On a hot summer’s day, Berlin’s Olympiastadion announces itself as a sudden, startling silhouette rising up from the greenery of a 130-hectare park commissioned by Hitler for the 1936 Olympic Games. The afternoon I visited for Germany’s World Cup clash against Ecuador in 2006, the weather was punishingly humid, and the entire crowd seemed to be wearing black-and-white German shirts. Caught up in the beery throng in my striped O’Neill’s League of Ireland kit, I was the exception, and cheery Teutonic match-goers were delighted to guess that I was Scottish.
“Hibernian! Hibernian!” they said, pointing at my green and white jersey. “Cork City!” I roared back, both because it was hard to be heard over the hubbub and because I was annoyed (obviously) to be mistaken for British. They looked at me politely but obliviously. I might as well have said: “Madey-Uppy FC”. They shuffled on, disappointed not to be able to share their knowledge of Scottish soccer.
All my life I’d dreamed of attending the World Cup – though perhaps that isn’t quite the way to put it. To dream of doing something is to imply it might actually come to pass. But how could you get to the World Cup? It seemed as impossible as beaming onto the bridge of Starship Enterprise in Star Trek or breaking into the A-Team’s van. It existed on television: that was the medium through which you experienced it. The idea of actually going there in person seemed more than fanciful – it bordered on delusional. Yet now here I was, freshly disgorged from the trains which had been arriving with martial precision at the Olympiastadion, where 74,000 were en route to see Jürgen Klinsmann’s Germany dispatch the flailing Ecuador.
The approach to the grounds was a spectacle in itself. Though extensively refurbished ahead of Germany’s 2006 World Cup, the stadium’s origins as an architectural assertion of Hitler’s power were clear, especially as you passed the Nazi-era statues by Karl Albiker: brawny, neoclassical figures which reflected “National Socialist heroic realism”. And yet the atmosphere within could not have contrasted more starkly with the sobering walk-up. The Germans were loud and joyous as their midfield wizard Michael Ballack – think Roy Keane crossed with the up-and-coming conductor of a prestigious philharmonic orchestra – pulled the strings, and they bulldozed their way to a 3-0 win. Many of the songs were familiar from the terraces back home: it turns out there is no language barrier when supporters burst into “Stand Upppppp ... For Your Team of Choice”. There was another surprise. Seated alongside my father and I were incoming Ireland manager Steve Staunton and former Bray Wanderers boss Pat Devlin, who, in this, the age before selfies and Instagram, kindly posed for a picture.
READ MORE
Looking for a country to support this World Cup? Cape Verde has you covered ...
World Cup Group E guide: Germany’s next generation certainly can’t be written off
World Cup Group F guide: Strong Dutch side capable of going deep into competition
World Cup Group D guide: Mauricio Pochettino plots knock-out route for the United States
As I say, the day was a shock because it suggested that the World Cup takes place in the real world, when, as we all know, it largely unfolds on television. And not just any television: for the proper World Cup, you have to be plonked in your livingroom, simultaneously supine and hopped-up with anticipation, and gorging on several matches a day.
The pub is fine, sure – I was too young to drink at the time, but that’s where I watched Ireland defeat Romania on penalties in 1990. You could even do so in an airport departure lounge, where I saw Ireland lose on spot kicks against Spain in 2002 (Aer Lingus delayed the flight from Amsterdam to Dublin so we could witness the post-Roy Keane Ireland do the least Roy Keane thing imaginable and sink to a heroic defeat).
But it is at home, on a television, that the World Cup is best enjoyed. This is both a universal, undeniable fact – and also a departure from the golden rule of sport, which is that you really had to be there to appreciate it. That is certainly the case with GAA matches. Watching last year’s All-Ireland hurling final between Cork and Tipperary at home was sheer torture – how could it compare to taking it in first-hand?
There is something hollow, lonely, and empty about your team playing on a big day in Croke Park when you can’t lay a hand on a ticket. In my case, it wasn’t for want of trying. I’d spent the night before wandering around Dublin asking random groups of Cork supporters if they had any tickets, only for it to turn out that most of them were looking for one too.
Earlier, driving along the canal into Dublin, I had spotted a car in front of mine festooned in Cork colours and, at one of those interminable red lights, fantasised about hopping out, tapping on the window and asking whether they had any spares. Then the lights turned green, and the chance was lost. It was probably for the best, as they may well have suspected there was something wrong with me: fortune may favour the brave, but rarely the desperate or deranged.
Being there is even more vital in the case of the League of Ireland, where the gap between attending in the flesh and watching on television is vast and unbridgeable. In person, nothing is better than the League of Ireland – the songs, the mindless hate (me towards any Dublin team), the Backrooms-esque stygian travails of nipping to the toilet.
It is one of the most singular experiences in sport – brilliantly Irish and as much an existential undertaking as a sporting one. If a Beckett play were a sports competition, it would be the League of Ireland; if an Andrei Tarkovsky movie were a sports competition, it would be the League of Ireland; if the new Boards of Canada album were a sports competition, it would be the League of Ireland. Nothing beats it – yet on TV, any random fixture will look like a tie from the Moldovan third division in 1984, just after the floodlights have failed. The worst advertisement for the League of Ireland is advertising the League of Ireland – being there is the entire point.
[ Who has qualified for the World Cup and what groups are they in?Opens in new window ]
Not, however, with the global soccer jamboree that kicks off on June 11th. We all have our favourite World Cup memories, and in most cases, they involve sitting on a couch in a livingroom, staring at the screen. Over time, the couches and the livingrooms will change – but there will always be you, and there will always be the World Cup. It’s a highlight reel of your life, beginning in the darkest waters of your dimly remembered childhood and extending right up to this very moment.
I have no memories at all of the 1978 World Cup – aside from my father laying out the wall chart of all the teams and fixtures that had presumably come with a newspaper, or possibly the latest edition of Shoot! magazine. But I vividly remember watching the 1982 tournament and the iconic Brazil side – gods among men, led by the athlete-philosopher Socrates – crumbling 3-2 to Italy, a result that shocked even the Italians. I was in the livingroom in our house on the north side of Cork – a place in which I have not set foot in 40 years but to which I can return simply by closing my eyes. Then there was 1986, a different house, and Maradona dismantling England – first with a handball so divine it feels antithetical to describe it as cheating, then with the goal where he skipped around half the England team and Jimmy McGee intoned… “Different Class ... Different Class!!!”
The billion-dollar bonus here was, of course, that the team Maradona had just dispatched to the glue factory was England. What does it say that, for many of us, watching England lose is almost more satisfying than seeing Ireland win? Actually, I don’t care what it says – some things just feel right, and England flopping hilariously at the World Cup is the universe’s way of checking in and telling us that everything is going to be okay. Best of all, there is an England collapse for every season. You have Maradona dumping them out in ’86. Gazza’s tears in 1990, their meltdown against Sweden at Euro ’92 (not the World Cup, but somehow it still counts), Harry Kane’s missed penalty against Qatar four years ago, when he attempted to connect with a passing seagull. Do you have a favourite? Can’t we pick them all?
Is it heresy to suggest the men’s World Cup is more fun when Ireland aren’t in it? It is certainly different: no “Olé, olé, olé”, no bunting, no empty streets as kick-off approaches – and no shredded nerves when Ireland, in the end, suffers a sticky fate.
[ Fifa raises top ticket price for World Cup final to over €9,500Opens in new window ]
I will never forget watching Germany dismantle Ecuador in Berlin, which is just as well, as the photos I took have long since vanished into digital dust. But was it better than watching the World Cup in my livingroom? No, I don’t think so, and come June and July, that’s where I will be. Do I know much of anything about the relative merits of the Iranian and New Zealand international sides? No. Will I stay up until 4am to watch them play in a half-empty stadium in Los Angeles? Absolutely. That is, after all, the essence of the World Cup – something that can only be experienced at its fullest if you’re at home, on your sofa, praying your favourite team wins or, better yet, that Harry Kane sends another peno into the stratosphere.
Source: The Irish Times
