A lifetime of memories

I was born in July 1960. Not much was going on

I was born in July 1960. Not much was going on. Eerily, Harp lager was launched the same month and, although we would grow up apart, once I was old enough to consummate the relationship it would become the chosen bad influence on my brain cells during early adulthood.

Something significant did happen on July 10th. In Parc des Princes, Paris, the first European Nations Cup final took place.

Traditionally the European Championship, as it's been known since 1968, has a greater spread of good matches than the World Cup, although nowadays with 16 teams contesting the finals the concentration of quality is stretched a bit.

I was in Sligo during the Easter school holidays in 1972 on the weekend of the England-West Germany quarter-final, first leg. I remember sitting silently on my own in a hotel television lounge in front of some English tourists who became more agitated as it firstly became clear that they weren't going to bank the sort of insurance necessary for the second leg. Then it became clear that they mightn't win at all.

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They trailed 1-0 at half-time to a goal by Uli Hoeness. As the teams left the field, Jimmy Magee pointed out the irony of an amateur making the difference on such a great occasion of professional sport. Hoeness, I think, didn't want to go pro until after that year's Munich Olympics.

The European championships weren't finished with him. Four years later he missed the crucial penalty when the West Germans lost their title to Czechoslovakia in the 1976 final. It was his last international. At 24 he had his career ended by injury. Anyway, England lost at Wembley 3-1 and couldn't salvage anything a couple of weeks later in Berlin where the second leg ended scoreless.

A generation of players had passed by the time England next reached the finals: 1980 in Italy wasn't a success for them. As was almost de rigeur at the time, the English fans' flying column of hooligans rioted during the match against Belgium in Turin - a grim foreshadowing of when the same elements would come into a deadlier conjunction at the Heysel five years later.

France's Euro 84 was probably the most enjoyable tournament I can remember. It represented the flowering of the great French team that had been so unlucky in the World Cup two years earlier. RTÉ's coverage gave birth to Eamon Dunphy's legendary assessment of Michel Platini as a "Good player, not a great player".

Undaunted, the French captain ran the whole fortnight, during which he scored nine goals from midfield in five matches, including two hat-tricks in the group stage. The semi-final against Portugal remains the most enthralling match I have seen and the final refutation of Platini's detractors.

France found themselves unexpectedly trailing in extra-time. Somehow they got up off the canvas to equalise, and with two minutes to go to penalties Platini got onto a cross in the Portuguese penalty area, and what happened next seemed to take place in slow motion, like a scene from The Matrix. He stopped the ball, took the time to tee up the shot and lofted it into the net past the frantic scrambling on the goal line.

The novel experience of watching Ireland at a major tournament dominated Euro 88. One preliminary memory was of a BBC preview in which Johan Cruyff tipped Ireland as the team to watch: "They play their own game and are afraid of nobody."

I was in the middle of the most disastrous project of my brief and hapless public relations career. The project was enormous, with commensurate opportunity to go wrong. Despite my diffident warnings (dismissed as self-serving), it launched on the afternoon of the Ireland-England match - 16 years ago today. To my despair, this seminal event flashed only intermittently before my eyes. Instead of watching with my pals at a specially convened viewing party, I spent the day trying to interest distracted media outlets in my "news".

Phase two, of this by now as obscure as ever enterprise, took place the following Wednesday, the evening of the Ireland-USSR match, to a predictable surge of public ennui. By the Saturday of the Holland game I was free, free at last, and in an Enniscorthy pub where I endured agonies as the match wound its way towards the draw that would have been enough to put Ireland into the semi-finals.

I vividly remember Paul McGrath hitting the post before Holland began to turn the screw. After about 80 minutes and an interminable period of Dutch pressure, Ireland broke, with Kevin Sheedy leading an attack down the left. I parked the Harp on the counter and, inspired by the planet Dimwit, which was then ruling my house, jumped off the bar stool shouting: "We have them!" Inevitably, the famously freakish goal soon followed. Between Koeman's blunderbuss drive into the ground and Kieft's stretched header, the ball looked like bouncing wide. Instead it reared up with all the spin of a White House briefing and Ireland were gone.

The other tournament that stands out is the most recent. Four years ago France were back, this time as World Champions, with another outstanding team, inspired by another perfect 10. Zidane's ability to dazzle on the biggest occasions is extraordinary, but it was a comparatively prosaic task that stood out in the Euro 2000 semi-final, another epic against Portugal.

I'm not the biggest fan in Europe of the golden goal, but it's hard to imagine a more nerve-wracking example of the genre than a penalty kick in the last minutes of extra time. The Portuguese went nuts when the referee pointed to the spot. It was a fair penalty, but who could blame them? Zidane's icy dispatch settled the argument.

I was on the road home when the final was played. Returning from the Cork-Tipp Munster final in Thurles, I stopped with a friend in Kildare to catch Italy and France.

Anyway, the match is winding towards a win for Italy when Wiltord squeezes in the injury-time equaliser. In the crowded saloon bar I leap up in acclaim. The man behind me won't forget the moment either. On his way back from the Derby meeting at the Curragh, he now has beer over his good shirt.

The weeks ahead will bring more memories. There will be matches at home, trying to interest the children in the whole phenomenon, and matches with friends. Harp is now a fashion crime and my locals have long stopped selling it.

But around Dundalk and points north it will sit on bar counters in the tubular beams of big-screen broadcasts. And miles away there will be those evenings when I slip away from home and perch on a bar stool beside a counter on my own. I will tune into some random match and lose myself in its drama and the passing of my life's latest four-year increment.

Me and the European championships. Forty-four next month and still going strong, all things considered.

Seán Moran

Seán Moran

Seán Moran is GAA Correspondent of The Irish Times