1980s REVISITED:I WAS BORN IN the 1970s, so I associate the 1980s with childish things - boot runners, Sodastreams, U2 at Live Aid and so on. Reminiscences of this kind can seem superficial, but the truth of the past emerges from tiny details.
What we ate, wore and watched has considerably less empirical weight than an historical overview of Ireland in the 1980s, but whether tiny details are less valuable is open to conjecture. The little things can open a seam under which far more valuable recollections are buried - like how we felt. History is far too blunt an instrument to do that.
One such miniscule moment was in June 1990: some 78 minutes into a dour encounter between Ireland and Italy, in the quarter finals of our first World Cup. I am with a friend, watching on one of four monster-screens in the RDS.
We are 1-0 down, 15 minutes from elimination, when the linesman flags, indicating an Irish substitution. The game pauses, and the Irish manager sends onto the pitch . . . John Sheridan. Yes, it was 1990, but for me, this was the last moment of the 1980s, and the final moment of my childhood.
Everything hadn't ended when Toto Schillaci scored for Italy after 38 minutes - but it was all over long before the final whistle. It had ended when the Irish manager sent on number 16. That night, as on every other during our odyssey, Ireland had taken to the field wearing shirts numbered one to five and seven to 12. And number six? The number of the team captain up until a few months earlier? The number of the most decorated player in Irish football history? The number of the captain of the most successful club side ever, the man who had proved his fitness before joining the squad? Number six stayed on the bench.
A decade before that fateful night, I had entered the 1980s as an eight-year-old Liverpool fan. Ronnie Whelan was 19 in 1980, and had moved to Liverpool the year before. He was about to make his debut for my team, and when he did in 1981, scoring against Stoke, our progress throughout the next decade was (in my mind) bolted together. This football-mad Dublin-born Liverpool fan had a bespoke hero who ran the midfield for club and country and became Ireland's most successful football player.
This was the 1980s for me - staying up late to watch them win in Europe in midweek, with my mum. Lech Poznan. Dinamo Bucharest, the commentary shouted down a phone, the crowds in Eastern Europe seeming to wail about the cold, the horrors of communism, and their teams.
Anyone casting aspersions on Irish people supporting English club teams might consider how their loyalties originated, and how the strongest allegiances are pure and forged in the hearts (and not the heads) of children. I went to every international home game. As far as I was concerned, the best exponent of Irishness on the ball was the guy from Finglas playing in Anfield. Kids support football because of football and nothing besides. I even remember an uncle stupidly telling me that Everton were the Catholic club in Liverpool, and at that point renouncing my Catholicism too.
In 1988, things got even better. Ireland qualified for Euro '88, and the planets aligned on a bright day in Gelsenkirchen when Whelan scored a spectacular bicycle kick against Russia. This team had a spine of hugely talented, highly successful players - Houghton, Aldridge, McGrath, David O'Leary, and as the decade ended, I approached adulthood with an big, open heart. Growing up is easy! And then . . . something happened. Who knows the reasons for Ireland's best midfielder being overlooked in favour of Alan McLoughlin, John Sheridan and other honest players who were, nonetheless, unfit to lace his boots? No one can tell me that Ronnie Whelan wasn't fit to play. If he was, he wouldn't have been on the bench. No one can tell me he couldn't fit into the system - he had played in every qualifier. No one can tell me that Jack Charlton's team over-achieved by reaching the quarter final of the weakest World Cup in living memory. Hadn't Northern Ireland beaten their World Cup hosts in 1982? Didn't we beat a superior Italian team in 1994? Didn't Greece win the Euros a decade later? After our departure from the competition, I fell out of step with the world and less inclined to trust the people who ran it.
In the 1990s, Jack's Army had the loudest voice of anyone. Books and songs were written, and the euphoria was held up as a symbol of a new economy, national consciousness, confidence. The jubilation! To this newly minted adult, the sport had been co-opted by people who didn't seem to care what had happened, or more accurately, what had failed to happen. Something other than football had intruded; adult complications sullying the purity of a magically simple, beautiful game. Something died.
Football became somebody else's property, and I wouldn't get fooled again. The odds were good, too. In the 1990s, my club began a long decline and along came the successor - a faster, fitter, box-to-box midfielder from Cork who played for Manchester United. When Ireland's most decorated player since Ronnie Whelan left Saipan, the friend who had been with me in the RDS - that night the 1980s died - was the only other one who felt the tug of something familiar. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.