Days of Heaven by Declan Lynch

gave the diaspora in general a powerful connection to this team of Jack’s, not to mention giving Jack a team which could qualify for the
tournaments which had previously eluded it. Dermot Bolger witnessed this at Euro 88, in his play In High Germany : ‘The crowd joined in, every one of them, from Dublin and Cork, from
London and Stockholm. And suddenly I knew this was the only country I still owned, those eleven figures in green shirts, that menagerie of accents pleading with God.’
    As for Jack’s own Englishness, for us it had become either an amusing irony or just another fast one we had pulled on them, taking on the ‘gruff Yorkshireman’ who had once
applied for the England job and not even received the courtesy of a reply.
    Again, we told ourselves what we wanted to hear, that this was the sort of Englishman we could take orders from, a rough-hewn individual, a plain fellow whose tastes were not unlike our own,
though he was also about as English as you can be, in the sense of having an unambiguous devotion to Queen and country.
    Bigger things were happening for us, with a nation re-discovering a part of itself that had been missing, presumed dead. Discovering these weird new phenomena such as luck, and winning, and
being part of something that matters.

H aving said all that ... having taken from England the great game of football and taken back the sons that she had nurtured for us and beaten her
1-0 in the opening match of the European Championship, a match which England could have won 5-1, or even 7-2, we did not feel any need to be magnanimous in victory.
    The film-maker Alan Parker, when he was over in Dublin making The Commitments would be deeply disappointed by the wild rejoicing in the saloons of Ireland when anything remotely bad
happened to the England football team. Here was the Englishman, Parker, giving opportunities to talented Irish youngsters, making Ireland look and sound better than it actually was, and generally
doing us a big favour. And this is how we showed our appreciation. ‘But we support you’, he would say plaintively.
    Indeed, apart from the more obdurate members of the National Front, most England fans would show a benign attitude to the Republic in the big tournaments, even willing them to win, as long as
England weren’t involved. Which some of us would automatically see as just patronising and just another demonstration of their lack of awareness of the bitter enmity which is supposed to
exist between us.
    And I do not exclude myself from any of this carry-on. I was able to maintain these apparently contradictory positions, with no feelings of remorse.
    At the time I was Anglophile in most things, as were most of the people I knew. We immersed ourselves in English sport and English television and English rock ’n’ roll for most of
our lives, because we obviously found it better than whatever we were getting at home and yet, how we laughed at Ten Great England Defeats, one of Arthur Mathews’ more sublime offerings for Hot Press . (Incidentally for the historical record, I should correct the impression that Arthur was a frequent contributor to Hot Press. For a long time he was essentially regarded as
a lay-out man who just turned out an article from time to time as the mood took him. Here we had one of the best comedy writers in the world, who was only doing it in his spare time — perhaps
another sign there of Paddy not pushing himself.)
    Christmas would see a new edition of Arthur’s ‘The Border Fascist’, a terrifyingly funny and note-perfect version of a provincial paper, with headlines like ‘Belturbet
Man Executed in Malaysia’, and an ad for hearing aids in Cootehill: ‘Are You Fucking Deaf?’ And there was the comic strip, ‘Charles J. Haughey’s Believe It Or
Not’.
    But the Ten Great England Defeats is what concerns us here. It was the sort of piece that could only have been done by an aficionado, the sort of chap with a suitcase under