As Etta James once put it, ‘aaaaaaat laaaaaaast’. Show time. And who was there to welcome us only Conor McGregor. “What’s up Ireland,” he asked. “What’s up Mr Notorious,” the nation replied. And then he had a message for the lads: “You are the most experienced team out there . . . you are the veterans of this entire competition. There is not a movement, an approach, an obstacle that you have not seen or felt before. These young cubs you are going up against were still in their nappies when you were knee deep in the trenches . . . it’s time to show these young boys that this is man’s work now, it’s time to take these young boys back to school, the school of hard knocks.”
It was a stirring tribute to Gilesie, Liamo and Dunphy, all of whom had made it in to the starting line-up for the Big One, RTÉ opting for experience over the young cubs, Duff, Sadlier, Cunningham and the like, who, Conor had intimated, wouldn’t know a trench from a pair of Pampers. A controversial decision, perhaps, when some had insisted that some youthful energy might be needed for the occasion, but RTÉ had decided to avoid doing anything rash. The last thing its panel needed on this big day was, after all, a dose of nappy rash.
Team news. You never, need it be said, wish anyone a hamstring pull or anything like that in the warm-up. Zlatan in Sweden’s starting XI. Oh well. “Ibrahimovic, we believe, will play . . . wherever he likes,” Tony O’Donoghue told us, making it impossible to show us a Swedish team shape with any great accuracy.
How disappointed were the panel with the Irish line-up? They weren’t, they were chuffed with it, you could have decked Darragh Maloney with a feather. Dunphy could find no negatives at all, except James McCarthy, and Liamo’s only concern was that Ciaran Clark can be a bit . . . that word again . . . rash. (Nostradamus, how are ya?). Apart from that, though, there was extreme contentment, anyone playing a drinking game over the possibility of Dunphy referring to our Wes as a street footballer with guile trolleyed by the first ad break.
What about Zlatan, though? Earlier in the day TV3 had shown us clips from his most recent press conference in which he was asked, oddly, why he still plays football when he’s already a legend. “Because the legend can still deliver,” he replied. “I come here to enjoy. I have been dominating wherever I go, no worries.”
“He’s a confident lad,” concluded Graeme Souness, who wore the look of a man who’d sell his granny for a trip in a time machine so he could enter a 50-50 with Zlatan.
Back on RTÉ, Darragh couldn’t but fret about the fella, and all Gilesie could offer was : “Hopefully he’ll have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning, Darragh.”
Darragh was not comforted either by Dunphy’s observation that “we’ve got better players than them – if you leave Zlatan out of the equation”, although it was encouraging to hear that, at 35, Kim Kallstrom “can barely walk”.
Over on the BBC, they were all just claiming to have a little bit of Irish in them, Danny Murphy with the unsurprising revelation that his Da was from Cork, Alan Shearer, resplendent in his black pants and white shirt, trying to outdo Danny by revealing that “I love a pint of Guinness, if that helps.”
“You didn’t have to come dressed as one,” said Gary Lineker.
Anthems time and Ronnie Whelan was struggling, especially after Andy Townsend, in a neighbouring seat, gave him a big “COME ON!”. He calmed himself in time for the game, as did Ireland who were really rather bloody brilliant.
Back on the Beeb, Jonathan Pearce and Mark Lawrenson were chatting about Seamus Coleman, Lawro reckoning he was a £70,000 buy from Cork City (close enough: a £60,000 purchase from Sligo Rovers), before suggesting Shane Long would chase a paper bag in a park and that one of the Swedish players had gone down “like custard”. You’d be like, wha?
Half-time. Dunphy could find no negatives at all, except James McCarthy. Otherwise, the consensus: outstanding.
Second half. George Hamilton warned us that a thunderstorm was on the way. And moments later it arrived, Wes lighting up the heavens with the mother of all strikes. As Pearcey described it: “Hoolahaaaaaaaaaan! Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes!” And that pretty much summed it up. The assist from Killybegs no less delicious.
By now you could only conclude we’re a bit good at this footballing lark.
But. Our addiction to 1-1s shows no sign of abating. Zlatan. Clark. Rash. Goal.
The trench veterans were frustrated. “If we’d had a Modric,” Gilesie sighed, while Liamo pined for a Keano. Dunphy, though, aimed his ire at . . . guess . . . McCarthy. “The guy does nothing! He’s strolling around the pitch like a traffic cop, pointing here and pointing there, not doing anything himself! He’s a waste of space!”
Possibly hard to quibble, if not quite as bluntly. But then he told us that James had got Roberto Martínez sacked at Everton, as authentic a claim as, say, Donald Trump’s was measured in his response to Orlando. At which point Mr Notorious might have concluded: time to call up a young cub in his nappy?
