I was trying to listen to the radio, I really was. Queuing to go through the turnstiles at Lansdowne Road last Saturday (en route to a seat I've been paying for since the 1980s, lest you think me a freeloading hack), I had the Walkman switched on and my ears snugly filled with a pair of tiny phones. I was working for you.
Well, okay, I was trying to listen to soccer talk on the radio.
All day on BBC Radio 5 Live I'd been hearing the manic-depressive English commentators mood-swinging wildly in their assessments of their team's prospects against mighty Germany that night; interspersed occasionally there were the Scots, charmingly optimistic and full of affection for their tactical genius of a manager. (For the non-fans who are still reading, the operative cliche here is "a week is a long time in football".) There was, however, little talk about the day's make-or-break match, Ireland v Holland. RT╔ Radio 1 wasn't much help: right up to 30 minutes before kick-off you could still Ask About Gardening with Gerry Daly - perhaps he would have had something to say about our perennial problems in central defence or the late-blooming Niall Quinn, if he'd been pressed on the questions.
Finally at 2.30 p.m. came Saturday Sport (RT╔ Radio 1), with plenty of pre-game adverts, summaries of other sporting events and a panel scratching around for reasons to be cheerful.
So there I was, trying to listen to the radio. But soon, into that turnstile queue, there came distraction. The first thing I noticed about the guy behind me was the warm, sticky odour of a couple of hours in the pub; then came his voice, booming louder and louder to his pal beside him, to no one in particular, to everyone in his hearing - drowning out the drone in my earphones.
"I don't know what everyone is worried about. Names. That's all it is, names. Out there it's just 11 men against 11 men, not names. Van Nistelrooy. Kluivert. . ." He was trying to charm the magic out of the names (was Rumpelstiltskin Dutch?), but a murmur of fear in the crowd around him said we weren't sure it was working. He pressed on nonetheless.
"Hasselbaink." Ouch. There was nothing for it now but to laugh, albeit nervously. "Overmars." Now scores of us were roaring laughing, picturing in our minds the succession of brilliant, lethal footballers to whom these mere names are attached. And yet also released, ready to face the names with a smile and a song.
Philosophical musings like this particular stand-side discourse on the-name-and-the-thing are surprisingly common in the world of sport, which resists strictly material analysis. The language is not always so sophisticated; however, one of my favourite audio moments of the summer came from a Test Match Special BBC Radio 4 commentator who, on telling us that a particular English batsman was unlikely "to be mentally psyched out" by this Australian bowler, immediately offered profuse apologies for the redundant phrasing. (Now think of how often you've heard similar phrases about Kerry this week.) After Ireland's victory on Saturday, there was inevitably a lot of talk about "belief" and "faith". The virtual exchange of vows between Mick McCarthy and Jason McAteer would have been embarrassing in any other circumstance; on this day their emotional words were an unutterably touching and honest closure to the open-heart surgery that team and supporters had been through.
Ray Houghton, a canny observer at most times, managed to top them and everyone else in the metaphysics stakes in his final summing-up for Saturday Sport: Shay Given's goal, he suggested, "was blessed. There was someone else in there, a 12th man, stopping the ball from going in the net." Sort of like, God is my co-keeper.
You'd surely never hear something so superstitious and undialectical from Eamonn McCann. On the Sunday Show (RT╔ Radio 1, Sunday) he was ready to offer materialist readings not only of soccer but of a range of other sports - the successful Irish rowers being very much on the agenda, what with Myles Dungan presenting the programme. McCann, reflecting on ironies of media interest and sporting achievement, assured us that Ireland's most successful athlete is an unheralded woman lawn-bowler.
Jimmy Magee was also on hand, and he wasn't going to let any sport be mentioned without assuring listeners of his own grasp of the game's technicalities. Soon he'd drawn McCann into a mini-dialogue on bowls, which Dungan soon interrupted on the basis that he couldn't understand what they were talking about. Surely the capacity to elicit such an admission of ignorance from Myles Dungan must qualify as some sort of definition of a subject's genuine, deep-dark obscurity.
Jimmy Magee notwithstanding, lately for me the Sunday Show has been generally less irritating than its rival, the Sunday Supplement (Today FM, Sunday). This week, despite its dominant conservative line, the latter programme let the liberal agenda in the shape of Nuala O'Faolain into the studio. But was she set up? The subject at one point was halting sites, and presenter Sam Smyth was teasing guest Moore McDowell about the efforts being made by UCD (where McDowell serves on the governing body) to prevent a group of Travellers from campus-camping. McDowell joked about the electronic inducements that UCD's neighbours, Philips, had been able to offer the Travellers to keep them away; Smyth joked more dubiously about the "tinkers" already occupying prestigious chairs at the college. (Or was that "thinkers", har-har.) Finally, unsurprisingly, Nuala O'Faolain had heard enough. It was hardly a joking matter, she said, with emotional conviction that would have made Mick McCarthy proud, that UCD was "barricading itself" against the most oppressed and impoverished section of our population. She attacked vociferously and articulately, finishing with a question; she demanded of McDowell to know how many Traveller students UCD actually had.
McDowell sounded strangely cool. "You might be aware, Nuala, if you were better informed - which I'm not surprised you're not . . ." "Oh, that's a real L&H put-down," O'Faolain interrupted, confidently pressing the question again on McDowell.
"You might be aware," McDowell repeated, "that UCD is allowing a halting site to be built on its grounds." "I wasn't aware of that," O'Faolain bravely replied before deflating entirely. She might have roused herself to say that this didn't actually answer the question of what UCD was doing about the education of Travellers; that a site was a small price for UCD to pay, given its enormous landholdings; that this provision scarcely conferred a licence for smug joking about the plight of Travellers. However, she could tell as well as anyone that an exchange that started with her talking about barricades and ended with McDowell talking about a halting site was an exchange she had lost. So, like Van Nistelrooy, Kluivert and company, the name O'Faolain lived to fight another day.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie