It was, undoubtedly, the television image of the sporting week. A row of football fans, the first three with their faces buried in their hands, the next two chewing their nails to the quick, the next mouthing "pleeeease, pleeeeease, no" and the next three bravely looking on at the gut-wrenching scene before them.
They could have been Celtic supporters last Monday as they listened to Jock Brown and Fergus McCann explain why it was actually a good thing that Wim Jansen had left the club. Or they could have been Spurs and Manchester United fans watching Saturday's FA Cup final on telly. But, in fact, they were the faces of a row of Cork City supporters, picked out by an RTE camera, two minutes from the end of the FAI Cup Final replay on Saturday evening. Shelbourne had won a corner and had thrown the world and his mother in to the box in an attempt to equalise Derek Coughlan's 73rdminute goal. Cork survived, but one suspects the row of supporters on our screens will need post-traumatic-stress-syndrome counselling to recover from the moment.
With just 20 seconds to go the camera picked out another Cork City fan, a girl who looked no older than 10, wide-eyed, terrified and petrified that the shower from Dublin would snatch an equaliser and ruin her perfect day. They didn't, Cork won the cup for the first time and she'll never forget it because she was there. Over at Wembley, earlier in the afternoon - in case you were out in the sun and missed the news - Arsenal won the double. This made Kevin Costner and the Archbishop of Canterbury very happy, and left Cardinal Basil Hume and Tony Blair gutted. We know this because Sky Sports and ITV devoted a considerable part of their lengthy build-up to celebrity supporters.
(Word has it that Blair thinks his team was once called Castle but, after ditching the principles on which the club was built, was renamed New Castle).
As for Costner - well, when he was in London last year somebody brought him to Highbury and he thought it was a "boootiful experience", so now he's an Arsenal fan. "Gunners - that's a goooood name," he told the Sky Sports' reporter who followed him to a film set somewhere in America. "It's not a wimpy name, it's a strooooong name - so, `Go be Gunners!'," he said, in a message of support to the Arsenal players. (What if he had been taken to a Brighton match? "Go be Seagulls'. Or a Plymouth game? "Go be Pilgrims'. Or Brentford? "Go be Bees'.) Sky Sports, though, failed to get the really big scoop from Costner - i.e., that he will begin work soon on his latest project, WengerWorld. The plot: a French economist leaves Japan and heads for north London, where he discovers a football club in a post-apocalyptic state. The only words in the players' vocabulary are "Offside Ref!' and their bored supporters are haunted by chants of "Nayim from the halfway line". But then, Wenger, in a scene requiring state-of-the-art special effects, transforms two spooky creatures called Martin Keown and Ray Parlour into footballers, recruits a bunch of French players nobody's ever heard of (who turn out to be a bit good), convinces a couple of Dutchmen that the club won't be offended if they express themselves on the pitch and, voila, they all live happily ever after. (It's a feel-good movie, if you're a Gooner. It's a turkey if you're not).
"He's more intelligent than most of us," said Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood of WengerWorld's central character on Saturday night's Match of the Day. "He seems to make all the right decisions, so we leave him alone to get on with his job - we don't interfere with him." (Yoo, hoo, Jock and Fergus - are you listening?)
"BrattbAAAAKKKKKK . . . Sin e!!!," said a rather excited Mac Dara Mac Donncha, the Ole Ole commentator, when the Norwegian scored Celtic's second goal in their title-clinching win over St Johnstone (TnaG, Monday night). Mac Dara, one suspects, is in need of a hernia operation after that commentary, like most Celtic fans are in the aftermath of Jansen's exit from Parkhead.
"Aw, I cannae understand it, cannae understand it," said an apoplectic Charlie Nicholas on Friday's Tartan Extra on Sky Sports, when Paul Dempsey asked him to explain why Celtic had just lost the manager who helped them win the league, after nine failed attempts.
Before European integration the Sun's version of events at Celtic might have gone like this . . . "McCann and Brown give Jansen Edam Good thrashing". "Edam good thrashing", you see, is what the paper willed the English football team to dish out to Holland in Euro '96. Then there were the headlines before the match against Germany - "Achtung Surrender - For You Fritz ze Euro '96 Championship is over" and "`Blitz the Fritz". But all that's history now, as Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, explained to Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last Wednesday, following a request to the tabloids from the chairman of the Press Complaints Association to "moderate its language during the World Cup in case the English hooligans take them too seriously and use them as an excuse for violence".
"All that was just old-style tabloid humour," explained Morgan. "There is no longer an appetite for it, what with European integration and more and more of our readers going to Europe. They want to put the war behind them, put frog-bashing and kraut-bashing behind them - I think they're right to do so and we have to reflect the way our readers have changed."
So, in an attempt to discover just how Euro-friendly the tabloids had become, Jeremy visited the offices of the Sun where he asked assistant editor Fergus Shanahan "if it might be possible that they could write politically correct headlines" for this summer's World Cup. "Suppose we beat Germany 1-0," said Jeremy. "When we beat Germany," insisted Fergus. "Suppose we beat Germany," said Jeremy, who is never out-insisted by anyone. "Okay, in the last World Cup it would have been `Hun Nil!'," said Shanahan. "Now some people might feel there's a little hint of xenophobia creeping in there - we're in favour of jingoism, not xenophobia, so let me show you what we'll be doing in this World Cup." Go on, guess. Maybe "Unlucky Germans, our good pals, beaten by fluky Shearer goal"? Nope. Over to Fergus: "You're Schmidt And You Know You Are," he declared triumphantly. Jeremy groaned. (S'pose the Germans can use "You're Smith And You Know You Are", if the score is reversed. Maybe not).
