We're out of Euro 2004, but we can still support the teams who, by complete chance, are playing England, writes Frank McNally
It's been a difficult month for football fans, with first the end of the English Premiership and, more recently, a whole 17 days elapsing since the Champions League Final brought the curtain down on another season of live televised football.
Many of us have been going through cold turkey. My own low point was when I heard the BBC was televising a series of nightly programmes on "Chelsea" and I tuned in excitedly to find that - God help us - it was some kind of flower show. Ugh!
But at last the long nightmare is over. Today the curtain rises on Euro 2004, and an orgy of live soccer for the next three weeks. Not until the end of the quarter-final stage (June 27th) will there be an interval of more than 24 hours between games. So, for the next 16 days, when that special person in your life asks, "Is it my imagination, or is there football on every night?" you can assure her that it's not her imagination. She'll be thrilled.
Unfortunately, there is no Irish interest in Euro 2004, so we're faced with the traditional dilemma of who to support. In less enlightened times, the answer would have been simple: the team playing England. But I think we're over that whole post-colonial thing now, thank God. It is quite beneath us as a mature, self-confident democracy to gloat about English sporting failures (with the permanent exception of Tim Henman). Instead, the challenge must be to identify with some of the 2004 finalists in a more positive way.
They may not seem the most obvious choice, but if we're looking for a surrogate team to represent the Republic of Ireland, we need look no further than Croatia. After all, it's a small country on the fringes of Europe. It has a population of four million-odd. It's overwhelmingly Catholic - since partition, anyway. And it's still in the early days of a post-conflict situation. The Croatians are also likely to fill the usual Irish role of plucky underdogs at Euro 2004. Plenty to identify with there, as they attempt to get out of a group that includes - by sheer coincidence - England.
On the other hand, Group B also involves the team that, more than any other, kept us out of Euro 2004:
Switzerland. We could hold a grudge over this. But every Irish fan knows that, if we'd had Roy Keane, the Swiss would never have beaten us once, never mind twice. There'll be a certain fascination about how well they do, because we'll know we could have done at least as well. Good enough reason to cheer them on, even without considering the many things Switzerland and Ireland have in common (neutrality and cows, to name just two).
Then of course there's France. Everybody's favourites to win the competition, the French are also the purists' choice. There's an almost feminine beauty to the way they play, from their right-back - whose first name is Lilian - to the faun-like Thierry Henry up front. In short, anyone with a love of football will be cheering for France. It's just unfortunate that, like our other chosen teams, Switzerland and Croatia, the French will be playing England in the group stage. What were the chances?
Speaking of chances, the bookies expect England to finish second in Group B, in which event they could be playing Portugal in the quarter-finals. Portugal has an obvious claim on our support, sharing as it does more lines of longitude with Ireland than any other country in the EU - including the highly influential 8.3 degrees W, which unites the city of European champions Porto with Roy Keane's home in Cork.
But the winners of the Portugal-England match would then most likely face Italy in the semi-finals. And of course there's a powerful bond between Irish and Italian fans ever since that great night in Rome 14 years ago. Also, the Italians are indirectly responsible for The Sopranos - the only thing worth watching on television this last month - so there could be no competition there for Irish support.
But the question you're probably asking by now - especially if you enjoyed the Chelsea Flower Show - is this: surely the obvious team for Irish fans to follow is England? And yes, of course you're right. In an ideal world, nothing would please mature Irish soccer fans more than to see David Beckham and the lads win the major championship they deserve. But this is not an ideal world, and a couple of points need to be taken into account.
First of all there's the continued exposure of Ireland to British television. During the summer of English triumphalism that would quite understandably follow victory in Portugal, the BBC would be responsible for more potentially harmful emissions than the Thorpe reprocessing plant. An appearance by Jimmy Hill wearing a St George bow-tie, for example, would be inevitable. Not that this would worry people like us. But the danger is that, among less mature Irish supporters, it would encourage the sort of knee-jerk anti-English feeling we hoped we'd left behind.
There are many other reasons why an English win now might not be timely; for example, it would detract from their recent Rugby World Cup heroics that so thrilled us all. But there's also a sense in which fairness demands England lose in Portugal - ignominiously, if possible. Most teams taking part in this year's championship have trained long and hard. None more so, I'm guessing, than the Portuguese riot police. You can bet they've been honing their skills for months, no doubt spending many hours away from their wives and families. If England win, however, there'll be no riots. Which would, of course, be a good thing in itself. But every major police force in Europe - including the Garda - has had a go at the minority of violent English fans. Surely the Portuguese deserve their chance too.
