup. Let’s also say that there is on average a 10% chance of each one of the top 9 clubs winning the cup, and we’ll disperse the remaining 10% among the rest of the field (bottom dwellers in top flight, the second tier and non-league).
If we accept that Pats - on average - have had a 10% chance of winning the cup, well they should have won the cup something in the region of 5 times since 1961. Shels, Bohs and Dundalk have done exactly that, Derry have four wins, as have Sligo Rovers. The ‘’other’’ Rovers’ numbers won’t make anyone here feel better, so we’ll move on, but I think the point is made - a prominent League of Ireland club should be looking at winning the cup on average once a decade.
If something has a 10% chance but only occurs one time in 52 trials or less than 2% of the time as with Pats cup wins - is something amiss?
Not at all. What we have is variance. This is the effect of how real outcomes deviate from expected outcomes. This is broadly why the European economy is heading to hell in a handcart. People made the wrong bets and were overexposed to unexpected outcomes - things that ‘’weren’t supposed to happen’’.
People get carried away by trends and make sweeping conclusions from small samples:
There was period where the Epsom Derby winner had ‘double’ third and fourth letters with surprising frequency:
1995 LaMMtara
1996 ShAAmit
1997 BeNNy The Dip
in 1998, GuLLand carried the hopes of many trendspotters over the finishing line.....some 10 places behind the wiNNer. A foolproof system for picking Derby winners? No, just variance.
The curse of the Superbowl coin toss is a telling case. Up to last year’s game the NFC side had won the coin toss 14 years in a row. Yes the 50/50 coin toss had been in the favour of one side on 14 successive occasions. This pattern has probability in the region of 1 in 16,000 of happening. A dud coin? No, just variance.
These outliers of probability have to exist, something must be on the edge, or else there is no edge. It’s just a little soul destroying when your football club is blighted with them. What is more reassuring however is that all these outliers of probability will eventually gravitate closer to their true expectancy as the number of trials increases. (Pedantic point number 4: this doesn’t mean that the probability changes, just that pattern of improbable outcomes is unlikely to continue).
So if the players are good enough, and the management savvy enough, and we acknowledge that the fans can’t influence things one way or another, then the hoodoo is debunked and Pats surely have as good a chance of winning the 2012 FAI Cup as any team that’s riding high in the league and facing non-league opposition in the first round.
So too, of course, is there a chance of being the “Pats-ies in a giantkilling act”. A sub-editors dream, but let’s not go there.
Monday, 21 May 2012
Thursday, 26 April 2012
The Abandoned Cup Final
Every
couple of months I visit my mother's house to see if I can leverage a
better deal for myself on the will. The triangular patch of grass at the
front of the park opposite our house stirs memories of epic matches won
and lost in fading light on the most geometrically impractical football
pitch you could imagine (corner kicks at the apex were particularly
eventful). The 'triangle' is empty save the worryingly mature looking
trees that I clearly remember being planted as leafless saplings in
protective cages.
We were perhaps the last generation who can honestly say ''we played football all day, every day''. We used the new trees as goalposts, and soon wore away a bald patch between the two most suitable young sycamores. To the Park-keeper's undoubted satisfaction this arid goalmouth has since made a recovery of growth surpassed only by the Lazarine follicles of Wayne Rooney's crown. It also betrays the fact that the kids are otherwise occupying their time.
Very often there was only two of us playing ball; the kid up the road was from a long line of Bohemians patrons, players, members, fanatics. One of us stood between the trees, the other took shots. This simple game developed a more competitive edge when a commentary from the shooting player was introduced. After blasting the ball in to the goal I would occasionally wheel away towards the non-existent adoring fans and in a nasal-drone owing much to Brian Moore's commentaries on ITV's 'The Match' enthusiastically rejoice “And Mark Ennis has surely put red and white ribbons on the FAI Cup.....it's heartbreak for Bohemians, glory for St Patricks...oh the magic of the cup!”
These forays in to fantasy were all too frequently overheard by roaming sorts not so interested in football. The requisite punishment for being imaginative was exacted with committed zeal. If they only knew the hooliganism opportunities that the 80's game offered I'm sure they would have been far more amenable to the sport.
The commentary would resume, flawlessly, once the beating had ended and the savages moved on to find kittens to crucify. “That unpleasantness seems to have abated, order has been restored, lets get back to the game”.
The 'after the fact' commentary was objected to by the goalkeeper. He noticed the pattern that every save he made was described as a Bohs shot, saved by the Pats keeper, and every goal I scored was credited as testimony to the majestic supremacy St Pats enjoyed over their city rivals. Complain as he did, it should be noted that his commentaries too were about as balanced as a North Korean 'State of the Nation' address.
These games we played until either the rain or the beatings got too heavy.
We'd then retreat indoors, to the fledgling world of computer-football. In the era of Pro-Evolution Soccer and FIFA 2012 games, it is difficult to comprehend how we got so much entertainment from primitive efforts as Kick-Off 2, Microprose Soccer and Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
The physics of the games were not of this world – a player jumping to head the ball could cover about 20% of the pitch in his leap, centre-halves casually broke the world long jump record with each boinking clearance from their squarely pixelated and unfeasibly large heads. Players moved at extraordinary speed, and the computer controlled goalkeepers seemed to be programmed by an anarcho-absurdist art movement. The controlling joysticks owned no vocabulary beyond ‘point’ and ‘shoot’, yet invented nuance added infinite layers of meaning to all the clunkiness the 64kB of RAM could muster.
Again we provided our own commentary. High stakes Pats v Bohs games, multi-legged affairs depending on whether I was winning or not. These games with all their quirks of pseudo lunar gravity conditions were contested with a fervour that I genuinely think exceeded that of the real players week to week. Victories were gracelessly indulged, defeats an unbearable torment.
Noting that the ‘learning tool’ the shop spivs had sold them was being used for nothing other than video games by their kids, there would occasionally be a stuffy parental directive that the computer was turned off and we turn our attention to something more worthwhile.
Enter Subbuteo.
Marketed as table-top football, I expect there were few outside the Anglo-Irish gentry who possessed a table large enough to adequately host the vast cloth pitch. Consequently we played table-top football on the floor, on our knees, scurrying about the edges of the pitch to flick our players in to position.
Accidents were frequent.
Players met the most gruesome of injuries, full-backs were routinely sheared at the ankles when crushed by a careless knee leaning over the pitch. The snap was sickening. The severed plastic player would often still be stuck to the knee when the clumsy culprit rose; a tragic base with lonely boots filled now with utterly detached feet and mournful socks remained on the pitch. A once feared international footballer now a pathetic abandoned stump, an Ozymandias of the beautiful game.
Sometimes an urgent attacking initiative might result in a human player rising to his feet and leaping across the pitch to switch wings. I saw one West German midfielder horribly decapitated in consequence of such reckless enthusiasm. We lowered to half-mast the Crayola flag of the fatherland on a lollipop stick which we had blu-tacked to the top of the scoreboard for subsequent games in that tournament.
Medical techniques were rudimentary at best. Many a seemingly ruined stump of a man was blu-tacked back to his base and sent back to the pitch to man his post. It’s not like nowadays lad.
My friend had the genuine official Subbuteo Bohemian FC team. I had some budget team decked all in red which I, erm, ‘customized’ with Tip-ex to give a touch of whiteness to the sleeves and make a more realistic St Pats kit, who also doubled as Arsenal when the need arose. I must take this opportunity to apologize to John McDonnell and Eddie Gormley who suffered horrific eye-injuries on account of my unsurgeonlike hand in administering the Tip-ex to the red jerseys.
One rainy summer holiday afternoon, with RTE showing nothing but a caption for hours on end apologizing that rain had stopped play at Wimbledon, we ran an FAI Cup tournament from the quarter-final stages. We played out each of the ties between ourselves, broadly fiddling the thing to ensure that Bohs and Pats met in the final through what you might call collusive goalkeeping and officiating.
The final was to be deadly serious however.
We ironed the pitch in preparation. We lined the players up in a team group before the game, and took real photos with a borrowed camera which back in those days needed to be brought to a shopping centre to get developed. We had a tin foil wrapped egg cup for the winner. Honest to god, we sang Amhran Na bhFiann. We then lined up our formations and got the 2 x 10 minute halves underway.
The play was clam tight. Half time 0-0. Chances in the second half were few and far between again. My sweeper system was impenetrable. Dave Tilson had been in prodigious form in the quarter final and the semi, but I had his number, big sellotaped together lump that he was.
With time running out and extra time on its way I broke rapidly out of defence. The ball moved quickly down the left flank then bounced off a Bohs winger before touching the hand of my opponent which was resting on the pitch. Handball. Blatant. Free-kick.
He set his wall: four men. He flicked two defenders to get tighter to the two midfielders I had sent in to the box, but this was a shooting opportunity and we both knew it. He held the stem of his goalkeeper stick in one hand, and held the goal itself in its place with the other. Moving the goal frame from its spot was a penalty offence and could cost the cup. I was known to be more than a little ruthless in working these technical transgressions to my advantage, so things were pretty tense.
Pat Kelch was my free taker. He too was blu-tacked. Heavily blu-tacked in fact. One of the greatest properties of the adaptable adhesive was the extra ballast it gave to players. They could hit the ball extra hard with the added weight. For Kelch I used way more blu-tack than was needed. He was more adhesive than plastic if the truth be known but in keeping with the realities of the game, he hit the ball harder than any player I’ve ever seen.
I lined up the crucial free-’flick’ with immense concentration. I ok’d it with my opponent that I was now about to strike the free. He confirmed that he was ready. I loaded up my index finger, pulled it tight as a catapult, then snapped it out with all the force, intent and hurt I could summon from my being.
The connection was sweet, Kelch propelled in to the air after impact with the ball and soared across the room. The ball burst through the wall sending the Gypo defenders spinning about the beautifully uncrinkled pitch like bowling pins. It tore past the helpless Bohs keeper, over the line, and smacked off the back stanchion of the goal frame before rolling back on to the 6 yard box.
“And Kelch has won it for St Pats!!!!....the very gods are held spellbound by what they have just witnessed here at Lansdowne Road....a strike worthy of a world cup final has won the FAI Cup....the hurt is over....the Saints are back in heaven”
But. There were protests.
“I saved it”
“You didn’t save it”
“I saved it, look at where the ball is”
“It hit the back of the goal and came back out. It’s a goal, I win, you lose, Pats win the cup.”
“No they don’t”
“Yeah they do”
“You’re a fucking spa....”
...and the conversation went badly downhill from there.
There may have been arm twisting. There might have been finger bending. It’s possible there were remarks about mothers. If we knew how to waterboard, we’d have done it. Some hitherto intact players were visited by a vengefulness so cruel and wanton that they were literally crushed by their feuding overlords and sent to the blu-tack ward. It wasn’t pretty. Match abandoned.
Decades on, this is the first time I have been able to address the hurt of the abandoned cup final. Morally St Pats were the winners, but in true League of Ireland tradition, our Subbuteo record books show only an asterisk and a lengthy explanation of injustices and the damage done.
I believe we may have stuck to European club tournaments thereafter .
We were perhaps the last generation who can honestly say ''we played football all day, every day''. We used the new trees as goalposts, and soon wore away a bald patch between the two most suitable young sycamores. To the Park-keeper's undoubted satisfaction this arid goalmouth has since made a recovery of growth surpassed only by the Lazarine follicles of Wayne Rooney's crown. It also betrays the fact that the kids are otherwise occupying their time.
Very often there was only two of us playing ball; the kid up the road was from a long line of Bohemians patrons, players, members, fanatics. One of us stood between the trees, the other took shots. This simple game developed a more competitive edge when a commentary from the shooting player was introduced. After blasting the ball in to the goal I would occasionally wheel away towards the non-existent adoring fans and in a nasal-drone owing much to Brian Moore's commentaries on ITV's 'The Match' enthusiastically rejoice “And Mark Ennis has surely put red and white ribbons on the FAI Cup.....it's heartbreak for Bohemians, glory for St Patricks...oh the magic of the cup!”
These forays in to fantasy were all too frequently overheard by roaming sorts not so interested in football. The requisite punishment for being imaginative was exacted with committed zeal. If they only knew the hooliganism opportunities that the 80's game offered I'm sure they would have been far more amenable to the sport.
The commentary would resume, flawlessly, once the beating had ended and the savages moved on to find kittens to crucify. “That unpleasantness seems to have abated, order has been restored, lets get back to the game”.
The 'after the fact' commentary was objected to by the goalkeeper. He noticed the pattern that every save he made was described as a Bohs shot, saved by the Pats keeper, and every goal I scored was credited as testimony to the majestic supremacy St Pats enjoyed over their city rivals. Complain as he did, it should be noted that his commentaries too were about as balanced as a North Korean 'State of the Nation' address.
These games we played until either the rain or the beatings got too heavy.
We'd then retreat indoors, to the fledgling world of computer-football. In the era of Pro-Evolution Soccer and FIFA 2012 games, it is difficult to comprehend how we got so much entertainment from primitive efforts as Kick-Off 2, Microprose Soccer and Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
The physics of the games were not of this world – a player jumping to head the ball could cover about 20% of the pitch in his leap, centre-halves casually broke the world long jump record with each boinking clearance from their squarely pixelated and unfeasibly large heads. Players moved at extraordinary speed, and the computer controlled goalkeepers seemed to be programmed by an anarcho-absurdist art movement. The controlling joysticks owned no vocabulary beyond ‘point’ and ‘shoot’, yet invented nuance added infinite layers of meaning to all the clunkiness the 64kB of RAM could muster.
Again we provided our own commentary. High stakes Pats v Bohs games, multi-legged affairs depending on whether I was winning or not. These games with all their quirks of pseudo lunar gravity conditions were contested with a fervour that I genuinely think exceeded that of the real players week to week. Victories were gracelessly indulged, defeats an unbearable torment.
Noting that the ‘learning tool’ the shop spivs had sold them was being used for nothing other than video games by their kids, there would occasionally be a stuffy parental directive that the computer was turned off and we turn our attention to something more worthwhile.
Enter Subbuteo.
Marketed as table-top football, I expect there were few outside the Anglo-Irish gentry who possessed a table large enough to adequately host the vast cloth pitch. Consequently we played table-top football on the floor, on our knees, scurrying about the edges of the pitch to flick our players in to position.
Accidents were frequent.
Players met the most gruesome of injuries, full-backs were routinely sheared at the ankles when crushed by a careless knee leaning over the pitch. The snap was sickening. The severed plastic player would often still be stuck to the knee when the clumsy culprit rose; a tragic base with lonely boots filled now with utterly detached feet and mournful socks remained on the pitch. A once feared international footballer now a pathetic abandoned stump, an Ozymandias of the beautiful game.
Sometimes an urgent attacking initiative might result in a human player rising to his feet and leaping across the pitch to switch wings. I saw one West German midfielder horribly decapitated in consequence of such reckless enthusiasm. We lowered to half-mast the Crayola flag of the fatherland on a lollipop stick which we had blu-tacked to the top of the scoreboard for subsequent games in that tournament.
Medical techniques were rudimentary at best. Many a seemingly ruined stump of a man was blu-tacked back to his base and sent back to the pitch to man his post. It’s not like nowadays lad.
My friend had the genuine official Subbuteo Bohemian FC team. I had some budget team decked all in red which I, erm, ‘customized’ with Tip-ex to give a touch of whiteness to the sleeves and make a more realistic St Pats kit, who also doubled as Arsenal when the need arose. I must take this opportunity to apologize to John McDonnell and Eddie Gormley who suffered horrific eye-injuries on account of my unsurgeonlike hand in administering the Tip-ex to the red jerseys.
One rainy summer holiday afternoon, with RTE showing nothing but a caption for hours on end apologizing that rain had stopped play at Wimbledon, we ran an FAI Cup tournament from the quarter-final stages. We played out each of the ties between ourselves, broadly fiddling the thing to ensure that Bohs and Pats met in the final through what you might call collusive goalkeeping and officiating.
The final was to be deadly serious however.
We ironed the pitch in preparation. We lined the players up in a team group before the game, and took real photos with a borrowed camera which back in those days needed to be brought to a shopping centre to get developed. We had a tin foil wrapped egg cup for the winner. Honest to god, we sang Amhran Na bhFiann. We then lined up our formations and got the 2 x 10 minute halves underway.
The play was clam tight. Half time 0-0. Chances in the second half were few and far between again. My sweeper system was impenetrable. Dave Tilson had been in prodigious form in the quarter final and the semi, but I had his number, big sellotaped together lump that he was.
With time running out and extra time on its way I broke rapidly out of defence. The ball moved quickly down the left flank then bounced off a Bohs winger before touching the hand of my opponent which was resting on the pitch. Handball. Blatant. Free-kick.
He set his wall: four men. He flicked two defenders to get tighter to the two midfielders I had sent in to the box, but this was a shooting opportunity and we both knew it. He held the stem of his goalkeeper stick in one hand, and held the goal itself in its place with the other. Moving the goal frame from its spot was a penalty offence and could cost the cup. I was known to be more than a little ruthless in working these technical transgressions to my advantage, so things were pretty tense.
Pat Kelch was my free taker. He too was blu-tacked. Heavily blu-tacked in fact. One of the greatest properties of the adaptable adhesive was the extra ballast it gave to players. They could hit the ball extra hard with the added weight. For Kelch I used way more blu-tack than was needed. He was more adhesive than plastic if the truth be known but in keeping with the realities of the game, he hit the ball harder than any player I’ve ever seen.
I lined up the crucial free-’flick’ with immense concentration. I ok’d it with my opponent that I was now about to strike the free. He confirmed that he was ready. I loaded up my index finger, pulled it tight as a catapult, then snapped it out with all the force, intent and hurt I could summon from my being.
The connection was sweet, Kelch propelled in to the air after impact with the ball and soared across the room. The ball burst through the wall sending the Gypo defenders spinning about the beautifully uncrinkled pitch like bowling pins. It tore past the helpless Bohs keeper, over the line, and smacked off the back stanchion of the goal frame before rolling back on to the 6 yard box.
“And Kelch has won it for St Pats!!!!....the very gods are held spellbound by what they have just witnessed here at Lansdowne Road....a strike worthy of a world cup final has won the FAI Cup....the hurt is over....the Saints are back in heaven”
But. There were protests.
“I saved it”
“You didn’t save it”
“I saved it, look at where the ball is”
“It hit the back of the goal and came back out. It’s a goal, I win, you lose, Pats win the cup.”
“No they don’t”
“Yeah they do”
“You’re a fucking spa....”
...and the conversation went badly downhill from there.
There may have been arm twisting. There might have been finger bending. It’s possible there were remarks about mothers. If we knew how to waterboard, we’d have done it. Some hitherto intact players were visited by a vengefulness so cruel and wanton that they were literally crushed by their feuding overlords and sent to the blu-tack ward. It wasn’t pretty. Match abandoned.
Decades on, this is the first time I have been able to address the hurt of the abandoned cup final. Morally St Pats were the winners, but in true League of Ireland tradition, our Subbuteo record books show only an asterisk and a lengthy explanation of injustices and the damage done.
I believe we may have stuck to European club tournaments thereafter .
Saturday, 7 April 2012
Little Wingers
I didn’t have the armchair to myself, I seldom do. My kids have warped the timespace of inheritance protocol and have set up occupation in the sitting room of my house for many many months now. Clearance to watch a football match on my own television in my own sitting room requires me to call bilateral talks at lunchtime with the key delegates of the Cartoonocracy. They are a hardline sort. They didn’t like the idea one bit. They’ve seen this stuff before; the games are soooo long, and sometimes Daddy gets cranky.
Timing can be a great ally in negotiation. The leverage of my having the Easter Bunny’s ear proved decisive in thrashing out a Good Friday Agreement. Pats v Rovers would be a standing room only affair in the Armchair Saint’s sitting room. I would send the Bunny's ear back to him after the game.
You should know more about the kids. The boy is three. I expect he will eventually be barred from most of the football stadia on this island unless legislation softens about jumping on seats, or headbutting. He spends much of the game engaged in a construction / destruction cycle involving Lego towers and karate chops.
The girl is five. She is precociously logical and has no tolerance for throwaway answers. You’d best respond to her queries with the kind of sure-footed precision that someone staring down the business end of pistol held by a Samuel L. Jackson character ought to deliver. Much of the narrative of the past week has been set against the backdrop of her evolving affections towards the violin which a few months ago was oh so central to her well being.
The violin looks beautiful and its sound has the potential to match. But the journey from screeching cacophony to elegant melodic flourish is long. Each persistent correction from her teacher nudges her further towards a satisfying sonorous articulation, but it too dents her enthusiasm. It’s an education in effort and reward, and right now she wants to throw the towel in.
It’s a new situation for me too. I’d like her to keep playing, but I don’t want her to play to please me. It was her idea to play the violin, it can be her idea to stop. But I know she will regret it, and that will be no satisfaction to either of us on the day some years down the road when that feeling bites hard on her. Rorsy and Tiger may well stroll down the 18th fairway at Augusta this weekend in epic sporting battle - both products of ‘enthusiastic’ paternal coaching from a tender age in their (fathers’?) chosen discipline. I can’t help but think of all the projects taken on by super motivated coaching Dads whose efforts are now eternally resented by their offspring. Must be scores of wounded kittens for every Tiger.
So each occasion she has expressed her admiration or appreciation of anything this week, I have planted a not very subtle seed of self-motivation by highlighting how much hard work the person who made it has put in to achieve that level of ability. She rumbled it pretty quick of course: “I know you’re talking about my violin Daddy, but I don’t want to play it anymore.”
An hour till kick-off. I have been admitted to the sitting room, I bribed the border guards with a small plate of ginger nuts. Channel hopping before the game I strike pure gold as Jimi Hendrix Live at The Isle of Wight is being broadcast. Now this is a proper pre-match build up.
Jimi’s guitar grinds, squeals, howls and roars in lysergic euphoria. This isn’t music; it defies notation. This apparently free-form fury is all under Jimi’s control, like a god juggling lightning bolts. He mouths each wail in perfect synchronisation. The illusion catches the attention of a ginger nut eating ex-musician.
Question 1: “Daddy, is that music happening now, somewhere else?”
No, this was over 40 years ago.
Question 2: “Daddy, is that man making those noises with his mouth?”
Daddy laughs. No, he’s making them with his guitar and kind of singing them too, but you can only hear his guitar.
Question 3 & 4: “Why is he doing that? Is he wearing the same kind of clothes as us?”
Well....his clothes are pretty different, aren’t they....very colourful. He’s doing it as part of his performance.....he was the best guitarist ever.
Question 5: “Did he put his fingers in all the right places on his guitar?”
Daddy laughs. Yeah, but he was way beyond that kind of thing.
“Daddy, I know you’re thinking about my violin and you’re going to talk about practicing”. Daddy laughs. This time, I actually wasn’t going to mention it.
The channel switched, the teams on the pitch. The boy sparks to attention. “Which one you-are Daddy, which one you-are?”. It becomes apparent that the boy thinks he’s watching a video game and that I am controlling one of the teams. My God, what have we done?
I explain to the crew that while I have no influence over the outcome of the game, we are rooting for the red and white guys. The boy gets excited at the numbers on the jerseys. “Number 9 kicking it, number 6 kicking the ball now, then number 8.” His commentary is preferable to and frequently more accurate than the efforts of the state broadcaster. However this is not the time to slate RTE, my gratitude to them for televising this game is eternal.
Vindicating my decision to not yet expose them to chilly evenings of football without the barrier of a television screen, the children express their boredom as early as the second minute. “Daddy are the red team going to score soon?”. Well, probably not. There may not be any goals, and that would be a good thing.
It is while processing this counter intuitive proposition that the girl’s thoughts are unceremoniously derailed by the blizzard of ginger nut crumbs which fill the air as Chris Forrester opens the scoring.
The boy was building his Lego tower, its base was precarious. As he stretched to put each additional story on to the wavering structure he grimaced in the fear that all which had been built might collapse. I didn’t need a mirror to know that Gary Twigg’s header off the bar was the catalyst for a similar expression closer to home.
We had a little chat about balance and how he needed to build the tower in the middle of the base. If you put the pieces in the wrong places you’ll have all manner of problems. At this point Killian Brennan illustrated my point with greater clarity than my words could ever muster, 2-0 Saints.
Much will be said about Pats third goal. I’ll not burden it further than to say it was so outrageous an effort that I must plead guilty to calling Forrester a ‘cabbage’ in the moments between the ball leaving his foot, tagging a cloud and landing in the goal.
In the aftermath of Ken ‘not-my-fault’ Oman pulling one back, my wife noted that Damian Richardson sounded very like my father; whence I praised the zeitgeist of her expeditious interjection and noted it as a great advert for the domestic game.
Pats scored a fourth, and a fifth, Brendan Clarke improvising a quarterback role with his booming deliveries tucked behind the haplessly turned fullbacks. You’d almost feel sorry for his contemporary at the other end of the field if he weren’t a Shamrock Rovers goalkeeper.
The match ends, it’s all very pleasing. It’s bedtime for the little people. The girl offers this pearl of wisdom as she leaves the room: “Daddy, don’t those boys in the green and white need to practice really hard if they want to be as good as the red team?”.
Timing can be a great ally in negotiation. The leverage of my having the Easter Bunny’s ear proved decisive in thrashing out a Good Friday Agreement. Pats v Rovers would be a standing room only affair in the Armchair Saint’s sitting room. I would send the Bunny's ear back to him after the game.
You should know more about the kids. The boy is three. I expect he will eventually be barred from most of the football stadia on this island unless legislation softens about jumping on seats, or headbutting. He spends much of the game engaged in a construction / destruction cycle involving Lego towers and karate chops.
The girl is five. She is precociously logical and has no tolerance for throwaway answers. You’d best respond to her queries with the kind of sure-footed precision that someone staring down the business end of pistol held by a Samuel L. Jackson character ought to deliver. Much of the narrative of the past week has been set against the backdrop of her evolving affections towards the violin which a few months ago was oh so central to her well being.
The violin looks beautiful and its sound has the potential to match. But the journey from screeching cacophony to elegant melodic flourish is long. Each persistent correction from her teacher nudges her further towards a satisfying sonorous articulation, but it too dents her enthusiasm. It’s an education in effort and reward, and right now she wants to throw the towel in.
It’s a new situation for me too. I’d like her to keep playing, but I don’t want her to play to please me. It was her idea to play the violin, it can be her idea to stop. But I know she will regret it, and that will be no satisfaction to either of us on the day some years down the road when that feeling bites hard on her. Rorsy and Tiger may well stroll down the 18th fairway at Augusta this weekend in epic sporting battle - both products of ‘enthusiastic’ paternal coaching from a tender age in their (fathers’?) chosen discipline. I can’t help but think of all the projects taken on by super motivated coaching Dads whose efforts are now eternally resented by their offspring. Must be scores of wounded kittens for every Tiger.
So each occasion she has expressed her admiration or appreciation of anything this week, I have planted a not very subtle seed of self-motivation by highlighting how much hard work the person who made it has put in to achieve that level of ability. She rumbled it pretty quick of course: “I know you’re talking about my violin Daddy, but I don’t want to play it anymore.”
An hour till kick-off. I have been admitted to the sitting room, I bribed the border guards with a small plate of ginger nuts. Channel hopping before the game I strike pure gold as Jimi Hendrix Live at The Isle of Wight is being broadcast. Now this is a proper pre-match build up.
Jimi’s guitar grinds, squeals, howls and roars in lysergic euphoria. This isn’t music; it defies notation. This apparently free-form fury is all under Jimi’s control, like a god juggling lightning bolts. He mouths each wail in perfect synchronisation. The illusion catches the attention of a ginger nut eating ex-musician.
Question 1: “Daddy, is that music happening now, somewhere else?”
No, this was over 40 years ago.
Question 2: “Daddy, is that man making those noises with his mouth?”
Daddy laughs. No, he’s making them with his guitar and kind of singing them too, but you can only hear his guitar.
Question 3 & 4: “Why is he doing that? Is he wearing the same kind of clothes as us?”
Well....his clothes are pretty different, aren’t they....very colourful. He’s doing it as part of his performance.....he was the best guitarist ever.
Question 5: “Did he put his fingers in all the right places on his guitar?”
Daddy laughs. Yeah, but he was way beyond that kind of thing.
“Daddy, I know you’re thinking about my violin and you’re going to talk about practicing”. Daddy laughs. This time, I actually wasn’t going to mention it.
The channel switched, the teams on the pitch. The boy sparks to attention. “Which one you-are Daddy, which one you-are?”. It becomes apparent that the boy thinks he’s watching a video game and that I am controlling one of the teams. My God, what have we done?
I explain to the crew that while I have no influence over the outcome of the game, we are rooting for the red and white guys. The boy gets excited at the numbers on the jerseys. “Number 9 kicking it, number 6 kicking the ball now, then number 8.” His commentary is preferable to and frequently more accurate than the efforts of the state broadcaster. However this is not the time to slate RTE, my gratitude to them for televising this game is eternal.
Vindicating my decision to not yet expose them to chilly evenings of football without the barrier of a television screen, the children express their boredom as early as the second minute. “Daddy are the red team going to score soon?”. Well, probably not. There may not be any goals, and that would be a good thing.
It is while processing this counter intuitive proposition that the girl’s thoughts are unceremoniously derailed by the blizzard of ginger nut crumbs which fill the air as Chris Forrester opens the scoring.
The boy was building his Lego tower, its base was precarious. As he stretched to put each additional story on to the wavering structure he grimaced in the fear that all which had been built might collapse. I didn’t need a mirror to know that Gary Twigg’s header off the bar was the catalyst for a similar expression closer to home.
We had a little chat about balance and how he needed to build the tower in the middle of the base. If you put the pieces in the wrong places you’ll have all manner of problems. At this point Killian Brennan illustrated my point with greater clarity than my words could ever muster, 2-0 Saints.
Much will be said about Pats third goal. I’ll not burden it further than to say it was so outrageous an effort that I must plead guilty to calling Forrester a ‘cabbage’ in the moments between the ball leaving his foot, tagging a cloud and landing in the goal.
In the aftermath of Ken ‘not-my-fault’ Oman pulling one back, my wife noted that Damian Richardson sounded very like my father; whence I praised the zeitgeist of her expeditious interjection and noted it as a great advert for the domestic game.
Pats scored a fourth, and a fifth, Brendan Clarke improvising a quarterback role with his booming deliveries tucked behind the haplessly turned fullbacks. You’d almost feel sorry for his contemporary at the other end of the field if he weren’t a Shamrock Rovers goalkeeper.
The match ends, it’s all very pleasing. It’s bedtime for the little people. The girl offers this pearl of wisdom as she leaves the room: “Daddy, don’t those boys in the green and white need to practice really hard if they want to be as good as the red team?”.
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Crocodile Racist
A few years ago, a man called Donal Ruane wrote a book called ''Tales From A Rearview Mirror'', a collection of short stories based around his experiences as a taxi-driver in Dublin. Let it be no reflection on Mr Ruane's efforts that I have not read this book, in fact his book is in the loftiest of company when I consider the books I have not read. It is not improbable that he or his kin will someday query their preferred search engine and land upon this text: feel free to take my ignorance as a back handed compliment.
The premise is that the spectrum of the city populace includes at its edges a class of spaceballs, fools, criminals, hookers, deviants, madmen, drunks, vomitters, defecators and fornicators - some of whom have cause to avail of a taxi service. Perhaps it was a creeping fear of seeing myself featured as subject matter in his book that kept me from robbing it from Easons.
Reporting on the antics of the misfits and misbehaved doubtless has the potential to make for an interesting read. Yet the seed of thought that began its germination within me was one of how the response to that book might read. "Tales From The Back Seat - Crazy Fuckers of the Dublin Taxi-Driving Scene".
As most people won't bother reading that book I have decided to spare myself the trouble of writing it. Nevertheless some exposition is required for the point which I will eventually make for you to disagree with.
The country was changing. For the first time since Henry VIII and his goons instigated their plantations, people were coming from abroad in large numbers to set up their lives in Ireland. We were, for once, stakeholders in a land of opportunity rather than emigration. Multiculturalism was on our doorstep, but of course there were pockets of doubt and scepticism at the new people and their new ways.
I was going to Dalymount Park, and I was behind schedule. A taxi was thumbed and boarded on the Malahide Road. The destination given, I clicked the safety belt home and began to text my estimated time of arrival to those whose company I was to share enduring a cold evening of offsides and throw-ins.
The driver may appear to readers as lazily drawn, but it is without exaggeration that I assure you he would have instincted the joyous feeling of early lunch in any casting director settling down for a day's auditioning of 1980's National Front caricatures. Shaved head - check, muscularly squat - check, darts player bling - check, swallow tattoo - but of course.
His big intimidating swollen bulb of a head looked at me through his rear view mirror. "Yeh going to a match?"
"Yeah", I answered, "Bohs and Pats". Mentioning the League of Ireland generally slays conversation with the chilling efficiency of a Sarajevo sniper, and I didn't particularly want to talk. A direct hit. He turned up the radio.
I'd make myself a warm favourite against most in a game of Beat-The-Intro. This was Crocodile Rock by Elton John, a cringeworthy orgy of nostalgia for 50's American diners, cars, jukeboxes, girls in cardigans that let you get to third base; maybe boys in cardigans for Elton.
I expected the driver to give this tune short shrift and perhaps load a screamcore version of "Deutschland Uber Alles" into his cd player. But no, he seemed pretty tickled by Elton's reminiscences of when rock was young. He didn't quite catch all the words, but he knew the tune and mumbled out some of the more clearly flagged rhyming couplets.
Feeling the groove, he then took a second shot at conversation, though it was clear his mode was to be more broadcast than dialogue. The topic a recent fare:
"I was going down Dorset Street and I saw these two jungle bunnies flagging me down. Big fellas. I pulled in for them and then they started this fucking unga-bunga jungle talking in the back. They're fucking everywhere."
I'm caught stone cold by this. Yes, I should have said, "I find your views distasteful Sir. Please pull over, I mean to disembark and do not wish to further give you my custom." My stance was unheroically that of a goldfish under aerial bombardment: eyes open, mouth closed, hoping it ends real soon.
His salvos of bile pause to reload just as the Crocodile Rock is building to its chorus. He's at a fork in his thoughts, though sadly not near enough Dalymount for my liking. He screws his face in a contortion so his largered cheeks near consume his eyes. I'm waiting for an onslaught of maniac aggression to be unleashed. What is unleashed is the most misguided karaooke squeal of Elton singalong imaginable.
Laaaaaa, la la la la laaaaaaaa.....
His shoulders rise around his ears like a diva bleeding her ersatz little heart out,
La la la la laaaaaaaa.....
he shakes his pasty cathedral dome skull from side to side, pleading a mercy from the overwhelming emotion Sir Elton has stirred in him,
La la la la laaaaaaaa.....
his right thumb slaps a snare drum on the steering wheel, his left the beats in between - it makes the inky swallows on his hands flutter in the cab like Elton and Suzie from the song jiving on the diner floor while their milk shakes are made.
The chorus ends. The maniac steps off the concert stage and back on to the soap box.
"I wasn't comfortable with them talking their jungle language and I could see them keeping looking at me. Don't get me wrong I'm ready if anyone wants to the act bollox, I keep this under the seat..."
While driving he reached under the seat keeping one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road. He produced a thick lump of wood on a chain and lifted it up to show me before looking over his shoulder to read my reaction. Seemingly he didn't trust the mirror any more, he wanted to look straight at me with utter disregard for his moving vehicle or those in its path. For all the inability to dance and supposed penile modesty, never in my life was I happier to have my soul cased in a white skin.
He turned his attention back to the road.
"Still it was getting to me, I got a bad feeling off them, so I saw this copper up near the traffic lights and I pulled over. I says to the garda that I was uncomfortable with the two fellas in the back - that they were up to something. The garda took them out of the car and that was that. Dodgy bastards aren't they?"
This again followed by the piercing falsetto Elton chorus in all its deranged glory. Who would have thought that such a hardened bigot could harbour a soft spot for the canon of a bisexual pianist?
Phibsboro. Like a remorseful client at the red light district, I paid my way and sheepishly got out of there.
The match itself a 2-2 draw. The obligatory abuse of opposition players resonates rawly around the sparsely attended grounds of the League of Ireland. A derby between Dublin teams, where players, managers and clubs ride the league carousel with the loyalty of a viagral mongrel is a perfect breeding ground for insular animosity.
On the days that I have risen from my armchair, and even on days when a microphone too near the stands records a profanity forever, I have heard players and managers (don't even need to start on match officials) insulted - sometimes with the aid of melody - on the basis of the following. The list is not comprehensive, merely a taster:
Drug taking
Drug dealing
Paedophilia
Infidelity
Being a Rapist
Having AIDS
Celebrations of a wife's accommodating manner
Theft
Receding hair
Excessive hair
Looking like an alien
Size of nose
Homosexuality
The more outrageous the abuse, the louder the approval from those near the source. On occasion - at different grounds, with different clubs - I have heard black footballers have some remark passed at their expense based on some thinly veiled references to the presumed background of their ancestors - not necessarily shouted for the player to hear, but for the edification of their fellow fans. Almost invariably this has been met with a self-policing response among the fans along the lines of ''leave the racist stuff out lads''. Never is it ''leave the paedo stuff out'', or ''leave the terminal disease stuff out''.
Others are probably different, but I would take far greater offence to most of the abuse in the above list than if someone made a barb at me based on my ethnicity. The kind of racism that I perceive to be behind the taunts of football fans is merely a malformed attempt at humour to entertain their mates. It is hardly the work of a considered manifesto based on a fervent belief that our society should be ethnocentrically stratified. We are not talking about the taxi driving sociopath here - he is a sickening racist, others just make clumsy cracks based on race. Its very different.
Yes, yes, you can't take these things lightly of course and the 'kick racism out of football' type campaigns are to be lauded, but I believe that both the extent and intent of racism in football is overplayed. I remain forever puzzled at how some people can question the parentage or sexual activities of a player, accuse them of the most serious criminality, wish a terminal disease upon them, and then take the moral high ground if someone should whisper a monkey noise. Funny old game.
The premise is that the spectrum of the city populace includes at its edges a class of spaceballs, fools, criminals, hookers, deviants, madmen, drunks, vomitters, defecators and fornicators - some of whom have cause to avail of a taxi service. Perhaps it was a creeping fear of seeing myself featured as subject matter in his book that kept me from robbing it from Easons.
Reporting on the antics of the misfits and misbehaved doubtless has the potential to make for an interesting read. Yet the seed of thought that began its germination within me was one of how the response to that book might read. "Tales From The Back Seat - Crazy Fuckers of the Dublin Taxi-Driving Scene".
As most people won't bother reading that book I have decided to spare myself the trouble of writing it. Nevertheless some exposition is required for the point which I will eventually make for you to disagree with.
The country was changing. For the first time since Henry VIII and his goons instigated their plantations, people were coming from abroad in large numbers to set up their lives in Ireland. We were, for once, stakeholders in a land of opportunity rather than emigration. Multiculturalism was on our doorstep, but of course there were pockets of doubt and scepticism at the new people and their new ways.
I was going to Dalymount Park, and I was behind schedule. A taxi was thumbed and boarded on the Malahide Road. The destination given, I clicked the safety belt home and began to text my estimated time of arrival to those whose company I was to share enduring a cold evening of offsides and throw-ins.
The driver may appear to readers as lazily drawn, but it is without exaggeration that I assure you he would have instincted the joyous feeling of early lunch in any casting director settling down for a day's auditioning of 1980's National Front caricatures. Shaved head - check, muscularly squat - check, darts player bling - check, swallow tattoo - but of course.
His big intimidating swollen bulb of a head looked at me through his rear view mirror. "Yeh going to a match?"
"Yeah", I answered, "Bohs and Pats". Mentioning the League of Ireland generally slays conversation with the chilling efficiency of a Sarajevo sniper, and I didn't particularly want to talk. A direct hit. He turned up the radio.
I'd make myself a warm favourite against most in a game of Beat-The-Intro. This was Crocodile Rock by Elton John, a cringeworthy orgy of nostalgia for 50's American diners, cars, jukeboxes, girls in cardigans that let you get to third base; maybe boys in cardigans for Elton.
I expected the driver to give this tune short shrift and perhaps load a screamcore version of "Deutschland Uber Alles" into his cd player. But no, he seemed pretty tickled by Elton's reminiscences of when rock was young. He didn't quite catch all the words, but he knew the tune and mumbled out some of the more clearly flagged rhyming couplets.
Feeling the groove, he then took a second shot at conversation, though it was clear his mode was to be more broadcast than dialogue. The topic a recent fare:
"I was going down Dorset Street and I saw these two jungle bunnies flagging me down. Big fellas. I pulled in for them and then they started this fucking unga-bunga jungle talking in the back. They're fucking everywhere."
I'm caught stone cold by this. Yes, I should have said, "I find your views distasteful Sir. Please pull over, I mean to disembark and do not wish to further give you my custom." My stance was unheroically that of a goldfish under aerial bombardment: eyes open, mouth closed, hoping it ends real soon.
His salvos of bile pause to reload just as the Crocodile Rock is building to its chorus. He's at a fork in his thoughts, though sadly not near enough Dalymount for my liking. He screws his face in a contortion so his largered cheeks near consume his eyes. I'm waiting for an onslaught of maniac aggression to be unleashed. What is unleashed is the most misguided karaooke squeal of Elton singalong imaginable.
Laaaaaa, la la la la laaaaaaaa.....
His shoulders rise around his ears like a diva bleeding her ersatz little heart out,
La la la la laaaaaaaa.....
he shakes his pasty cathedral dome skull from side to side, pleading a mercy from the overwhelming emotion Sir Elton has stirred in him,
La la la la laaaaaaaa.....
his right thumb slaps a snare drum on the steering wheel, his left the beats in between - it makes the inky swallows on his hands flutter in the cab like Elton and Suzie from the song jiving on the diner floor while their milk shakes are made.
The chorus ends. The maniac steps off the concert stage and back on to the soap box.
"I wasn't comfortable with them talking their jungle language and I could see them keeping looking at me. Don't get me wrong I'm ready if anyone wants to the act bollox, I keep this under the seat..."
While driving he reached under the seat keeping one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road. He produced a thick lump of wood on a chain and lifted it up to show me before looking over his shoulder to read my reaction. Seemingly he didn't trust the mirror any more, he wanted to look straight at me with utter disregard for his moving vehicle or those in its path. For all the inability to dance and supposed penile modesty, never in my life was I happier to have my soul cased in a white skin.
He turned his attention back to the road.
"Still it was getting to me, I got a bad feeling off them, so I saw this copper up near the traffic lights and I pulled over. I says to the garda that I was uncomfortable with the two fellas in the back - that they were up to something. The garda took them out of the car and that was that. Dodgy bastards aren't they?"
This again followed by the piercing falsetto Elton chorus in all its deranged glory. Who would have thought that such a hardened bigot could harbour a soft spot for the canon of a bisexual pianist?
Phibsboro. Like a remorseful client at the red light district, I paid my way and sheepishly got out of there.
The match itself a 2-2 draw. The obligatory abuse of opposition players resonates rawly around the sparsely attended grounds of the League of Ireland. A derby between Dublin teams, where players, managers and clubs ride the league carousel with the loyalty of a viagral mongrel is a perfect breeding ground for insular animosity.
On the days that I have risen from my armchair, and even on days when a microphone too near the stands records a profanity forever, I have heard players and managers (don't even need to start on match officials) insulted - sometimes with the aid of melody - on the basis of the following. The list is not comprehensive, merely a taster:
Drug taking
Drug dealing
Paedophilia
Infidelity
Being a Rapist
Having AIDS
Celebrations of a wife's accommodating manner
Theft
Receding hair
Excessive hair
Looking like an alien
Size of nose
Homosexuality
The more outrageous the abuse, the louder the approval from those near the source. On occasion - at different grounds, with different clubs - I have heard black footballers have some remark passed at their expense based on some thinly veiled references to the presumed background of their ancestors - not necessarily shouted for the player to hear, but for the edification of their fellow fans. Almost invariably this has been met with a self-policing response among the fans along the lines of ''leave the racist stuff out lads''. Never is it ''leave the paedo stuff out'', or ''leave the terminal disease stuff out''.
Others are probably different, but I would take far greater offence to most of the abuse in the above list than if someone made a barb at me based on my ethnicity. The kind of racism that I perceive to be behind the taunts of football fans is merely a malformed attempt at humour to entertain their mates. It is hardly the work of a considered manifesto based on a fervent belief that our society should be ethnocentrically stratified. We are not talking about the taxi driving sociopath here - he is a sickening racist, others just make clumsy cracks based on race. Its very different.
Yes, yes, you can't take these things lightly of course and the 'kick racism out of football' type campaigns are to be lauded, but I believe that both the extent and intent of racism in football is overplayed. I remain forever puzzled at how some people can question the parentage or sexual activities of a player, accuse them of the most serious criminality, wish a terminal disease upon them, and then take the moral high ground if someone should whisper a monkey noise. Funny old game.
Monday, 27 February 2012
Gardai recover money at Harolds Cross
The advice went that if you wanted to sprout hair in a particular area of your body then the best way to stimulate the follicles was by cutting back any existing hair – scant as it may be. It's a long game. For bushy growth one must raze the hair back to the skin and endure a period of no hair where hair is most desired. I have heard tales – and they may be apocryphal, or else I might just outright deny them – of impressionable young Oasis fans in the mid-90's who shaved the lonesome wisps above the bridge of their nose in the hope of transforming a sparse tundra in to a rich forest of Gallagher mono-brow. That some of these pioneering galoots ended up looking more like Bert from Sesame Street than madferit rock'n'roll revivalists was a near inevitable side effect of tampering with Mother Nature's fuzz rationing.
The method may have been ill-judged, but I expect there are few among us who have not at one time or another sought to steer our appearance in to the slipstream of those we admire.
Now its all good and well trying to look like your favourite footballer or musician, but what I eventually came round to thinking was pretty weird was when the sportswear manufacturers pitched the garb of middle aged men to teenage boys.
Ladies and gentlemen, the manager's jacket.
They were big and warm, they staved off the biting winds and protected to a reasonable degree against the rain - your mother approved of these things. Yet she did not think it weird that you sought to carry yourself in the fashion of men of her own generation: Jack Charlton, Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger. Me and my mate managed to sell our parents on the thermal benefits. These ill fitting boiler jackets - bought over-sized to allow for growing space of course - did the promised job of staving off the elements, but there is absolutely no doubt in my now matured mind that this benefit was completely out weighed by the fact we looked like fucking dorks.
Sadder still was that we were oblivious to this glaring truth.
What amazes me most in hindsight is that when coming home from Friday night matches around the parts of the city where being streetwise and fleet of foot were worthier assets than a warm coat, is how we weren't kicked very hard in the nuts and got our bus fare stolen more frequently than we did.
Pricey as these coats were, it one day became very clear that the premium was paid on branding rather than any breathtaking exposition of tailoring.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and Pats were playing a 'home' fixture in Harolds Cross. Finding nobody who could muster the same levels of enthusiasm as myself towards this 'Group B' fixture, I decided to take a solo venture out to the 'Theatre of Uncomfortable Flashbacks'. These were the festering laundry days of the mid-season league split, and the horrific drudgery of being in the lower tier; robbed of the big games that lightened the load of supporting a prospectless team.
The trip from Coolock to Harolds Cross was one requiring two buses and a bit of footwork between them. My pocket money just about covered the four bus fares of the round trip, a match programme, £2 admission and a few pence for a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar. The quaint naivety of it all is hard for me to reckon with - it sounds like something from a colliery town in the post-war years but that's exactly how it was in 1992. I was 13 years old and the delicious vices of distraction that preoccupy the teenage mind had yet to penetrate my love of going to watch football. I seldom missed a bad game.
On this particular day all was going swimmingly until I got to the double jobbing greyhound racing track. Approaching the turnstile I felt around my pockets for the required funds. Not that pocket...erm, not that one either, must be the inside one...no...maybe zipped in my tracksuit bottoms...hmmph, no. Nowhere.
I stepped out of the not very long turnstile queue so I could have my own fluster space. I performed the gawky chicken dance as only a teenager feverishly rummaging for misplaced money in a too large jacket can. My discomfort simmered towards a burning panic as I realised the scale of predicament unfolding. I knew absolutely nobody at the game. Even if I did, the turnstile guy was unlikely to embrace a 'lost my money heartbreak serenade' to help me out. I hadn't even got 20p to call home and get me out of this far-side-of-the-city fiasco.
The situation improved with the passing minutes as I figured out that the money had slipped through my pocket and in to the inner lining of the jacket. All was not lost, but I had coins rolling all round the seams at the back of the enormous jacket where no coins should be. I tried to chase them back through the hole from whence they came.
They were large pockets, though infuriatingly distant from the bottom of the coat. There was much space to navigate to carefully guide each coin with your fingertips. Like a Saturday night gameshow challenge the coins slipped away again and again before I could locate the hole in the pocket. I twitched my fingers, coat and body in to all combinations of contortions and convulsions desperately trying to liberate the damned four pound odd. Had I left a cap on the ground in front of me I'd easily have covered the lost coins in donations for the one boy freak show I was putting on. Oh for the small mercy of it being the days before cameraphones and youtube.
Plan A was not working, and was never likely to work. Plan B involved ripping the lining of my new – and in my mind – very dapper middle aged mans training ground attire. This I tried. And this too I failed at.
No luck. I needed someone to help me. The only face I recognised was that of an elderly one-eyed man who used to stand near the turnstiles. He was perhaps some manner of a bib-less match steward. I didn't know him whatsoever, but I always wondered what fun and games he was having before he lost the eye. To recap: I was 13, he was old and had one eye. Likely conversation partners we were not.
He had little interest in pulling apart the jacket of a pubescent boy in full view of the queueing matchgoers. In hindsight I can acknowledge he had a point.
In true Bosco storybook fashion my predicament was resolved with the aid of a member of An Garda Siochana. An apologetic improvisation on the coat lining with a nail clippers saw that - unlike many - I did not lose my money at the dog track, and bucking the trend of media reports I become one of the few League of Ireland fans who was ever assisted in to a match by our state police.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Daylight Robbery
The visiting team was robbed, I remember it clearly. My first trip to Richmond Park, and there was a controversy that is still spoken of in certain circles by uncertain squares. St Pats, then putting together a league-winning squad, won 4-1 without really breaking a sweat. The robbery’s effect on the result was nebulous. Actually, even that lowly assessment may be overstating it, for the robbery took place not on the field, but in the dressing room.
The date was 13th May 1989, the occasion was Eamonn Gregg’s Testimonial. The nine-times capped international full-back was a work-mate of my Dad’s in the ESB. To my eternal gratitude he offered me the chance to lead out the League of Ireland XI which would provide the opposition to Brian Kerr’s side.
The League of Ireland side was - looking now at the match programme - to have been managed by Billy Young. I have no recollection of Young being present. Ray Treacy was running the show. They wore a green strip, and I was given an Ireland-ish tracksuit to take in to the away dressing room with me to sport while leading the team out. This was not what you would call an official Ireland tracksuit, it was more the kind of garb you might spot in O’Carrolls or Dublin Airport duty free tantalising tourists to get another fix of merch to go with their shamrock bodhrán and shillelagh.
And so in to the dressing room. This was superstar stuff in my eyes. I was among real footballers in a real dressing room. Ray Treacy welcomed me in and gave me a spot to get changed in among the players. The language of the men was excitingly choice. My Ma would have had me out of there in a flash if she knew I’d be hearing the same kind of vulgarity that I could hear at home.
One of the more vivid memories I have of the dressing room experience was my astonishment at the huge flopping members that were being unveiled across the changing area. I was a boy of 10 years. There was much I had not yet seen in this world. Men did not get changed down to their barest when I went to watch my Da’s team play in the park. The difference between League of Ireland footballers and park players was never clearer to me before or since.
Ray Treacy began to address his men, presumably laying out the loosest of formations for what they perhaps regarded as a playful afternoon kick-about preceding a serious evening of socialising. The manager suddenly found himself without that most fundamental of 80’s management tools - a pen. “A pen. Has anyone got a pen?”, he asked the partially-dressed motley soon to take the field as the league’s elite. When the “I’ve no pen, but I’ve plenty of lead in me pencil” cracks and its ripples of banter dissipated, I shuffled towards Ray.
In the absurdly oversized faux-Eire tracksuit, the studs on my football boots were trampling the leggings about 4 inches up from the hem. I handed Ray the biro I had brought to take autographs with. Sap that I am, I may even have asked him for his autograph as I handed him the pen, like it was some kind of quid pro quo.
We took to the field with me leading the team out as planned. I could hear my Dad and my Uncle cheering me as I took the team down towards the shed end for the kickabout. I shuffled nervously around the six yard box hoping someone would give me a pass of one of the balls that were whizzing like cannonballs over my head. Dundalk keeper Alan O’Neill was between the posts and after he had impressively pulled a cross from the sky he smilingly rolled the ball out to me and invited me to take a shot.
This was my moment. If I could rocket this ball past the best goalkeeper in the League of Ireland someone would be bound to notice and it wouldn’t be long before word got to Brian Kerr and my football career would be fast-tracked from the ignominious lull it was enduring as 14th man for Priorswood U11s in the Brenfer League 11D.
In hindsight I acknowledge that I did not factor in the Size-5-ness of the ball. I was used to kicking a £1.99 ‘Cup Champion’ ball in the park, and a Size 4 along the touchline with my fellow subs for Priorswood. Kicking a Size 5 was like booting the ornamental concrete orbs on the pillars of the posher driveways in housing estates. To be honest I think I recoiled further than the ball moved forward. I went from hoping everyone saw me to hoping nobody saw me. I had also managed to hurt my ankle in this pathetic attempt to make Richmond Park swoon at my potential. I swallowed the pain like a toddler forcing the last sickening mouthful of vegetables down to qualify for dessert privileges.
The ref summoned the captains and mascots. Hands were shook, backs patted, photos taken, and I left the pitch. I went back to the dressing room and stepped out of the tracksuit. I put my own clothes back on and went out to watch Pats play the League of Ireland side off the park.
The next day my Dad got a phone call from Eamonn asking could we arrange to get the Ireland tracksuit back to him. “That’s no sweat Eamonn, I’ll box that off,” my Dad replied in characteristic manner.
He put the handset back on the receiver - it was the 80’s remember - and quizzed me as to the whereabouts of the Ireland tracksuit. I told him I took it off and left it in the dressing room.
Well, there was phonecall upon phonecall, the same questions answered many times over; the same account given of going to the dressing room, taking off the tracksuit - LEAVING IT THERE - and putting on my own clothes before returning to the stand for the match. Weeks of this stuff.
Sometimes I’d be asleep in my cell and the screws would come in and shine 1000 watt lights in my pupils, call me a lying paddy bastard and make me explain again what happened that afternoon. That I had as much use for a tracksuit that sagged inches beyond my arms as Paul Doolin has for Wash cut & blow dry discount vouchers never seemed to occur to anyone else.
The tracksuit - to my knowldege - was never found. But no matter how clearly and frequently I gave my account, I could never escape the stigma of being prime suspect in the Eamonn Gregg Testimonial Faux Eire Tracksuit Robbery.
The Pats Squad: Dave Henderson, Eamonn Gregg, Pat Kelch, John McDonnell, Mick Moody, John Treacy, Pat Fenlon, Maurice O'Driscoll, Robbie Gaffney, Paul Byrne, Mark Ennis, Paul Campbell, Derek Gaugh, Damien Byrne, Conor Best
League of Ireland: Alan O'Neill, Dermot O'Neill, Harry Kenny, Kevin Brady, Martin Lawlor, Mick Neville, Paul Whelan, Brian Carey, Paul Doolin, Jim Donnelly, Eugene Lawless, Martin Murray, Derek Murray, Joe Hanrahan, Derek Swan, Dessie Gorman
The date was 13th May 1989, the occasion was Eamonn Gregg’s Testimonial. The nine-times capped international full-back was a work-mate of my Dad’s in the ESB. To my eternal gratitude he offered me the chance to lead out the League of Ireland XI which would provide the opposition to Brian Kerr’s side.
The League of Ireland side was - looking now at the match programme - to have been managed by Billy Young. I have no recollection of Young being present. Ray Treacy was running the show. They wore a green strip, and I was given an Ireland-ish tracksuit to take in to the away dressing room with me to sport while leading the team out. This was not what you would call an official Ireland tracksuit, it was more the kind of garb you might spot in O’Carrolls or Dublin Airport duty free tantalising tourists to get another fix of merch to go with their shamrock bodhrán and shillelagh.
And so in to the dressing room. This was superstar stuff in my eyes. I was among real footballers in a real dressing room. Ray Treacy welcomed me in and gave me a spot to get changed in among the players. The language of the men was excitingly choice. My Ma would have had me out of there in a flash if she knew I’d be hearing the same kind of vulgarity that I could hear at home.
One of the more vivid memories I have of the dressing room experience was my astonishment at the huge flopping members that were being unveiled across the changing area. I was a boy of 10 years. There was much I had not yet seen in this world. Men did not get changed down to their barest when I went to watch my Da’s team play in the park. The difference between League of Ireland footballers and park players was never clearer to me before or since.
Ray Treacy began to address his men, presumably laying out the loosest of formations for what they perhaps regarded as a playful afternoon kick-about preceding a serious evening of socialising. The manager suddenly found himself without that most fundamental of 80’s management tools - a pen. “A pen. Has anyone got a pen?”, he asked the partially-dressed motley soon to take the field as the league’s elite. When the “I’ve no pen, but I’ve plenty of lead in me pencil” cracks and its ripples of banter dissipated, I shuffled towards Ray.
In the absurdly oversized faux-Eire tracksuit, the studs on my football boots were trampling the leggings about 4 inches up from the hem. I handed Ray the biro I had brought to take autographs with. Sap that I am, I may even have asked him for his autograph as I handed him the pen, like it was some kind of quid pro quo.
We took to the field with me leading the team out as planned. I could hear my Dad and my Uncle cheering me as I took the team down towards the shed end for the kickabout. I shuffled nervously around the six yard box hoping someone would give me a pass of one of the balls that were whizzing like cannonballs over my head. Dundalk keeper Alan O’Neill was between the posts and after he had impressively pulled a cross from the sky he smilingly rolled the ball out to me and invited me to take a shot.
This was my moment. If I could rocket this ball past the best goalkeeper in the League of Ireland someone would be bound to notice and it wouldn’t be long before word got to Brian Kerr and my football career would be fast-tracked from the ignominious lull it was enduring as 14th man for Priorswood U11s in the Brenfer League 11D.
In hindsight I acknowledge that I did not factor in the Size-5-ness of the ball. I was used to kicking a £1.99 ‘Cup Champion’ ball in the park, and a Size 4 along the touchline with my fellow subs for Priorswood. Kicking a Size 5 was like booting the ornamental concrete orbs on the pillars of the posher driveways in housing estates. To be honest I think I recoiled further than the ball moved forward. I went from hoping everyone saw me to hoping nobody saw me. I had also managed to hurt my ankle in this pathetic attempt to make Richmond Park swoon at my potential. I swallowed the pain like a toddler forcing the last sickening mouthful of vegetables down to qualify for dessert privileges.
The ref summoned the captains and mascots. Hands were shook, backs patted, photos taken, and I left the pitch. I went back to the dressing room and stepped out of the tracksuit. I put my own clothes back on and went out to watch Pats play the League of Ireland side off the park.
The next day my Dad got a phone call from Eamonn asking could we arrange to get the Ireland tracksuit back to him. “That’s no sweat Eamonn, I’ll box that off,” my Dad replied in characteristic manner.
He put the handset back on the receiver - it was the 80’s remember - and quizzed me as to the whereabouts of the Ireland tracksuit. I told him I took it off and left it in the dressing room.
Well, there was phonecall upon phonecall, the same questions answered many times over; the same account given of going to the dressing room, taking off the tracksuit - LEAVING IT THERE - and putting on my own clothes before returning to the stand for the match. Weeks of this stuff.
Sometimes I’d be asleep in my cell and the screws would come in and shine 1000 watt lights in my pupils, call me a lying paddy bastard and make me explain again what happened that afternoon. That I had as much use for a tracksuit that sagged inches beyond my arms as Paul Doolin has for Wash cut & blow dry discount vouchers never seemed to occur to anyone else.
The tracksuit - to my knowldege - was never found. But no matter how clearly and frequently I gave my account, I could never escape the stigma of being prime suspect in the Eamonn Gregg Testimonial Faux Eire Tracksuit Robbery.
The Pats Squad: Dave Henderson, Eamonn Gregg, Pat Kelch, John McDonnell, Mick Moody, John Treacy, Pat Fenlon, Maurice O'Driscoll, Robbie Gaffney, Paul Byrne, Mark Ennis, Paul Campbell, Derek Gaugh, Damien Byrne, Conor Best
League of Ireland: Alan O'Neill, Dermot O'Neill, Harry Kenny, Kevin Brady, Martin Lawlor, Mick Neville, Paul Whelan, Brian Carey, Paul Doolin, Jim Donnelly, Eugene Lawless, Martin Murray, Derek Murray, Joe Hanrahan, Derek Swan, Dessie Gorman
Monday, 20 February 2012
The Art of Defeat
Losing football matches may seem a somewhat counter intuitive strategy when the endgame is all about victory, the creation of legend and the construction of a hearty store of warm memories to feed our souls on cold days. But, to lose, when clearly - and I mean indisputably, undeniably - you are the better team, is not defeat. It is, readers, an exhibition of artful cunning. Avant-garde football.
Having showcased their class with an exhibition of ball retention, methodical approach play and inventive attacking sequences, St Pats really had taken enough out of the two legs against Cliftonville to assure both themselves and their support of their worth this season. Goals were nonchalantly scored - and even more nonchalantly ruled out lest anyone get carried away by winning as comfortably on the scoreboard as the passages of play would testify. The durability of the goalpost paintwork was expertly tested by John Russell, who enthusiastically conducted some further experiments on the durability of fibulae among the visiting Cliftonville midfield. His endeavour warranted reward and it was telling of the goodness of character and oh-so-keen judgement of Richie Winter to allow him to enjoy much of the second half from the comfort of the dugout.
Also laudable was the groove of improvisation which Barry Murphy brought to the game. His approach to dispatching backpasses was truly groundbreaking with all kinds of unexpected angles being explored. We were brought further to the cusp of great innovation on the Cliftonville goal when Murphy’s movements astonished all onlookers. The abstract position he was drawn to seemed to phase some of his colleagues but doubtless all are still getting know each others beat at this early stage of the season. We can surely expect a stable tempo to materialise in the defence before the curtain rises on the 2012 league campaign.
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