Locker Room: So, here we go, here we go, here we go, off on our travels with the lads. You wouldn't think we'd call it that, but we do. Our travels. When we ask a question about our away record we'll say something like, "so, Brian, six on the spin on your travels?" When you go on your travels it helps to know the lingo. We all know that footballers have had more travels than Gulliver.
The nature of our travels has changed over the years. This column has only been partaking of travels since the jaunt to Albania in 1993. We returned there for more travels early in Brian Kerr's reign and "LockerRoom" was able to reflect with satisfaction that the simple act of purchasing and eating Albania's entire gross national product in two crazy days a decade earlier had evidently provided a timely stimulus to what had been an obviously ailing economy.
When we went back with Brian, the Albanians didn't even feel the need to charge us the $50 exit fee we'd had to pay the first time. This was a relief. We hadn't known about the $50 dollar exit fee in 1993 and what with times being quite hard in the paper and with "LockerRoom" having just spent all his expenses on eating the crops, we were taken by surprise by the exit fee. The sum of $50 would buy you a house in either Dublin or Tirana back then as I recall. We were forced with some difficulty to ring the newspaper and down a crackling line beg for $50 to be wired. "But why should I?" asked the sports editor unanswerably before the line went dead.
When we go on our travels with the team we are faced with the difficulty of explaining the arduous nature of our travels to a general public who believe the life of the sports hack is mainly beer and skittles for the semi-literate. It's slightly more complicated than that actually. Still the demands of our vocation even when explained at length don't stop the lay person, the unqualified acquaintance from pursing the lips and shaking their head and saying "Barcelona? For three days? Ve-hery nice."
Naturally they don't leave it at that. Soon the entire litany of misconceptions are being aired. "Alright for some." "You're life's a bleedin' holiday", "Don't try to tell me that's work!" Wrong on every count. You expect more from the woman you live with.
People, lay people, make the basic error of judging the quality of any putative travels by factoring in the time of the year, the importance of the match and what they know of the venue. Wrong. More wrong than an entire plate of Wrong Pie.
Travels are properly assessed using a binary system which factors in the details of how much work has to be done and correlates this with detailed knowledge of the telecommunications system in the country to be visited. This gives us a figure for stress which, oddly, can be influenced negatively by the importance of the fixture itself.
How so?, you ask, with your charming naivete. Surely a big fixture is more exciting. Well, no. A big fixture means big stress for the manager which transmutes to the players which results in long sulky silences and a refusal to engage in elevated banter about "six on the spin on their travels" which causes further down the line large blank spaces in newspapers and long embarrassing conversations with sports editors most of whom are heartless tyrants who feel that bigger events deserve bigger coverage. This system of stress transference or to use a medical term, the trickle-down road to coronary arrest , places the greatest burden on the noble scribes.
The ideal fixture for those of us who must suffer travels is actually a second-string Irish squad playing Andorra in Barcelona on the Saturday afternoon of a big GAA and rugby weekend which also features a major natural disaster somewhere else in the world. Sadly, Carlsberg don't create soccer fixtures but if they did . . . Tel Aviv of course is slightly different. People still go through the motions of denouncing your very existence as one long holiday and pondering what they wouldn't give to be "jetting off" on Wednesday on the same actual plane as Roy Keane.
Then they make some jokes about one suicide bomber doing a twirl and asking the other if her "bomb looks big in this" and they say that for political reasons they wouldn't be going to Israel anyway and then they shake your hand and look at you as if they want always to remember what you looked like before you went off as a limp political sellout on what would transpire be your final travels.
You call after them that, heh, heh, whatever it's like it can't be as bad as Windsor Park , Belfast in 1993, but it's too late.
There's more of us now and even if we are wiped out in large numbers in Israel we know that our profession will survive. We have bred like vermin, hardy and ingenious and increasing in numbers so that we now occupy half of a large aeroplane when on travels.
This gives rise to a curious phenomenon. We are loaded onto a plane on a specific way. Journalists first, herded down to the back. Than ordinary civilians who occupy a no man's land in the middle of the plane and finally players, lithe and tracksuited and unencumbered by laptops and books of soccer stats. They sit at the front and never look back. No matter how long the flight is that point in the aisles of the plane where the journalists' seating area begins marks Checkpoint Charlie for the players. They are West Berliners and beyond the wall and the checkpoint is a world of teeming squalor and grey slab ugliness about which they feel little curiosity or empathy.
Were we are flying non stop to, say, Australia and were the toilets at the front of the plane locked and out of order I'm sure the airline would impose some arrangement wherein the laptop bags of the hackery would have to be passed to the front of the plane for the team to use. These would be filled, zipped and politely passed back. No player could be asked to suffer the indignity of wandering down through the isle to whatever sort of a hellhole of a lavatory they use back there.
In the old days of course we were all good chums and we stayed in the same hotels together and even travelled up and down in the same lifts. There was a sort of apartheid lite in existence of course whereby you would get into a lift with a player and come over all Uriah Heap and ask if you could most "'umbly press the lift button for sir" and the player would smile and produce a shiney card from his tracksuit pocket which he would then insert into a slot you'd never even noticed before and then he'd press with the number 97 on it, thus enabling himself to access the private tower level floor, where awaited a Shangri-la of respectful flunkies and fawning virgins who would feed him grapes as the songbirds sang and the harp strings were plucked.
We'd get off on the third floor and go to the room and crack open an $80 jar of cashew nuts from the mini bar and reflect that at least we had shared a lift with one of the young gods. Often we'd reflect bitterly that instead of asking which button the player would like pressed we should have said "you're life's a holiday mate. Ve-hery nice. Floor 97 for three days? Oooooooh! Alright for some". You never think of these things till afterwards though, do you?
