Watching hope draining from a whole nation

POZNAN LETTER:The result confirmed many Poles' fatalistic conviction that great things do not really happen to their country, writes KEITH DUGGAN

FOR THE first time since the tournament started, a hush fell over the square in Poznan on Saturday night. In the fan zone, the crowd fell quiet and in the bars, people sat on floors and stood on the street watching Poland and the Czech Republic through windows.

The roads were quiet. Taxi drivers pulled up to listen to the radio. Any restaurant without a television had no customer. People who had no interest in football began to live every ball in this match. They didn’t just watch the game; they searched it for any sign that something special was going to happen.

It was very reminiscent of what Irish towns and cities were like during the tremulous days of other big tournaments when Ireland teams played out of their skins. All across Poland, reality fell away for the 90 minutes everyone was locked into the same hoping-against-hope mode. But you could see the faith beginning to slip on the faces of the Polish in Poznan as the minutes wore on.

After the initial euphoria when their team launched raid after raid in Wroclaw, they became anxious and despondent and, after Petr Jiracek cut in from the left flank to take Milan Baros’ pass and slot home that opportunist’s goal for the Czech, they became resigned. It just wasn’t to be.

Not long after the final whistle, the sky boomed, filled with lightning and rain fell in Poznan with spectacular energy. The rainfall did in minutes what the police with their batons and shields could not do: it cleared the square. This was proper European summer rain and people screamed and ran indoors and stood in the arches and gables of the buildings around the square. As we stood talking on a street where a small river of rain ran through the cobbles, a local man asked what part of Ireland we were all from. He told us he had worked in a hotel in Clifden for several years and his eldest daughter was born in Ireland.

In 2003, when Poland was coming into the EU, he and his wife decided it was a good time to return home. Coming home worked out well for him and even though he retains a strong affection for Ireland, he feels he left at the right time. His friend volunteered she had been Ireland once, for just a week.

“Limerick,” she said gloomily, gesturing towards the rain sheeting down.

“It was like this. Every day.”

In the hour or two after the Polish team exited the tournament, there was a definite sense that the championships had in many ways ended for the local fans.

The result was a confirmation of what many Polish people has spoken about in the days before the tournament began: their fatalistic conviction that fantastic things do not really happen to their country.

The stars seemed perfectly aligned on Saturday night: the Poles had been playing with confidence and just one simple win could have set them up for a portentous quarter-final on home soil against the country they would most like to beat: Germany. It would have been a fabulous occasion and even if the adventure had ended against the superior attacking verve and skill of the Germans, at least there would have been a nice since of symmetry to their exit.

Hundreds of Polish fans headed for home immediately. It wasn’t just the disappointment of the match, it was as if the nagging thoughts of ordinary chores and patterns – Mass in the morning, work on Monday, bills, worries – came crashing down on them. When the rain was falling at its hardest, the square was deserted and it was then we heard the faint defiant cry of what has become the inescapable anthem of the tournament: You’ll Never Beat The Irish.

By Sunday, they were arriving in Poznan for tonight’s game against Italy. They travelled in the packed, slow trains that rumbled through the low farm land from Gdansk to Poznan, in carriages that are a throwback to the 1970s and on which the catering staff make coffee using an industrial size jar of Nescafe. It was slow and no frills and Poznan was to be the final leg.

Many of the Irish were trying to find places to watch the GAA matches and Graeme McDowell in the golf last night. They talked about championship results at home and about the Ireland-New Zealand drop goal. Those conversations may offer another reason about why Ireland can only go so far in football.

The Polish, for instance, did not have a golfer trying to win the US Open last night. They had not just played the All-Blacks in a cagey thriller either. They have nothing comparable to the GAA. At some level in Ireland, there is an expectation that Irish sport can be all things against all people.

Expecting to thrive in football is part of it. It is only a couple of generations since football was regarded with suspicion and hostility in large parts of Ireland and it isn’t even 20 years since it found its full national voice. So as traumatic as the two games against Croatia and Spain have been, there seemed to be an acknowledgement even among the players that a natural order asserted itself. They just weren’t good enough.

And yet in other games there were plenty of examples of Giovanni Trapattoni’s insistence that anything can happen in football. As Greece stands on the precipice as a nation, its football team has lost none of its doggedness. People were so riveted by Poland’s bid to keep going on Saturday night it took a while for the news to register that the Greeks had somehow managed to beat the silken Russians and send them out. Ireland are not the only football nation left disillusioned by these championships. But no team has been as comprehensively outplayed. In contrast, it has been odd to see everything going right for England – no rows and no self-loathing. At least not yet.

So tonight, then, will be a strange way for Ireland to bow out of this campaign: a European tournament game and nothing at stake except the slender possibility of giving the vast, noisy Irish fan brigade a goal to celebrate. Tomorrow, the exodus from Poland to Dublin starts and so will the debates over where it all went wrong.

Soon, the Irish will be forgotten and soon, Poland will quickly be empty of all its football mad, hard-partying visitors. Football tournaments are daft and wonderful bursts of eccentricity and foolishness and relentless spending.

How things are going in Ukraine was a mystery to everyone: there was never any since of twinning between the two countries. But the Polish have been perfect, if slightly anxious hosts.

You can’t help but think that they must have been taken aback by the relentless drinking and eating, the seemingly limitless reserves of cash people from the visiting nations seem to have. Already, the European Championships are over for them and by the time the final has moved to Kiev, they will probably be secretly relieved. Still, tonight in Poznan, the hosts are stocking the shelves and ordering in extra kegs and bracing themselves for one last, unholy blast from the Irish.