Days of Heaven (24 page)

Even those of us who are not alcoholics, are not exactly grown-ups either.

And when you throw in all those who
are
alcoholics, and who are in positions of influence, you start to get a sense of where we might be going wrong.

It has been observed that the way we collectively behaved during the boom years was a bit like Paddy winning a massive compo claim and spending the money exuberantly until it all runs out, at
which point he expresses great surprise that such a strange thing should have happened, just when everything was going so well.

Kevin Myers has mused much on our astonishing inability or refusal to plan things properly, or to plan them at all. Thus we can build hundreds of miles of motorways with no service areas, and we
think that’s all right. We have this delinquent streak, tending repeatedly towards self-destruction.

We seem to be uncomfortable with any strategy other than making it up as we go along, which may explain how so many of the Irish got around Italy in 1990, improvising, living on their wits,
scraping together the means of survival and looking after the drunk ones, knowing that in a very short time, they would have to be looking after you. I guess you could keep that going, all right,
for about three weeks.

And we viewed it as normal that men would spend nine-tenths of their money on gargle on the first night on foreign soil, caring nothing for the morrow.

We don’t seem to have any idea what to do with money apart from to waste it. And we have a genius for that. All of which are the classic traits of the teenager on the beer, the immature
person.

Or maybe I just favour this theory, because it seems to describe my own condition. In many ways I allowed my teenage years to continue all the way through my twenties and into my thirties. I had
taken on vast responsibilities, quite casually, without realising that I might have to become a fully functioning adult, too, in order to make it all work. And in my case, that would mean making an
agonising reappraisal of my drinking.

Which would mean basically giving it up.

But all this is much clearer now in hindsight.

One of the reasons we don’t rightly grasp these things at the time is because the drink itself is stopping us from getting there — it is, as they say, cunning, baffling, powerful. We
are still getting something out of it, still getting the message that everything is going to work out fine and that
we
are all right, it is everyone else who is wrong.

As far as I could discern, I was mainly a social drinker, doing a job which demanded that I socialise, and drink. At the time of Italia 90 I was drinking no more than many people I knew, though
I now realise that many people I knew were either alcoholics themselves or getting there.

I was working all the time and apparently doing well and I could hardly stay sober for that long if I had some deep-seated problem, could I? It would take me a long time to understand that I was
working mainly in order to create a space to drink, that that first pint in Mulligan’s after I dropped in my copy had become a holy thing, if not the entire point of the exercise.

It is so hard to tell the points at which you are crossing into more dangerous territory, all you know is that when you find yourself there, you can’t get back. Well, there is one way of
getting back, but that means not drinking again, and that can seem pretty unimaginable.

I can’t tell for sure if I crossed into those badlands during Italia 90, I just know that by the end of the year Jane and I weren’t living together any more.

And it most certainly didn’t feel like it back then, but maybe it was better that way. I was about 19 years old at the time, regardless of what it said on my birth certificate.

I would still see a lot of Roseanne, because I was only around the corner, in Monkstown. I would have to start growing up somehow, although I didn’t start to understand that for about
another five years.

First, I would need to improve my typing skills.

And I hope this is entirely coincidental, but it was only in writing this book that I realised that I stopped drinking for good at Christmas 1995 — which was just a few weeks after Jack
resigned, having failed to qualify for Euro 96. At the time I didn’t see a direct connection. Or even an indirect connection. I don’t remember thinking that the Charlton years were now
at an end, the good times were over, that it was time we all cleaned up our act, but I’m inclined to wonder if I was subconsciously responding to these deeper rhythms.

It just seems like too much of coincidence, that I finally came of age at the end of this roistering saga of football and beer, this bubble in which we would stay forever young. Thankfully, that
other bubble would be along soon, the money-bubble, in which we could divert ourselves. But it is tempting to see the Charlton years as the last big blow-out for Paddy in general, his wild years
before the onset of maturity, or at least the trappings of maturity.

Jack leaving us in 1995, his work here done, was supposed to signal the end of Paddy’s growing pains — or maybe it was just the beginning of the end.

Or maybe we weren’t even ready for that yet.

All of which was a long way from our minds as we waited, in a state of high anxiety, to see what Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard and Marco Van Basten would do to us below in Palermo.

We were taking no chances this time.

Arthur and I would be watching this in Liam’s place, sitting on exactly the same couches, arranged in exactly the same way as they had been against England. We wouldn’t be needing
the cold cuts this time, or the cherry tomatoes, we were only fooling ourselves that food had any part to play in this episode. This would be a hard-drinking deal, from start to finish, though I
should add that Arthur had a much healthier relationship with alcohol than I did, and it is a testament to the state we were in that he wanted it so much at this time.

Dunphy had gone out to Italy, which was probably the safest place for him. His trip had been planned long before the pen-throwing outrage, but most of us preferred to think of it as a showdown,
as Dunphy and Jack going
mano-a-mano
.

There had been a press conference at which Dunphy would ask Jack a question: does Jack think that the team should play the same way in the finals of a major tournament as they did in qualifying?
Jack refused to answer Dunphy’s question, because he was not a ‘proper journalist’. Which was about as good a result as Dunphy could get, in the circumstances.

The English journos saw Dunphy as a martyr for free speech and even the resentful Irish ones, the ‘fans with typewriters’, had to acknowledge that he was where he needed to be: front
and centre. And they, the ‘proper’ journalists, were in the front row taking notes.

The Fear went on for a bit longer against Holland than against England, but again it was relatively short — after 17 minutes, Gullit scored, playing a one-two and finishing it into the
bottom corner, like the superior being we knew him to be.

Holland had only managed a scoreless draw against England, so we figured they might take it out on us. But we weren’t done yet. We could always rely on England to cheer us up, which they
duly did by going ahead against Egypt, with a goal by centre-half Mark Wright.

We now had the additional stress of trying to work out the various permutations we needed to get ourselves out of this bloody Group F. With everyone on the same points and goal difference before
the match, in one scenario all four teams could finish with an identical record, raising the appalling prospect of the drawing of lots to decide all four positions. Ah, it was a terrible strain on
the brain.

But there was a modicum of relief in the thought that losing to Holland had none of the catastrophic connotations of losing to England — we had no ‘history’ with Wor Dutch,
apart from the fact that they beat us in Euro 88 and went on to win it. But we didn’t mind that. Mercifully they had been sated somewhat by that victory, because for the rest of the half and
deep into the second half, they showed no desire to tear us apart, as was their natural right.

And then Packie did it again.

At around the same time in the match as he’d done against England, Packie gritted his teeth and sent up a high, lobbing, dropping ball.

This time there was another mis-cue from a defender and the ball squirted away towards the goal, where it was chased down by Niall Quinn, sliding and poking it past the keeper, van
Breukelen.

Madness was now heaped upon madness, because the pandemonium which ensued was quickly followed by what looked like a gentleman’s agreement between both sides, to settle for a draw. This
was so deeply surreal, no-one had any recollection of seeing such a thing happening before on an international playing pitch in a competitive context. But there they were, Ireland and Holland,
apparently not trying any more. And to heighten the surrealism, this cosy little arrangement was founded on the premise that England would continue to beat Egypt in their match, happening
simultaneously.

Which doesn’t seem like a very strong premise, all things considered.

And as for the moral dimension ... it seemed as if football had thrown everything at us during the last ten days and now it was asking us to take a trip into the moral maze, which we flatly
refused to do, because in this situation, we had no morals.

It is remarkable indeed, and perhaps a little troubling, just how insensitive we were to the sufferings of the Egyptians. As if they hadn’t suffered, too. Had they not been through war,
within living memory? Were they not an ancient and venerable culture which had given nearly as much to human civilisation as we had? And even if they had given nothing, did they deserve to get
knocked out of the World Cup by this sort of blackguardism?

Unfortunately, by asking these questions, the Egyptians would be mistaking us for people who gave a fuck.

So secure were we in our sense of victimhood, we could not feel their pain.

We could not feel any of it. Not a twinge. And even if I am starting to feel just a small pang of remorse, twenty years on, to cure it, all I have to do is think of that piece written by Paul
Howard about his pursuit of the accursed Nazare, the referee who did us down in Brussels. All I have to do, is think of the nine-year-old Dion Fanning tearing out that picture of Nazare from the
Sunday paper, and ripping it up in disgust.

So there was no point telling us that the hearts of the Egyptian people were crying, as they watched their World Cup being taken away from them in such a cruel fashion. And there was definitely
no point in telling Dion Fanning, that he should feel bad about anything, as he made his way to a party to celebrate with a house full of other young people who were already wildly drunk. The
Leaving was still on. But Fanning recalls he had ‘broken the back of it’ at this stage — if indeed it wasn’t already broken before that first English paper.

Arthur and Liam and I were getting a taxi from Dun Laoghaire into town, where we would be meeting Mr George Byrne in the Pink Elephant for drinks. Outside, it was Latin America, the horns
blaring, flags flying out of cars, the ‘Olé-Olé’-ing and the ‘Give-It-A-Lash-Jack’-ing.

Unbelievably, there was still one more good thing to happen to us, one more break for us to catch. Tied on points and goal difference with Holland, we were awarded second place in the Group by
the drawing of lots. Which meant that in the last 16, Holland got Germany.

All we had to do was to beat Romania.

‘I missed the World Cup,’ Con Houlihan mourned. ‘I went to Italy.’

During Italia 90, families sat down together and made what they believed were rational decisions to spend the money they had been saving for years for an extension to the house, on this holiday
in Italy. I was particularly impressed by the story of a man who ‘bet’ that Ireland would finish second in the Group, booking cheap accommodation well in advance for his family in Genoa
for a match in the last 16 that might never happen — sensible people, living on the edge for a while.