THE FOLLOWING PASSAGE is an extract written by Paul Doyle from Against All Odds: The Greatest World Cup Upsets.

At least Michael Collins got to fly through space. He also got an eyeful of the moon, even if he never touched it, his famous mission being to man the Apollo 11 command module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin boldly strolled where no humans had ever strolled before.

Born in Italy, the grandson of an Irish farmer, Collins became an American hero and, in 1994, someone I stopped feeling sorry for.

Because, as I say, at least Collins got as close to the action as it was possible to get without actually doing his thing on the nearest heavenly body. I couldn’t help contrasting that with my own sad role in the greatest voyage of discovery debauchery in my lifetime.

In the summer of 1994, when it seemed like nearly everyone I knew, including bastards whom I knew for a fact had had little interest in football just a few years previously, was blasting off to New York’s John F. Kennedy airport ahead of the Republic of Ireland’s lustily anticipated World Cup duel with Italy in New Jersey.

And all I could do was wish them well at the start of their journey, and try to flog them a fluffy leprechaun. I was working in the duty-free shop in Dublin airport, see.

In the souvenir department. A job is a job, but this had never been an especially coveted position. Usually, the people to respect were the ones working in the alcohol section, or at the perfume counter.

They were in constant demand. And if ever one of their products had to be withdrawn from public sale because a bottle was chipped or packaging was torn, staff might be able to offload it to friends for a pittance or even for free.

So it was worth palling up to them. Befriending me, on the other hand, wouldn’t have earned you anything but a good deal on a tarnished pewter harp or a sheep plush that was coming apart at the seams. Tourists craved that stuff, apparently, but there was no call for it from folks I knew.

Until, that is, the ascent of Jack Charlton and his team, whose services to the Irish thingamajig industry are often overlooked.

That said, Charlton has sometimes been credited with relaunching the entire Irish economy. Siring the Celtic Tiger, no less. That is a bit of a stretch given other obvious factors at play in the country’s clamber out of the economic torpor of the seventies and eighties, such as the state’s corporation tax policy and the influence of the European Union.

But the notion that Charlton helped to release Irish entrepreneurial spirit by qualifying for international tournaments that everyone wanted to attend does have a lingering charm.

After all, from the moment he guided Ireland to their first-ever appearance at a major tournament finals — the 1988 European Championships — everyone began to hear tales of people doing exceptional things in order to join the ride. Taking second jobs, selling their cars, starting up businesses — anything from trading ice creams out of deftly-modified vans to importing exotica for resale: fruit, clothes, special interest magazines and more.

I knew one lad who got the money to follow the team at the 1990 World Cup by asking for it from his rich landlord father, which goes to show that the most extraordinary stories are not always the most interesting.

There were also, to be fair, occasional portents of Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger collapse, as the zeal for funds to travel in support of the team led to the granting of more than a few sub-prime loans. Charlton’s team sure set a mighty bandwagon in motion, where previously there had been an abandoned shopping trolley with spikes for wheels.

In November 1985, the last match under Charlton’s predecessor, Eoin Hand, had attracted a smidgin over 15,000 spectators to Lansdowne Road, nearly half of them from Denmark, who swaggered to a 4-1 win as home fans wailed and cursed. But less than three years later, tickets for Ireland matches were among the most precious commodities in the country.

Especially for away matches. There came to be a special glee, a singular pride, in following “the Boys in Green” abroad.

Few places on Earth have been untouched by the Irish diaspora but 1988 saw the first massive movement from Ireland of people expecting to return in a week or two. They weren’t travelling in search of refuge or employment, they were travelling for kicks. Which meant, in a way, they were travelling to say we have arrived at last. Our country has grown. Behold!

There was, admittedly, trepidation ahead of the first match at Euro ‘88, a jagged suspicion that fate had contrived for us to finally reach a major tournament only so that we could suffer a humiliating spanking on the international stage at the hands of our first opponents, who were, of all possible adversaries, England.

But Bobby Robson’s side were toppled 1-0 in Gelsenkirchen thanks to Ray Houghton, a magnificent dynamo whose one major shortcoming was that he didn’t score enough goals, even if he netted two of the most glorious in Irish history. The one that secured the victory over England in 1988 signalled, as has since been amply chronicled elsewhere, both a catharsis and a coming of age. Of sorts.

***

Most people like to think of themselves as complex. Deep and interesting, not like others. That’s especially true if they live in the shadow of better-known neighbours.

Observe how every Canadian slaps a maple leaf on their backpack before venturing overseas, lest anyone fail to distinguish them from Americans. Irish people are no different. Or are we?

Irish people tend to be swift to denounce paddywhackery or to rail against failures to appreciate our diversity and sophistication.

But when our team started qualifying for major international tournaments, the first instincts of thousands of my brethren was to converge on foreign cities and go dancing legless in big-buckled hats and shamrock rosettes.

When I wasn’t selling said wares, I myself ventured into the field to model them. It wasn’t actually guerrilla marketing, I was just acting the monkey like my brothers. It was fun.

But it is only proper to place on record one niggling lament from that time. It concerns a stereotype most Irish fans failed to live up to.

Much as we may grumble about clichés about our supposed fondness for a drink and a song, we also like to tell ourselves from time to time that we have a special aptitude for the same. Yet most of us used the rise of the national football team to blow up that myth.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by shame at being unable to think of anything better to sing at matches than “olé, olé, olé” over and over and over again.

Professional offerings were scarcely more inspired. Put ‘em Under Pressure, Ireland’s official number for the 1990 World Cup, may have been a nod to the old rebel song God Save Ireland but it mostly came across as a dull-witted rip-off of Ally’s Tartan Army, the musical accompaniment to Scotland’s 1978 World Cup fiasco.

Maybe it was fitting that our songs smacked of mimicry, since the Football Association of Ireland’s player development strategy consisted mostly of leeching off the efforts of British clubs.

And maybe the lack of lyrical creativity could be explained partly by the fact that there was little common culture of following football in the Republic by the time the country finally reached a tournament.

Clubs like Drumcondra and Bohemians had attracted tens of thousands of fans in the fifties and sixties, but the League of Ireland had fallen into relative neglect by the eighties and the best supported local team, Shamrock Rovers, saw their stadium bulldozed for housing in 1987.

It so happened that just as the local game began to deteriorate — in the late sixties — British teams with whom Irish people could easily identify, such as Celtic and the George Best-gilded Manchester United, were conquering Europe. Many Irish fans diverted their attention to where the top Irish players played and became passive consumers of televised entertainment. But none of that accounts for the farce that unfolded on the world stage in 1994.

Remember that a crescendo of sorts was supposed to be reached in New York and New Jersey that June. What better place — we were constantly asked — to demonstrate the unique passion and ingenuity of Irish people than on the east coast of America against Italy?

As soon as our opening group fixture was announced, a meta-contest was born to determine which of these huge immigrant communities was the most resourceful. Which country would manage to get the most fans into the Giants Stadium? A-wheedling we went.

Strings were pulled, favours called in, wheezes hatched, promises made. During the Charlton years, the FAI grew so driven by the compulsion to secure as many tickets as possible for Irish fans that the organisation entrusted around £200,000 to an unofficial London-based dealer known as George the Greek. Most tickets never materialised and the treasurer ended up having to pay money back from his own pocket.

Italy were similarly eager to achieve numerical superiority in the stands.

The Azzurri’s then-manager, Arrigo Sacchi, was more concerned with matters on the pitch, but when he suggested that the country’s government try to flex some muscle to get Italy’s group games moved from America’s east coast to a region where the climate would be more conducive to the style of play he wanted to encourage, Sacchi was told by the prime minister, no less, that shifting the opening match from New Jersey would be a betrayal of Italian emigrants.

Maybe Sacchi would have got a different reply if his mentor, Silvio Berlusconi, had taken over his country’s politics just a few months earlier. As it happened, Sacchi did not reveal the prime ministerial rebuff until nearly two decades after the event, and he took the opportunity to remind his Italian interviewer that when his team’s opening match came around, there were far more Irish fans than Italians in the Giants Stadium.

“It seems a lot of our people bought tickets … and sold them to the Irish,” reckoned Sacchi, leaving anything more about betrayals unsaid.

Thus there were buoyant folks in green all over the Giants Stadium — some jazzing up their look with fake ginger beards sold by me — and they were all gagging for a party.

Andy Townsend, Ireland’s captain on the day, said later that the atmosphere was so giddy and the air so still that when Irish fans opened their mouths to sing the first line of the national anthem, he was almost bowled over by the smell of beer, rolling towards him like an invisible and pungent wave.

What Townsend didn’t add but probably could have is that he was saved from falling down by the fact that a big chunk of Irish fans stopped singing after the first line. As usual.

Our strange secret — the thing that is seldom admitted, especially in front of an international audience even though Charlton’s team helped make it obvious — is that most Irish people don’t know the words to the country’s national anthem.

Ireland’s Andy Townsend pictured playing against Italy. Billy Stickland / INPHO Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO

Abolishing national anthems would be no bad thing. But if they must exist and are to serve a purpose, then it is to rally a people around some shared values or ambition.

Leaving aside the fact that Ireland’s was written in 1910 as a celebration of centuries of resistance to British villainy — and Irish people of a Unionist bent find that objectionable — the Irish anthem is an embarrassing own goal. What it does is expose a monumental failure of the country’s education system and the fallacy at the heart of one of the state’s founding myths.

The reason that the song is so poorly known — now as in 1994 and before — is that the version most commonly taught is in Gaelic.

That is a language in which most people in Ireland cannot communicate despite undergoing mandatory daily lessons and regular exams from the day they start primary school until the time they leave secondary school at least a decade later.

Even now, proficiency in Gaelic is a requirement for civil service jobs in Ireland, and every street sign and official document must appear in both Gaelic and English. The yarn is that Ireland is a bilingual country. But try to converse with an Irish person in Gaelic and, far more often than not, the gift of the gab becomes an alien concept.

Maybe there is another country that persists in promoting a similar delusion, but I don’t recall seeing many other World Cup participants look as uncomfortable during their anthems as most Irish players and fans do. What the shams shuffling in awkward silence at the Giants Stadium in June ‘94 made plain is that two wrongs do not make a right. English colonisers beat Gaelic out of the Irish and, since independence, the Irish government has
tried to force it back into us. ‘Tis one of the great paradoxes of the freedom struggle.

Granted, it’s a cute idea and this ghost dance wouldn’t rankle — it might even be more effective — if it were not compulsory. In school I, and every other Irish child, was told it was our duty to learn Gaelic.

Supposedly it was our mother tongue even though neither our mothers nor any of our other relations spoke it. It was stated outright, or just insinuated via the sinister glower of a short-tempered teacher, that those of us who resented this mandated identity or thought our time and effort could be spent more interestingly on other things, had no soul or, perhaps worse, a British brain. They tried to make us feel foreign in our own land, saddled a population already bedevilled by Catholic guilt with another sin to feed the shame.

They told us that the anthem was chosen because it was sung by the brave rebels who defied British troops and marched into Dublin’s General Post Office to proclaim the Irish Republic in 1916. But they usually omitted to mention that those rebels sang it in English. Liam Ó Rinn did not translate The Soldier’s Song into Amhrán na bhFiann until after the Easter Rising, as he pined for home from a Welsh prison.

It is worth repeating that the success of Charlton’s team helped to discredit another myth similar to the language lie: the one that maintained that soccer was an imposter’s game and true

Irishmen devoted themselves to Gaelic sports. That dogma was enforced with such bile that, famously, Liam Brady was once expelled for choosing to captain the Republic of Ireland U15s at soccer rather than play a friendly Gaelic football match for his school.

That was in the early 1970s, but the strain of thinking was still prevalent in the eighties. One fearsome teacher/coach at my state school in Dublin warned that anyone treacherous enough to reject call-ups for the school’s Gaelic football team would never be allowed to play for the soccer team: he managed both teams to ensure he was in a position to enforce his law.

But once cities all over the country — and rural villages in the Gaelic football heartlands — started emptying so that people could follow Charlton’s team, it was impossible to uphold the claim that soccer was an undesirable imposition from without.

Anyway, back to singing. The song has not always remained the same.

In the early 1920s, after the fug of the civil war and in the absence of any formal ruling, Irish teams used to sing whatever came to mind when invited to perform at international events.

Asked to settle on a ceremonial track for the 1924 Olympic Games, the team from the Irish Free State performed to the traditional tune Let Erin Remember. That same year a newspaper, the Dublin Evening Mail, launched a competition to find “a national hymn to the glory of Ireland”.

It put up a bumper prize and assembled a distinguished jury, including WB Yeats, to pick the winner. Four months later, the paper announced sadly that “having read the poems … we are all agreed that there is not one amongst them worth 50 guineas or any portion of it.”

Looking back, you have to suspect that the competition entrants were the very people who begat the people that years later foisted “olés” on each and every social gathering.

“Most of the verses submitted to us were imitations of God Save the King,” continued the disenchanted Dublin Evening Mail, who ultimately dropped the competition to avoid any further editorial cringing.

The nation’s cringing has continued. Most Irish people still get twitchy when they find themselves in a situation where they are expected to sing the national anthem, even if fortified by 10 pints. After the opening line, which is relatively easy for English speakers to pronounce, folks start mumbling piously, like we all used to do during prayers at Mass, that other weird institution of Irish life.

At the Giants Stadium, all that most of the assembled Irish could muster as the band played their anthem was an awkward hum.

Of more kind than one, as Townsend reported. And don’t let anyone tell you the band played the anthem wrong that day. Sure, they were confused, but that is only because everything about the national anthem is confusing.

The Irish players standing to attention before kickoff appeared bewildered as to why the song went on for so long and George Hamilton, RTE’s match commentator and a noted classical music connoisseur, remarked that the American hosts played the tune at a “slower tempo” than was normal. But all that happened was that someone had neglected to tell the band about the Nazi reworking of the anthem.

Ooops, that’s another thing that seldom gets mentioned. After independence, the Irish army went looking for a specialist to marshal their band. They found no one suitable in Ireland and didn’t want to hire a Brit. In 1923, they ended up luring a distinguished musician from the continent with the promise of a good salary and the rank of colonel. The appointed man had impeccable credentials so it was not just for a giggle that the Irish Army plumped for a
German military bandmaster named Fritz Brase.

Brase developed a fondness for adapting traditional Irish reels and jigs into what sounded like booming Prussian marches. He also developed a fondness for Adolf Hitler and, in 1932, joined the Nazi party from Ireland. That didn’t please his army employers but Brase had already endeared himself to them by, amongst other things, coming up with a sprucer take on The Soldier’s Song, honing the chorus while dispensing with the original verses.

On one particularly proud occasion, Brase conducted the Irish Army band as they played his adaptation — and Das Lied der Deutschen in honour of the visitors — before kickoff when Ireland hosted a swastika-sporting Germany team at Dalymount Park in 1936. Brase’s version quickly became the staple in Ireland. But apparently, no one told the band at the Giants Stadium, who solemnly played the verses, too.

Really the Irish national anthem should be wordless, just a jaunty instrumental that everyone could hop around to. That wouldn’t alienate anyone and could mask wholesale ineptitude. But if the government persists with a ditty in Gaelic, they should — in the interests of atmosphere and honesty — replace the current lyrics with some of the few lines in that language that everyone educated in Ireland knows.

The chorus could go: “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas más é do thoil é (“can I go to the toilet please?”) / Ní thuigim an ceist” (“I don’t understand the question”.).

Against All Odds: The Greatest World Cup Upsets is published by Halcyon Publishing. More info here.