BOOK OF THE DAY: Days of Heaven: Italia '90 and the Charlton YearsBy Declan Lynch Gill and Macmillan, 218pp, €18.50
CHAPTER 16 of this highly entertaining memoir opens with Con Houlihan’s immortal lament for his experience of Italia ’90: “I missed the World Cup. I went to Italy.”
The nerve-wracking (and mostly dreadful) series of games which brought the Republic of Ireland football team to the quarter-finals of that World Cup have been lionised, but this retrospective looks at the revolution that occurred at home during a summer, which, without question, marked the most carefree few weeks in the pent-up history of the Irish State. Football – the garrison game – clearly matters to Lynch. But he is not too much concerned about what happened in Italia ’90 – the penalty drama against Romania and the night of what-ifs against the tanned and handsome Italians are dealt with in merciful brevity.
Lynch is more interested in the decade-long journey to that explosion of national fervour. The book starts off in June 1988, on the weekend when Ireland beat England in Stuttgart. Lynch presents himself as heading off to New York to interview Christy Moore for the
Sunday Independentand is delighted with life. At Heathrow, he catches a ghostly sighting of George Best and hours later ends up on an unholy drinking session with the Gate Theatre cast of
Juno and the Paycockin Manhattan. So begins Lynch's leisurely construction of a matrix of Irish life in the 1980s.
This book is about journalism, friendship, the lethal delights of alcohol abuse, football, music and how it "felt" to be Irish in that period. As far as football goes, no passage illuminates his depth of emotion for the game quite as perfectly as a throwaway remark on page nine, when he is ruminating on Italia 90: "I even felt some vague disdain for the hordes beyond in Ireland and in Germany, wondering where they had been on a night a long time ago, in 1981, when a few of us from the Hot Pressmagazine had to persuade the barman in a Mount Street pub to get the telly going in a quiet corner . . . so that we could watch Belgium beating us 1-0 in the pouring rain, the thunder and lightning in Brussels, denying us qualification for the 1982 World Cup with a late, horribly illegal goal."
Lynch riffs away on the fly-by-night creativity of the Hot Pressgang of the 1980s, afternoon drinking sessions in the International, the driftwood nature of journalistic life. He seems to have bumped into most of the figures who shaped 1980s Ireland – Bono, CJH, Dermot Morgan, Paul McGrath and Fr Michael Cleary all appear.
Those who recall Lynch's Foul Play column in HPwill be familiar with the wicked humour and that quality is present in abundance. Also here is his tendency to take narrative detours. Many are rewarding, as when he deviates from Ireland's World Cup match against Holland to a day in 1975 when AC Milan played "the Town" (Athlone) in the Uefa Cup and Lynch was a boy among the crowd watching "these gods who had brought their own food and wine to this remote place at the end of the world, and who had watched in awe as a pipe band marched around the pitch before kick-off, led by a goat".
He holds a dim view of the Irish intelligentsia and seems to have a fierce set against the collective Questions and Answerspanel who chuckled at the "funny" questions about Jack and football at the end of the show: "These people know nothing. But worse, they do not even know that they know nothing."
Italia ’90 begins on page 129 and his barstool view makes for riotous reading. Some of his ideas are wonderfully off the wall – particularly the intriguing if tenuous link between a concert given by Placido Domingo in the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and the first stirrings of shiny, corporate Ireland. Lynch closes with Mary Robinson’s election and the illusory belief that this was a brand new decade and that the country had magically changed.
Keith Duggan is an Irish Timesjournalist
