‘The best laid schemes o’
Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but
grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!’
From 'To a Mouse (On Turning up in her Nest, with the Plough)', November 1785,
by Robert Burns.
'The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples'
The Bible,
Psalm 33:10
‘Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht’
Old Yiddish saying meaning, ‘Man Plans, and God Laughs’.
You may be wondering at the three separate but
related quotations above, but if you read on it will hopefully start to make sense. Back
in January of this year and in a rush of extreme sports-fandom related optimism
I decided to tempt fate by writing about how 2020 was going to be the year for me. Thanks to my good
friends over at www.verywestham.com,
who kindly posted that piece, as https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/
did not yet exist.
After some near and many quite far misses, back
in January I thought I was on the verge of seeing my two teams (the Tipperary
senior hurlers and Liverpool Football Club) hold their respective national
titles at the same time for the first time in three decades. Then along came a
pandemic and everything stopped. Individual mouse-like hopes and sporting
dreams suddenly seemed trivial and I felt like, just in that Yiddish derived saying above, God was laughing.
Then Jurgen Klopp (with a good claim to be the most
God-like of humans) issued an inspiring statement in March on how football (and by
extension all sport) is only the ‘most important of the least important things’
(see earlier blog: https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/03/football-life-and-death.html) and everyone settled down a bit.
Eventually, and thanks in no small part to the motivational intervention of David Brent (see earlier blog: https://sportyman2020.blogspot.com/2020/06/super-soccer-speaker-credited-with.html), Project Restart was successful and the Premier League got going again in the last week.
And last Thursday night at Stamford Bridge Chelsea beat Manchester City, thus ensuring that Liverpool could not be caught in the race for the Premier League. The result has led to a steadily building outpouring of joy and relief from Liverpool fans all over the world. Adding to the euphoria of victory is the knowledge that Liverpool have played scintillating football all season with, in my opinion, their greatest ever team.
So
here again is my pre-COVID-19 January piece, with a few new images included...
'When your sporting stars align'
(first published on www.verywestham.com on January 5th 2020)
The start of a new decade and the
recent success of my two teams (the Tipperary hurling team and Liverpool FC)
has got me thinking that my sporting stars are starting to align perfectly for
just the second time in my life, like that brief magical period of a few weeks
in the summer of 1990.
For non-Irish readers, hurling is an ancient Irish game that resembles field hockey but is played at a much more frenetic pace, with the players being able to catch and run with the ball. The ‘Premier League’ of hurling is the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship, played between 12 different Irish counties. The season runs from May to September with the final being played in Croke Park Dublin in front of 80,000 people. Every boy (and many girls) from hurling counties grows up supporting their county team and dreaming of one day playing for them. Despite being 46 years old and never being a particularly accomplished under-age player, one of my get-to-sleep fantasies is still the one where I score an injury time winning goal for Tipperary in an All-Ireland final with all of my friends, family (and enemies) in the crowd.
Hurling (and its far less elegant companion game of Gaelic Football) has strong historic links with Irish independence and nationalism and, therefore, a certain anti-Englishness. However, most Irish hurling fans are also avid followers of the actual Premier League, and everyone has a team. So while I was born as a supporter of the Tipperary hurling team (being a native of that county) and started going to their games with my father from the age of 6, I became a supporter of Liverpool FC, by my own choice.
In fact, I remember the exact moment when I became a Liverpool supporter. It was 1982, I was nine years old and I had a vague idea that there was this great football team that wore all red and whose fans sang songs. I was in a shop in our village and I picked up a Liverpool FC mug from a shelf. The mug had details of all of Liverpool’s titles and achievements. I was astounded at the number of successes. At the same time, I thought of the strong Irish contingent with the club at that stage: Mark Lawrenson, Jim Beglin, Ronnie Whelan and Ian Rush (who I thought was Irish). And then a wave came over me and I remember saying to myself something along the lines of: ‘these guys are brilliant!’ Thus began my love affair with Liverpool FC.
So anyway, back to the summer of 1990. Tipperary had won the All-Ireland championship in September 1989 and so they were still the reigning champions in the summer of 1990. The 1989 win had been extremely special, being Tipperary’s first championship win since 1971 (and so the first in my lifetime). And Liverpool had just won the First Division title in May 1990. But the absolute peak of sporting-stars-alignment took place specifically on June 25th 1990. I sat (and stood and jumped and screamed) with my father and brother in our sitting room, watching Ireland beat Romania in a penalty shoot-out and progressing to the quarter finals of our first ever World Cup, to take on the hosts Italy in Rome.
Liverpool - First Division Champions for 1989-1990
Tipperary - All-Ireland Senior Hurling Champions for 1989
The Republic of Ireland defeat Romania in the World Cup on June 25th 1990
Of course I didn’t realise or appreciate just how special those few weeks were until many years later. Just after the Irish victory over Romania, I headed off on that Irish rite of passage to ‘the Gaeltacht’ (Irish language school) in Connemara for the rest of the summer. There I watched the Italy game on June 30th and saw Salvatore ‘Toto’ Schillaci score the only goal as Italy progressed to the semi-final at Ireland’s expense. Two weeks later, on July 15th, I got the news from home that Cork had beaten our beloved Tipperary in the Munster hurling final, thus eliminating us from the All-Ireland hurling championship. And the rest, as they say, is history. Tipperary would go on to win intermittent but too infrequent All-Ireland championships, in 1991, 2001, 2010, 2016 and again last August, making us the current reigning champions. And despite keeping the trophy case ticking over since 1990, Liverpool would never again be champions of England. To add insult to injury, the greatest rivals of Tipperary and Liverpool (the Kilkenny hurlers and Manchester United, respectively) would go on to have unprecedented levels of success in the subsequent three decades.
Tipperary captain Seamus Callanan with the Liam McCarthy Cup in August 2019
And the victorious Tipperary team
But of course 2020 looks like
Liverpool’s dismal record might finally come to an end. Even the most cautious
and pessimistic of Liverpool fans realises that the current lead is a healthy
one. So in May 2020, Tipperary will still be the reigning All-Ireland hurling
champions, Liverpool will (please God) be champions of England (and Europe, and
even the world, if you take that latter competition seriously). So, three
decades on from that last sporting zenith in 1990, my sporting stars will again
(please God, again) be aligned. As for the Republic of Ireland football team –
well I guess you can’t have it all…
And now for images of two crucial June 25th penalties - taken exactly thirty years apart:
June 25th 1990: David O'Leary of Ireland puts the ball past Silviu Lung of Romania,
to take Ireland into the 1990 World Cup quarter finals
And finally, a penalty involving two Brazilians in the COVID-19 related emptiness of Stamford Bridge, as Willian of Chelsea scores against Ederson of Manchester City on June 25th 2020, to effectively end the Premier League title chase of 2019-2020, with Liverpool as champions.
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