24 Jack Charlton

During those halcyon days of the Charlton Era, the Manager seemed constantly to be repeating the refrain: ‘A nation of three-and-a-half million people cannot win the World Cup.’ His intention, obviously, was to dampen down the growing public expectation that was to leave the widest street in Europe completely empty during more than one unforgettable encounter with one of the great sides of world football. Jack, of course, could not have been expected to know that Ireland is not a nation of three-and-a-half million people, but a nation of 75 million people dispersed throughout the world. And because Jack was a Brit, we were much too polite, what with all the baggage attaching to this insight, to bring up the matter.

Charlton brought possibly unprecedented joy into the lives of Irish citizens, at home and abroad. Often it seemed as if he had been sent from on high to cancel out every evil deed his countrymen had perpetrated in Ireland, and he certainly left the balance sheet a lot healthier when he eventually departed.

But therein also lay the problem with Jack: his Englishness was both the greatest asset he offered Ireland and also his fatal limitation. He was accomplished in an art form that was not indigenous to Ireland, but which had come to be a key medium in which we sought to express our sense of having arrived in the world. He came to Ireland with modest expectations, and in the end seemed astonished by what he had managed to stir up. Far more effectively than any native son, he had awoken the Irish to the possibility of success. And yet, neither he nor almost anyone else seemed to look beyond the prospect of a modest achievement.

One man who seemed to sense that much more was possible was Roy Keane, who would end his international career in a distressing little drama at the 2002 World Cup in Japan. Perhaps there are those who remain convinced that what concerned Roy Keane in Saipan was the quality of the facilities. But, as he was to make clear as the years passed, what he was really seeking to express was the frustration of someone who had grown to see his own dream come true, wanted to make it available to the country he loved, and, though convinced that more was possible, found himself confronted and confounded at every turn by the ineluctable pathology of losing. ‘Win or lose,’ he would derisively remark on a radio programme a few years later, ‘hit the booze.’

Perhaps the Roy Keane saga carried also signifiers of a frustration that goes deep into the Irish psyche – a feeling buried under the weight of centuries of self-loathing that we might actually be as good as anyone else, and yet are expected, and therefore expect ourselves, to be delighted about getting knocked out in the quarter-finals. Perhaps Keane’s response was some kind of existential roar of frustration at the idea that not only do our dreams always seem to get short-circuited, but the entire edifice we construct around our endeavours appears to make this inevitable.

The Irish attraction to soccer has long been more than an infatuation with the novelty of a global sport. Deep in the warped culture of late-twentieth-century Ireland, it was a form of subversion. There was a sense for us then that it provided a form of liberation from the weight of authority represented by GAA leaders, clergy, teachers and self-appointed cultural gurus who told us what being ‘Irish’ could mean and what it could not mean. It wasn’t that we were actively rebelling against the re-Gaelicization of our cultural horizons, but rather that this process, for all that we may have supported or engaged with it, could not touch some other part of us that still needed to be nurtured: the colonized part, the part that remained incapable of expression in any identifiably indigenous code.

It was perhaps inevitable that soccer would become a vehicle for the unashamed expression of our post-colonial imagination, a sort of surrendering to that which, in other contexts, the national project of de-Anglicization sought to eliminate. Once you’ve been colonized, invaded, violated, you ever after need two distinct forms of self-expression. One is indigenous, a way of telling yourself who you still are. It needs to be of yourself, for yourself, by yourself, yourself alone. The other needs to be Other, of the outside, a means of saying to the rest of the world: I/we are still human, still living, still here; I/we can do what you can do (almost just as well, at least not as badly as you would expect). We are not as shite as we have been led to believe! Usually this means of expressing ourselves to the external will have been received from the violator, and will provide a way for the violated to seek the approval of he who has tried to persuade him that he is nothing. The two forms, obviously, operate at cross purposes. The very act of participating in something indigenous, however necessary this may be in one sense, validates the violator’s poor opinion in another. And by succeeding at the other, I/we affirm a part of our own dread that we may no longer be fully ourselves. We cannot win, but please don’t say it aloud.

This paradox defines the relationship between Gaelic games and soccer in Irish life and society. Gaelic games are the means of affirming ourselves to ourselves, a way of expressing our relief at the departure of the invader and celebrating his banishment. Soccer is the expression of that part of us that remains colonized, however long the visitors have departed. Soccer is the means we have unconsciously chosen to say, ‘Look, there is no need to be disappointed in our progress! Look, we can be like you after all! Look, we have not fallen back into barbarism! We are something, in spite of ourselves!’

The difficulty is that the very urge to demonstrate our capability is matched by a defeatism implanted also by the invader, which tells us that, no, we cannot ever win. What we crave more than anything is possible through soccer, but that, because it belongs to our former abuser, is infected for us with a pathology of losing. The very means we had found to express our desire to be as good as anyone has an in-built mechanism preventing us from becoming that which we crave to be.

Before Charlton, whenever the Irish national team took the field, the best expectations of the nation resided with the prospect of another ‘moral victory’. This was when you got sixty-four kinds of DNA kicked out of you but you still did not lie down. You might be beaten fifteen-nil, but if you hit the side-netting in the closing minutes, that was ‘a moral victory’, a sign that there remained a glimmering spark at the core of the unbending spirit of the Irish, and a portent of greatness still to come.

The incredible success of the national football team under Jack Charlton in the late 1980s and early ’90s, revealed itself in retrospect as a rehearsal of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle of the decade that followed – a glittering success that for a cosmic moment promised to wipe out nearly a century of failure. Both phenomena were managed, supervised and controlled by foreigners; and, more pertinently, both were based on a product that might be termed non-indigenous.

There is, then, a remarkable similarity between our responses in the respective arenas of industry and sport, and soccer tells the story more clearly than other sports. In both soccer and industrial policy, we like to leave it to outsiders. It is not that we lack self-belief – indeed, when someone comes in and takes charge, we find self-belief in open-top busloads. But we are poor self-starters, and especially poor at seeing ourselves in an area of expression or activity we perceive as belonging to peoples who can exude self-confidence without a barrelful of ale.

These are the facts of what Jack Charlton stirred up in us. The tragedy was not that he failed, but that he succeeded beyond his own wildest dreams, and thereby made visible what was possible but at the same time unrealizable.

Not once during his years as manager of the Irish football team was Jack Charlton asked: ‘Could a nation of 75 million people win the World Cup?’ If we had only had the belief to put it like that, he might have said ‘yes’, and who knows what might have happened?