Harpin' On Stuff

feel so small

2012-01-16T15:45:00.001Z

Happy MLK Day.

When I look at pictures of my family
I cannot help but hold my head up high
But then the fact that self-doubt keeps on nagging me
Holds me back and it makes me wonder why

If it wasn’t for my loved ones I would see no hope at all
Cos I feel so small

When I read back over human history
I cannot help but be amazed
But then the fact that much is still a mystery
Holds me back and has me counting down my days

I’d gladly sell my soul if I had space to set my stall
And I feel so small

Maybe this is the real meaning of loneliness
And the way I feel isn’t crazy after all
For it doesn’t make much sense that everyone can stand so tall
While I feel so small

When I read the U.S. Constitution
I cannot help but feel a glow inside
But then the fact that it ends at its own frontiers
Holds me back and puts shackles on my pride

The concept of united we stand and divided we fall
Makes me feel so small

Maybe this is the real meaning of loneliness
And the way I feel isn’t crazy after all
For it doesn’t make much sense that everyone can stand so tall
While I feel so small

Like a lion roaring inside a cage
I feel so small
Like a writer staring at an empty page
I feel so small
Like a reverend dreaming of a brighter day
I feel so small
Like a hunted fox as it’s running away
I feel so small
Like a blind man trying to find his way alone
I feel so small
Like the lonely sound of a single saxophone
I feel so small

But if we all feel small
Then why feel small at all?

© JL Pagano 1992, 2005

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

buckpassing

2011-12-24T06:00:00.000Z

This is for my beautiful daughter, who was born 17 years ago today. I wrote it shortly before she was conceived, though don't feel that much differently today! ;-)

As sure as darkness can be full of many dangers
As sure as little children shouldn’t talk to strangers
As sure as night follows day you’ll ask me the question
As sure as Mother Nature cannot be predicted
As sure as one to nicotine can be addicted
I’m sure I can safely say you’ll ask me the question

“Daddy, what’s really going on?”

Well, I could give you a bible and tell you to read
I could give you commandments and tell you to heed
But could I honestly say they’d answer your question?

Ask me how,
I’ll show you ways in which you can proceed
Ask me where
I’ll show you places you will not believe
Ask me any of the above and I’ll gladly reply
There’s just one thing though
Don’t ask me why

Now if you wonder why I question my ability
My train of thought it’s greatly lacking in mobility
In fact, when it comes to this, it’s stuck at the station
I asked the conductor what on earth the whole delay was for
He just laughed and said “Stop using stupid metaphors!
You can dodge all you like but they’ll still ask the question!”

“Daddy, what’s really going on?”

Ask me how, ask me where,

Ask me which,
I’ll help you choose the one that serves you well
Ask me what,
I’ll give you things to use for show-and-tell
But with one small request I cannot comply
You get the picture
Don’t ask me why

See in my soul, there’s a void
That I can’t avoid any longer
Whenever I try another year goes by
And the feelings can’t get any stronger
So when you ask me why I’ll sing this lullaby
In the hope that one day you’ll see
I’ll always learn more from you
Than you could ever learn from me

Ask me how, ask me where, ask me which, ask me what,

Ask me when,
I’ll take you all the way through history
Ask me whodunit,
And I’ll help you solve the mystery
But if it’s reasons you seek then don’t even try
I sure can’t help you
Don’t ask me why

© JL Pagano 1994

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

A few thoughts on today's vote

2011-10-27T10:47:00.000+01:00

What with my rugby site doing well and all, I rarely post here these days. But as the title suggests, I do have some thoughts.

First of all, the Presidential campaign has been one unlike any other political process I've seen on this island in the 20 years I have been living here. That's mostly because it's a national poll for individual candidates, an unusual entity despite the jurisdiction having such a small electorate.

What has interested me most throughout the campaign has been the way it is abundantly clear that the Irish media want Michael D Higgins to be in Aras an Uachtarain. At first, when their "eye of Mordor" appeared to be fixated on David Norris, I thought it was due to an inherent homophobia in Irish society. Bascially I thought the country just "wasn't ready for a gay president".

While I still feel that is the case, the subsequent picking off one by one of the other candidates, without any real focus placed on Higgins. Now let me be clear - he was always my preferred candidate, but what I'm saying is, if Norris was hounded to publish some letters, McGuinness to prove he wasn't in the IRA, Dana to prove she actually wants to be Irish, Gallagher to prove he's not your typical bent property developer, why hasn't Michael D been asked to show, oh I don't know, some kind of medical proof that he can last the full 14 years as President?

Yet still I will vote for him today. As was the case before the hounding began.

Then there are the referendums. On social media at least there is much, much fear mongering being spread about them, particularly the one about the Oireachtas powers.

I'm not saying there isn't a possibility that the amendment as written could give our elected representatives more power than perhaps they should have. But what I AM saying is this...the wording was published AGES ago. Why is the fear-mongering only being spread now? Where was all the doubt back when the referendum was first proposed?

I mean...we're meant to have our doubts as to the intentions of the government. Maybe they'll have too much power. Fine. But while we're on the subject of paranoia, how about the agenda of those waiting until the last minute to persuade us to say No by filling us with doubt?

In science, it's almost impossible to prove a negative. However in Irish referendums, it's extremely easy to produce one if it suits you. That is what history has taught me, anyway.

That's not to say this wording is perfect. But for what little legal knowledge that I have, I would have thought the words "with due regard to the principles of fair procedures" provide plenty of wiggle room for legal teams who wish to challenge anything these new bodies will bring to the table.

In other words, just wait until the first property developer and/or banker is called to appear before an Oireachtas committee should a Yes vote happen. Methinks the committee's power won't be quite as "absolute" as some would suggest.

But the process would certainly take a hell of a lot less time and public money than a toothless tribunal would, that's for sure.

Dana-inspired Ditty

2011-09-19T17:03:00.001+01:00

Businessmen, and talk show hosts,
Politicians too
Champions of childrens rights
And those who killed a few
Get councils four
or TDs score
To set you on your course,
And all kinds of anyone, can run for the Áras

my month of remembrance

2011-08-22T16:02:00.001+01:00

Hard to believe it is almost five years since this post was written! Worth a re-post methinks.

************************************************

Please forgive me for this post – it is not my wish to bring anyone down, it’s just that I want to continue my blogging hobby and I don’t want to do so while pretending nothing has happened over the past week.

I suppose it would be wise to inform those who may not know that my grandparents brought me up as their son.

The month of August, particularly the end of it, will always be one of remembrance for my family.

August 20th, 1936

My grandparents are married in Nashua, New Hampshire.

August 21st, 1913

My grandfather is born.

August 22nd, 2004

I propose to Sandra.

August 24th, 1977

My grandparents and I say our last farewells to most of our friends as we make final preparations to emigrate from the Bay Area of California all the way to Ireland.

August 26th, 2006

On the happiest day of my life, Sandra and I are married in front of friends and most of my family.

August 27th, 2004

My grandfather passes away peacefully in his sleep at the age of 91.

August 28th, 2002

My grandmother writes the above note and leaves it by her bedside. Please note the impeccable penmanship for (at the time) a 93-year old lady.

August 29th, 1992

I married my first wife.

August 30th, 2006

That same first wife, the only other person* I had in Ireland to be a contact person for my grandmother’s nursing home, has the unenviable task of calling me while on my honeymoon in New York to tell me she had deteriorated much over the previous 24 hours, and that we should change our flights if I wanted to be with her at the end.

August 31st, 2006

My grandmother passed away quiety and painlessly at the grand age of 97. We successfully changed our flights, but touched down 45 minutes before she was gone, so we did not quite make it to her bedside. At the very least, she was not unattended.

The funeral was yesterday. As much as my grandparents both loved me and were proud to carry out the challenge of bringing me up, because of the generation gap, it could be said that they never properly understood me, and of course vice versa. For me, the silver lining of recent events is that I know now they both understand me perfectly, and will watch over me and my family for the rest of our own days on this earth.

May they both rest in peace.

* = I must note that Sandra’s immediate family would have been more than willing to be available for my grandmother, but we felt it best to ask MyX because hers was a face that would be recognized more readily, plus she is mother to her two great-grandchildren.

bank holiday pay

2011-07-27T20:51:00.004+01:00

Our Labour Party may be in coalition but let’s face it, Fine Gael, ie The Christian Democrats, i.e. The Business Owner’s Party is pretty much in control of matters here.

And yes, I know, the topic du jour is housing tax at the moment, but I’m wondering about something else.

The mainly right-wing mainstream media here have been giving business owners ample time to bitch and moan about how much paying their staff overtime on Sundays and Bank Holidays affects their ability to trade. Which of course set us up nicely to accept the new government’s decision to get to work on legislation to dismantle the JLCs in place, allowing the sectors involved, and in the most part it was in the catering industry, to pay their staff a flat rate throughout the week regardless of the day.

I don’t want to argue the rights and wrongs of this issue in this post. But I do have a query.

We put our son in a crèche three days a week. One of those days is Monday, and it has to be with our situation. But when a bank holiday comes along, we still have to pay for that day. When the laws get changed, can I go to the crèche and tell them I’ll only pay for the actual days my son is looked after from now on? Or does the new legislation also come out in favour of the employers in this case as well?

Just wondering, like.

forget

2011-07-23T16:00:00.003+01:00

I've published these lyrics many times before, but I'm doing it again because it's meant for a female vocal and if I could choose anyone to sing it, it would be Amy Winehouse. RIP.

Take all your troubles
Take all your fears
Lose all your worries
From over the years
Lay down beside me
Turn out the light
Let’s dance with the angels

And if you still have regret
I can help you forget
For a night

There are those who will scorn us
And be sure there are those who will warn us
That we’ve got so much to lose
Yet between us we choose
Not to end what we have

One day you’ll leave me
And run far away
Back to your homeland
To a brighter day
Always forever
My thoughts will be with you
Don’t doubt for a moment

There’s no way I can let
Myself ever forget
Of this night

Just ignore those who scorn us
Pay no heed to the ones that will warn us
That we’ve got so much to lose
Yet between us we choose
Not to end what we have

So take all your troubles
And take all your fears
Lose all your worries
From over the years
Lay down beside me
Turn out the light
Let’s dance with the angels

And if you still have regret
Let me help you forget
One more night

© JL Pagano 2005

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

millstone, u.s.a.

2011-07-04T05:57:00.001+01:00

It has become something of a tradition for me to re-publish these lyrics on July 4, don’t see why I should stop now…

I was headed down Interstate 9
And I could not find my way

That’s when I saw the sign

“Now Entering Millstone, U.S.A”

There was reason to celebrate
And at first I couldn’t work out why
That’s when I checked the date
And saw that it was the Fourth of July

There was bunting and banners all round
Pride in the land that their fathers did found
An elderly couple walked up to me
A smile in their eyes as they said unto me

They said; “We were wondering what could be holding you back?”

Hey, check out that TV show!
Live footage of America’s greatest crime!
Hey, check out that mixing bowl!
It slices, it dices, it even tells you the time!

I was so overwhelmed by it all
Even the price of a long distance call
I thought about how sad my life had been
With all of these wonders that I’d never seen

And I started wondering what could be holding me back

I was enthralled with what I learned
Of great battles and heroes to admire
Independence that was truly earned
An amazing history that could not but inspire

So I started to talk of my home
I had several legends and tales of my own
That’s when I noticed the crowd around me
The looks in their eyes served to astound me

If indifference was atmosphere
Then I could feel a storm brewing that night
I guess they just didn’t want to hear
About places out of mind and out of sight

Now I’m wondering what can be holding them back?
Could it be the "American dream" is just that?
The American DREAM?

And so I got back on Interstate 9
Glad I had finally found my way
I just smiled as I passed the sign
“Thanks for visiting Millstone, USA”

© JL Pagano 1994

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

game of thrones

2011-06-23T11:56:00.000+01:00

SEASON ONE

I can probably offer a unique perspective since it seems I'm the only one who hasn't read the books! The superb cast together with its compelling “Lord of the Rings”-style narrative make this a must-watch for fans of the genre. Emilia Clarke in that garb works for me too.

why can't you see the madness?

2011-03-12T09:08:00.000Z

The person I wrote this song for is 62 years old today. Should they be reading this, Happy Birthday.

What use all your talent
When you have no desire
What use knowing truth
When you were born a liar

What use a Rolex watch
When you can’t find the time
What use a silken ladder
When you won’t try to climb

Maybe one day hell will freeze
And I will see what your mind sees
A forest hidden by all the trees

If you can see the black cats
That cross your path each day
And if you can see injustice
From many miles away
If all your worldly wisdom
Affords you perfect sight
Then why can’t you see the madness in your life?

What use a song about you
When you don’t want to hear
What use my sharing demons
When you won’t see my fear

Maybe one day hell will freeze
And I will see what your mind sees
A forest hidden by all the trees

If you can see the black cats
That cross your path each day
And if you can see injustice
From many miles away
If all your worldly wisdom
Affords you perfect sight
Then why can’t you see the madness in your life?

I love you
Cos I have to
But it’s still love
Why can’t you see?

You hurt me
Cos you had to
But it still hurts
Why can’t you see?

If you can see the black cats
That cross your path each day
And if you can see injustice
From many miles away
If all your worldly wisdom
Affords you perfect sight
Then why can’t you see the badness
Why can’t you see my sadness
And why can’t you see the madness in your life?

© JL Pagano 2005

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

go where you want to be left

2011-03-01T09:08:00.001Z

So in the most part the votes have been counted, and as has been pretty much predicted, Fianna Fáil and the Greens have been rightly punished for their shambolic handling of the economy.

We have to be perfectly clear that the above sentence is an accurate depiction of what happened. While Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin all hoist their victorious candidates on their shoulders, they must realise exactly how that victory came about.

As the Guardian rightly noted in an editorial, they happened to be there holding the parcel when the music stopped. The true success of these parties will be measured at the NEXT election, and the battle lines have already been drawn.

On the Left, there are now around 60 TDs. SIXTY. (for the purposes of this post I’m going along with the charade that Sinn Féin are left) And of those, the Labour Party, who made it clear to the electorate they were willing to go into Government with Fine Gael, won 37. So although they do have a “majority” mandate of sorts, it’s not a sizeable one, so they will have to watch their flank as the 31st Dáil goes on.

And as several people are keen to point out, there IS a case to be made for them staying out of Government altogether and being the lead party of Opposition. Though I’m not altogether sure that’s what the likes of Gerry Adams and Joe Higgins really want, whatever they might say publicly.

Like it or not, Fine Gael and Labour will be running the country together for the next while. Kenny’s minions may very well make noises about cosying up to independents, but there’s cuts to be made, which means there’s blame to be shared.

Still, I believe there could also be a positive spin put on all of this, and Lord knows, the country needs it. To para-phrase a previous Fianna Fáil party line, “we are where we are”.

Would the Left rather sit back and let the right handle the situation (and more than likely take all the credit when things eventually turn around) or are they willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty sorting it all out?

I TOTALLY get the notion that a Labour-led Opposition would quite possibly represent a fast-track to a Labour-led Government. I get it so much that I have put my views on record. But perhaps this is a time to put country before ideology???

I for one do NOT want the whole banks-EU/IMF situation handled exclusively by the pro-business lobby. I’d much rather know there’s some strong differing voices around the Cabinet table.

So once the Programme for Government is drawn up, lefty voters have a simple choice…support those on the pitch or those who prefer to shout from the stands. I know what I’ll be doing.

Technorati Tags: paganoireland,#ge11

#votinglabourbecause

2011-02-21T10:46:00.001Z

Listen!

In the above Audioboo I explain in less than 5 minutes why I’ll be voting the way I am. But whatEVER way you intend to vote, PLEASE go out and do it if you can. The new government needs a mandate and the larger the turnout, the more relevant the mandate. It’s on a Friday this year so there are really very few excuses. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours out of your day and it’s to influence the next 5 years of the life of this nation. Thank you.

Technorati Tags: paganoireland,#ge11

ac milan-0 spurs-1

2011-02-15T22:38:00.000Z

YA CANNAE MESS WI’ JOE!

My blogging is mostly about the rugby these days, and when it isn’t, it’s mostly about the upcoming Irish general election. But I HAVE to do a post so I can remember this match.

In the San Siro last night, Tottenham Hotspur, who I’ve supported for 34 years, found a way to eclipse what I considered to be their greatest-ever 90-minute display, which happened only last May in Manchester, when they clinched their place in this same Champions League, ironically also with a late Peter Crouch winner.

And this time, the excellent performances extended off the pitch, with assistant coach Joe Jordan pitching in by clearly getting inside the fiery Gennaro Gattuso’s head and making sure he was both booked and banned for the second leg.

Just as a reminder, not only had the home side SEVEN Champions League banners flying, they were sitting atop the Serie A table. Yet in the first half, you’d have a hard time believing they were the home side. All Spurs were missing was a goal, and during the interval I was afraid we were going to seriously miss the likes of Luka Modric and particularly Gareth Bale on the park.

Yet although I knew Milan would change their tactics in the second half, I never thought they’d feel the need to resort to the lowest level of dirty play to get back into the match. And you know what, it nearly worked. Nearly. They had us on the back foot alright and Crouchy’s goal (pic) had to come on the counter-attack after brilliant work by Lennon, but not only was our defence steady throughout, we did not receive ONE yellow card. That takes some doing.

I thought the French referee overall had a pretty good night, despite some complaints in the Spurs twittersphere. There was one incident where ex-Arsenal man Flamini showed both sets of studs to Corluka’s leg, and the Croatian can consider himself lucky to have been able to use crutches afterwards because if his leg had been planted it would have no doubt been shattered.

That SHOULD have been a straight red card, but Monsieur Lannoy receives my eternal forgiveness for giving what I can only describe as The Call Of The Season in injury time. What looked like a quality equaliser by Ibrahimovic was preceded by a push in the back on Michael Dawson, yet given the fact he had to later try to get out of Milan alive he did incredibly well to keep his composure and give the free.

He also could have booked Gattuso sooner for his unbelievable head-butt on Jordan. I was later reminded that the Scotsman actually PLAYED for Milan back in the day, so no doubt he knew exactly what choice words to use to spark the former Rangers player off. To be fair, though, it was clear to all that the Italians were resorting to dirty tactics, so what’s wrong with fighting fire with fire, right?

Even though Jordan has never himself worn a Spurs shirt, he has certainly gotten himself damn close to “legendary” status with his actions last night. Check out this thread that developed at full-time on twitter, titled “#joejordanfacts”!!!

Though Spurs have been fortunate in some of their victories this season which have them challenging the Top 4 again, there is absolutely no doubt they deserved every bit of this victory, practically winning the night in every single position.

And as for my Man of the Match, it HAS to be Heurelho Gomes. Sure, he’s gotten a lot of stick for some howlers but in this match the Brazilian drew on every inch of his experience that has seen him reach the semifinals of this competition with PSV to pull off some truly breathtaking saves (pic). And not only had he a solid defence around him, Wilson Palacios and Sandro finally clicked as a central defensive-midfield pairing to keep the chances to a minimum.

Naturally, you can’t say this tie is over. But with Bale likely to be back for the return leg on March 7, it must make us firm favourites for a quarterfinal berth we could have only dreamed of when that match against City kicked off just nine months ago. OR when Young Boys went 3-nil up in August. OR when we went 4-0 down against Inter in the same San Siro in October! Guess you write us off at your peril!

Too bad we won’t get a chance to see Jordan v Gattuso II!!! I know who MY winner would be!!!

COME ON YOU SPURS

Technorati Tags: paganosports,paganospurs,Tottenham Hotspur,Harry Redknapp

#EndaChickenny

2011-02-08T08:50:00.001Z

By not having the balls to face the electorate, Brian Cowen has virtually admitted that he was the worst Taoiseach this State has ever seen.

So you’d THINK anyone purporting to be his successor would go OUT OF THEIR WAY to show how unlike him they were.

But when you take out his mis-handling of the economy and analyse Cowen’s actual performance as a leader, which after all is what “Taoiseach” means, what stands out a mile was his inability/unwillingness to actually speak to the people he’s meant to be leading.

Whenever he’d made a speech it was always in front of a “friendly” gathering of business owners. And when he;d do interviews for national broadcasters, they were always carefully controlled, with one notable exception in the Ardilaun Hotel.

Then the Emperor’s clothes were finally shown for what they were when he was forced to face REAL questions posed by journalists from the BBC and Reuters when things were so bad we were looking for an international bailout.

Let’s face it…Cowen wasn’t a Taoiseach, he was an extra Finance Minister. And although charisma isn’t necessarily the absolute be-all and end-all quality of the political leader of a nation, you’ll have a hard time convincing me you don’t at least need some of it, and he has NONE. Zip. Zero. Nada.

And now we have Enda Kenny. The man who Bertie tore to pieces in 2007. The man whose own party tried to shift out of the party leader’s chair only last year.

The man who has the absolute cheek to assume he can decide when and where he debates his fellow challengers for Taoiseach. Did I say “decide”? Perhaps I should say “dictate”??? Wonder what type of leader that will make him?

Anyway…it could be argued that debates aren’t as important as the media make them out to be. Fine. BUT let’s be clear on what IS important about them…

The different parties are roaming around the country with their actions closely controlled by their respective campaign headquarters, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Still, at LEAST once during this process, in the lead up to arguably the most important general election the Republic of Ireland has ever seen, we deserve to see the challengers debate the issues of the day together WITHOUT their handlers.

Enda somehow feels he has the right to handle the debates himself. On Newstalk (or as I call it “BlueshirtFM”) this morning I heard a recording of him saying he "has it mind to do a 3-way, a 5-way, and one in Irish in the future” (para-phrase)

But there’s a debate happening TONIGHT, Enda. On TV3. Your party claim the network “jumped the gun”. Can I ask you this…WHO EXACTLY HAS THE GUN???? (No Sinn Féin jokes please!)

I know the country’s coffers aren’t exactly full at the moment, but whenever we have a referendum, a Referendum Commission is set up. I don’t see why this can’t also be done for elections. Actually, one is, because SOMEBODY has to count the votes! We just don’t call it an Electoral Commission.

While we’re all banging on about political reform, why don’t we formally establish a body to negotiate with the campaigns and be empowered to make a final decision on the dates, rules and compositions of TV debates? Problem solved. Nowhere left for Enda to hide.

All through this shambolic Fianna Fáil/PD/Green reign over the country, we the electorate have borne a portion of the blame for repeatedly voting them back in. Now we have a man whose party is leading the polls even though his front bench has daggers beneath their cloaks, and even though he has communication skills at least as bad as BIFFO.

I can only assume that if Enda Kenny becomes the next Taoiseach, we want more of the same from a different face.

I just have this to say to prospective Fine Gael voters…don’t come running to me after you do your first face-palm during his reign.

Technorati Tags: #ge11,paganoireland,Enda Kenny,Brian Cowen

Register. Engage. Vote. 25/02

2011-02-03T08:30:00.001Z

I know who I’m voting for on February 25, and I’ve made no secret of that on Twitter and Facebook. And of course many people will disagree. With so many parties to choose from, there’s bound to be much disagreement over the coming weeks.

But I believe there is element of this election about which we can all reach a consensus.

It’s not the fact that as much as one third of Irish voters stayed at home in the last general election that’s worrying, it’s the fact that the 67% turnout was UP on the previous poll in 2002.

So although I will use my blog during the campaign to spell out why I’ll be voting the way I am, I’ll be doing so just to explain myself, not to persuade you to vote in any way.

But I DO want to persuade you to be sure and first, REGISTER to vote (click here), then ENGAGE with the candidates in your area whatever way you can (you can start here) and finally, on the last Friday in February, VOTE.

Turnout figures should be at the VERY MINIMUM 80% level, but I want to shoot for 85%. Look what’s happening in Egypt! Don’t we owe it to them not to take our votes for granted?

I was thinking of maybe doing a video, and getting people from the social media world to help me by recording a brief clip of themselves holding a piece of A4 paper with the above logo and their Twitter username signed underneath it. I could easily run them all together WITHOUT ANY REFERENCE TO ANY POLITICAL PARTY. Just everyone united in promoting the fact that simply casting your vote is the most important contribution you can make to democracy.

If you think that’s a good idea and would like to give it a shot, please tweet/email/facebook message me soon, and also get people you know to do their own clips and send them on. I’m thinking anything from 50-100 clips should make a decent video.

But even if we don’t do that, let’s just do what we can in our own areas to get people out there. We’ve been wanting this opportunity to speak for so long, how about we use it?

PS I was going to take the “R.E.V.” initials for some kind of slogan using the word “REVolution”, but considering what’s going on elsewhere in the world, decided against it.

Technorati Tags: #ge11,paganoireland

trendy tweet

2011-01-20T13:01:00.001Z

Six Green bottlers, sitting in the Dáil.

And if one Green bottler should grow a pair o’ balls,

There’d be no Green bottlers, and no more Fianna Fáil.

Tweeted a shorter version of this earlier today and it got record re-tweets for me (which wouldn’t be much anyway, but still…) plus it appeared on “Dublin trends” (see below) so may as well stick up a blog post for posterity & what-not. In case I’m looking back from the future & wonder what it’s all about, it was the day it was sunny in January, the country had no government and the one o’clock news was at half-twelve.

is non-cyber bullying ok?

2011-01-12T07:41:00.001Z

Been getting a flurry of hits all of a sudden to this post from May 2008, so may as well re-post it. I very much doubt the bullying has stopped.

What is it about this country that makes a large number of its adults think that if something isn’t addressed on either Joe Duffy or Prime Time then it isn’t happening?

Last night, as most Irish people probably know by now, the latter programme investigated a “phenomenon” known as cyber-bullying which is seemingly prevalent throughout schools across the country.

Children are sending cruel messages to each other on social networking sites such as Bebo, they are sending cruel text messages to each other on their mobile phones, and worst of all, there is the practise of “happy-slapping” where gangs of people stand around and video record fights.

Prime Time seemed to hone in on the fact that one in every seven children was somehow affected by cyber-bullying.

I would actually be more concerned with the notion that according to the videos we saw of dozens of children cheering on each of these fights, then of the other six children in the survey, surely at least four TAKES PART in the process.

But was the news REALLY that shocking?

We know children have phones, we the parents bought them for them.

We know children go on Bebo, we let them use our computers.

We know bullying exists, it always has down the ages, and not just in the classroom – we were all chatting at the watercooler about workplace bullying after a Prime Time programme a couple of years ago.

So just because the weapons and techniques have become more advanced, does that make it a different problem?

Well I suppose in one way it does, since it makes accountability that much more difficult to locate, or so the program seemed to suggest.

“Don’t blame us!” was the reaction of the teachers and headmasters interviewed.

“Don’t blame the social network sites!” was the reaction of Damien Mulley.

“We are aware of this problem and have put a large part of our resources into defending every pupil’s constitutional right to an education” said the government representative who was interviewed.

Oh, wait, I must have dreamed that last quote.

It was very convenient that this programme was aired when one Education Minister had just stepped down and another was only just finding his feet, wasn’t it?

But of course you can’t even put entire responsibility on the government.

To paraphrase one of the headmistresses interviewed : “Parents seems to take an ostrich-like approach to what their children get up to, and they seem to believe that their own children are not capable of this sort of behaviour.”

So rather than focusing on how we’d react if our own children were being bullied, maybe parents should be considering what action we’d take if our little angels were in fact somehow involved?

Our children do not just interact when they are at school anymore. Whatever little dramas they think they are having with their peers, they are now with them 24/7 as situations can change in the blink of an eye via a text message, Bebo or chatroom posting.

Maybe that means we as parents should accept responsibility for our children 24/7 as well.

If we in turn go to bully our politicians to produce legislation, it may come down to the ludicrous situation whereby the computer records will need to be checked to confirm the timestamp of a particular bullying message to see whether or not the school can be considered liable for a bout of bullying.

I also found it ironic that on the same day as the screening of this documentary, a conference kicked off at Croke Park which began to discuss the possibility of a treaty banning a certain type of weapon used in war.

Banning cluster bombs would help make people who have already lost their limbs feel better about the future, but would it stop armies using other weapons?

By the same token, if the government produced extensive legislation restricting the use of mobile phones and social networking by minors, would it prevent bullies from preying on their victims by more “conventional” means?

I think we all know the answer to that one. And what’s more, our water-cooler conversations will no doubt change to the Champions League final by tomorrow anyway.

if the golf cap fitz….

2011-01-10T03:42:00.001Z

It’s seems quite simple really.

If Brian Cowen really did play golf with Sean Fitzpatrick as Taoiseach a matter of weeks before offering a high-risk guarantee to his bank, then he needs to resign in disgrace.

But of course it’s never that simple, is it?

I just don’t know.

Click here for more posts on Irish current affairs

Technorati Tags: paganoireland

blue blood

2011-01-06T10:04:00.001Z

by Bernard Jackman

To general sports fans, Blue Blood helps un-blur the line between bravery and stupidity when it comes to players hiding serious injuries.

To general rugby fans, Blue Blood is a candid, absorbing depiction of the modern professional game in Ireland.

To Leinster rugby fans, Blue Blood is simply required reading.

Click here for more 50-word reviews

Click here to see my Leinster rugby blog “Harpin On Rugby”

Technorati Tags: my fifty word review

terriers

2010-12-29T13:34:00.002Z

SEASON ONE

No vampires, no zombies, no mysterious islands, no singing, no setting in decades gone by…just a well-thought out, contemporary, character-driven comedy/drama to be seen here. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James play private-eyes who get caught up in a tangled web of lies and intrigue that’s bound to snag you too.

Click here for more of my fifty-word reviews

NB - I enjoyed this show so much I didn't think to check if there was definitely going to be a second season, turns out it has been cancelled! (check this link) BOO!!!! Well, you never know, DVD sales may bring it back, I've seen that happen before. Shame, with all the crap that's out there! Hat tip to @jkeyes on Twitter for the info.

while we

2010-12-25T06:00:00.000Z

While we fly to the sky

Do we stop to think and wonder why?

And while we fight day and night

Do we really know what’s wrong and right?

For while we argue and while we lie

A newborn baby starts to cry

Is the Band Aid dream still happening

Or was it all just an eighties thing?

For while we sing tills they ring

We have to pricetag everything!

And while we haggle and while we buy

One more decade passes by!

Food not bombs, love not money

Homes not parking lots; Do you think it’s funny

That while we argue and while we lie

A newborn baby starts to cry?

While we analyze, while we moralize,

While we theorize, do we empathize?

While we polarize, compartmentalize,

We fail to realize the need to harmonize

Cos while we eat our fries and plump for supersize

One more hunger victim dies.

Food not bombs, love not money

Homes not parking lots; Do you think it’s funny

That while we argue and while we lie

A newborn baby starts to cry?

© JL Pagano 1994

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

the middle

2010-12-13T09:33:00.001Z

SEASON ONE

The kids steal the show in this misfit-com, so much so that there’s nothing left for anyone else (anyone else…). The writing is good but lead Patricia Heaton doesn’t deliver enough of the funny, plus they flog the “it’s ok to be average” message to death (to death…).

Technorati Tags: my fifty word review,the middle

Click here for more fifty-word reviews

death, taxes & schoolboy humour

2010-12-08T11:28:00.003Z

What can I say...it was budget day, I needed a laugh, and appropriate or not, I got one... (video is just under 5 mins)

Click here for an index of the rest of my LifeSlice stories…

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boardwalk empire

2010-12-07T06:27:00.001Z

SEASON ONE

If the facts about this excellent HBO drama don’t reel you in like one of ‘Nucky’s” schemes, (starring Steve Buscemi, set in prohibitionist Atlantic City, a cross between the Sopranos and the Untouchables, executive producer Scorsese directing pilot, top notch support despite Kelly MacDonald’s dodgy Irish accent) then nothing will.

Click here for past fifty-word reviews

Technorati Tags: my fifty word review,Boardwalk Empire

why i’m not stumped by cricket

2010-12-04T07:00:00.001Z

I penned this back in 2007, right before the Cricket World Cup began, and as another Ashes series continues to keep me company as I feed Junior at an unsociable hour every morning, it seems a good time for a re-publish.

The legendary Ian Botham strikes a classic pose after dismantling the Aussies almost single-handed in 1981

Here’s a riddle for you – what does chronic bronchitis have to do with my knowing what a googly is?

This weekend, the 2007 version of Cricket’s World Cup gets underway out in the West Indies. The whole point of such a competition is to maximise the sport’s exposure around the globe in the hope of inspiring more people to take up the code themselves.

Well if you like riddles, and you’ve never watched a game of cricket, you’re really missing something. You’d swear the creators of the sport went out of their way to make both the rules AND the jargon so complicated that only a selected few would be able to participate.

So when you consider that I grew up in Ireland, a country which only just about accepted soccer and rugby but can’t quite stretch to embrace cricket with its “stiff-upper-lip” English roots, why is it that I have such a personal interest in what’s going on down in the Caribbean?

It all boils down to the Summer of 1981. I was but eleven, and having moved to Ireland from the USA three years earlier, I was already a fully-fledged fan of soccer, with my beloved Tottenham Hotspur having just lifted the FA Cup in the famous "Ricky Villa final".

But the off-season had arrived and there was no more soccer to follow until August. You would think that I would be eager to get outside into the fresh air and kick a ball around myself. Well I was, but I was to be denied.

It got to a stage where even climbing the stairs would have me gasping for breath. For a period of about five weeks straight, I was rendered immobile by an infection in my chest. OK – maybe my grandparents threw a bit too much cotton wool around me, but that was hardly my fault.

And to make matters worse, I found out I was allergic to the first medication I was prescribed a week after taking it. It gave me the all-over shakes so I’m sure that little error from the doctors set me back a good bit as well.

So what was an eleven-year old only child keen on sports yet confined to the bed/sofa to do to pass the time? That was simple – give himself a crash course in cricket. And what a better way to learn than to witness the biggest rivalry the sport has to offer – The Ashes test series between England and Australia.

You have to remember that back then there was no digital TV, no Sky Sports, no proliferation of live sport. All we had on our telly was RTE 1 & 2, BBC 1 & 2 and ITV. The rights to screen the cricket had at that stage always been held by Auntie Beeb.

Right here is where I guess I will have to explain why I was rooting for England that summer. Somehow growing up in Ireland I managed to avoid the prevailing aversion to all things British. My family had no real reason to dislike them, and since I had a tendency to cheer for the underdog, I saw no reason at the time why I shouldn’t be on the side of the English in this particular contest.

The first thing to grab your attention watching their coverage was the distinctive voice of Richie Benaud. Though an Aussie he was always impartial, and despite the fact that he sounded as though he was perennially stoned, he was one of those commentators who knew when to exercise his vast knowledge of the game and when to exercise his dry wit to entertain the viewer when things are going slow. And BOY, did things often go slow.

Watching the First Test of the Ashes series, I felt a little bit like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange in that not only was my condition preventing me from escaping the television, being the pre-remote control age, I couldn’t even change the bloody channel!!!

Gradually though, I started to wonder what was meant by certain terms of the game. Coming from America and having a basic knowledge of baseball, I suppose the hardest thing for me to get to grips with was the fact that in cricket, even if you hit the ball, you don’t have to run. You can play it safe and stand there doing nothing. This is what made the afternoons so long.

Still, with my enforced immobility, one by one the mysteries were solved. The biggest obstacles were what was meant by an “over” and why a batsman was considered out on account of the ball hitting his pad (“leg before wicket”). I suppose the fact that just one game lasted five whole days was a bit of a puzzler as well.

It also took me a while to work out why the official result of the First Test was; “Australia won by four wickets”. I thought you won a game by scoring more runs than the other guys?

Still, my curiosity was piqued enough to be actually ready to watch the Second Test by the time it came around, and I was to be introduced to an entirely new aspect of this enigmatic game. After five days, much bowling, much batting, much work by both sides, it all came to nothing. The match was declared a “draw”.

So what happens now, I thought? Extra innings? Maybe cricket’s answer to a penalty shoot-out? Nope – the answer was a big fat zilch. Going into the next test, the overall series score was still 1-0 to the visiting Aussies.

Given this realisation that after all that exertion over five days it could still result in absolute squat, it would have taken one hell of a subsequent contest to keep my attention focused on learning what it was that made this game interesting to fans in both hemispheres. Well, as it turned out, that Third Ashes Test was to go down in history as one THE greatest five-day games ever played.

For the first two matches in this series, England had been skippered by a chap called Ian Botham. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was a stand-out figure in the sport.

Where most of the protagonists were straight-laced and played with a mind-numbing preference to err on the side of caution, it was clear that Botham had the sport’s version of the X Factor. He was that rare breed they call an “all-rounder”, i.e. someone who could hold their own at the highest level whether they were batting or bowling.

However, renowned cricket journalist Christopher Martin-Jenkins aptly described the burden of being skipper on the man when he compared it to “a captaincy which had weighed more heavily than Frodo's ring”. Botham’s lack of form early that summer culminated in two successive batting scores of zero in the Second Test. And so, the skipper’s armband was passed to the more methodical yet MUCH less charismatic Mike Brearley.

Though the change instantly made a difference to Botham’s form, Australia still got off to a fast start at Headingley in Leeds for the Third Test. They scored 401 in their first innings, with Ian getting six of the ten outs (or “wickets”). Then he was the pick of England’s batters in the reply, hitting fifty as his team-mates collapsed around him to a dismal score of 174.

Time for me to learn yet another rule of cricket. If the team that bats second doesn’t get within 200 runs of their opponents, they can be forced to bat their second innings immediately. It is called “following on”, and it was a rule the Aussies did not hesitate to enforce. Suffice to say that come the end of Day Three, all seemed lost. The bookies had an England victory at a whopping 500-1.

It’s just as well noone told that to I.T.Botham! He gave an unbelievable batting display on Day Four. Remember what I said about a tendency to bat defensively? Well on this day, Botham threw that rule book out the window. It seemed like every time a ball was thrown at him, he had one aim in mind, to hit it as far as possible. And with the mood he was in, eager to prove his critics wrong, he was seemingly invincible.

Eventually, the Aussies had to resort to the only available method of stopping him. In cricket, you need two batters on the field at a time. They gradually managed to get Botham’s ten team-mates out and so his remarkable innings was halted at 149 not out, and England had posted a second-innings score of 356 which was immensely respectable under the circumstances.

And so, a measure of credibility had been restored to the home side, but even at that stage few could predict what was to happen on Day Five. The Australians, indeed any half-decent cricket team, would be expected to easily amass the 130 runs required for victory and a 2-0 series lead.

It’s just as well no-one told that to R.G.D. Willis!!! In cricket, getting a batsman out is celebrated much like a goal is in football – it’s comparatively rare and is usually the result of shrewd tactics on the part of the fielding team. For an individual bowler to get five or more wickets in one innings is considered quite an achievement.

On July 21st, 1981, with Australia requiring fewer runs as a team than Botham had scored on his own the previous day, Bob Willis accounted for no less than EIGHT of his opponents in quick succession. It was an amazing sight, watching him motoring in from his end of the ground and unleashing a thunderbolt each time. And as each wicket fell, the increasing home-crowd noise cheering the lanky Durham lad's run-in surely put an extra few MPH on his bowling.

Though the match will always be remembered as “Botham’s Test” one has to acknowledge the sterling contribution to the success of Willis’ 8 wickets for the loss of just 43 runs. Apparently no team had won a Test Match having followed on since 1894, so as you can imagine, being the impressionable eleven-year-old that I was, it left quite a mark on me.

For the rest of the summer from that day, cricket was all over the news (well the British version anyway), and I followed the series right to the end, with the home side capitalising on their remarkable Headingley turnaround by taking the series 3 to 1 and claiming back the Ashes.

Of course, once it came to the end of August, the football season was to kick into gear, and with my Spurs winning yet another FA Cup in 1982, there wasn’t much chance of my changing my primary allegiance to the “sport for gentlemen played by gentlemen”, especially since none of my classmates gave a damn about the Botham Test when I asked them had they seen it after returning to school!

Still, hopefully you now know why I feel obliged to highlight both the participation of the Ireland cricket team at the World Cup, as well as the meteoric rise of Bray-born Ed Joyce to the opening batsman slot of the England "one-day" team.

My best wishes to all of them for the coming weeks, and you can be sure I will be making time to catch an over or two along the way.

**************

As things transpired, it was the Irish cricket team itself that did the country proud more than Ed Joyce with their historic win over Pakistan and subsequent qualification for the “Super Eights”!!! As for the Ashes, after wins in 2005 and 2009, at time of this re-publish England seem to have a chance of retaining the tiny urn for the first time in ages, but it's only Day 2 of Test 2 so much can happen still.

it’s the domestic noise, stupid!

2010-12-02T10:51:00.001Z

Citizens of Ireland, I have seen the light.

I now know what has caused this so-called "banking crisis". But mere words on my blog can't be sufficient. Given the root of our troubles, it is only fitting that I use my vocal chords to share my discovery with you. Please offer me but four minutes of your time and you too can have a similar epiphany.

Click here for the AudioBoo recording.

Technorati Tags: paganoireland

where do i begin???

2010-11-27T10:00:00.001Z

It’s always good to get a grass-roots view from the other side of the ideological divide, and when I’m looking for an American Republican perspective I go to James Shott’s Observations. At first I was honoured last week when he emailed me asking me to give my take on the Irish financial crisis, but when I finally got around to sitting down to replying this morning my honour turned to outright confusion. And since confusion is the over-riding theme of this blog, I felt it fitting to reproduce my email here.

O that I had the time to explain it all fully because the trouble has roots in the country’s history since independence back in 1922! By that I mean the fact that this country’s leading two parties have virtually the same ideology and trace their differences back to a time when then principal argument was how friendly the Irish state was with the British.

Naturally you’ll hear different causes for Ireland’s mess depending on the commentator you speak to, but since you know my leanings and have asked me, I’ll do my best to give my spin.

When the global economy was enjoying its boom years, Irelands ruling centre-right Fianna Fáil party (means “soldiers of destiny” and is pronounced “FEE-unna FOIL”) saw to it that there was no restrictions on where construction companies could build. This meant that they had to keep going to the banks for loans and yet again, the govt allowed for little or no lending regulations and so our property bubble grew at a rate even faster than the rest of the world’s.

Now the Irish public are as much to blame as the politicians – they twice re-elected Fianna Fáil back into power in 2002 and 2007 under Bertie Ahern who was Prime Minister (or “Taoiseach” pronounced TEA-shock). The opposition consisted primarily of the country’s second largest party, ANOTHER centre-right party called Fine Gael (FINN-uh GALE) and the third largest, also the country’’s largest left-wing party, Labour. Because those two parties are so diverse ideologically, the electorate found them hard to trust when it came to working together.

Fianna Fáil has itself relied on coalition partners, first a small party called the “Progressive Democrats” who were even further to the right and thus aided & abetted the financial liberalism, and in 2007, bizarrely, by the Green Party, who were also junior partners in Government and preferred to see their own agenda worked on rather than performing as “watchdogs” on Ahern & co.

And in case you think I’m of the opinion that the Irish Left is totally innocent, I must point out that a cornerstone of Fianna Fáil’s success over the years has been its flirtations with the Unions. During the good times Bertie Ahern offered the main unions something he called “benchmarking” which sounded fair as a concept but was basically money for nothing in that it guaranteed regular pay-rises with little guaranteed increase in productivity in return.

So in April 2008, Bertie Ahern, himself under public scrutiny for his personal financial affairs, stepped down as Taoiseach but under the Irish system, no general election was necessary and when his Finance Minster Brian Cowen (also complicit in the property bubble) took over as party leader, he also took over as Taoiseach.

Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and a month later, the heads of all the major banks arrive at Brian Cowen’s door and tell him he has to provide a blanket govt guarantee on all their deposits. Of course the public don’t KNOW it was they who told them until much, much later. But included in the guarantee is Anglo-Irish Bank, essentially a bank for the rich, and the bulk of the toxicity was to be found there, and since then more and more public money has been poured in to keep it afloat.

Cowen then created NAMA, which was our version of TARP, to absorb the toxic loans of the construction companies, and he also had the police seize the records of Anglo Irish Bank in early 2009, and the “investigation” has been “on-going” ever since.

It seems that the government’s intention has been to use every political delay tactic at its disposal to ensure that NAMA was fully operational to the extent where it could not be dismantled. During this time, since public spending remained high and money kept getting poured into the banks, he eventually reached the stage last week where he had to go cap-in-hand to external lending sources.

Now Ireland’s dilemma is not unique I know. Our crisis is so significant, however, because it is the SECOND Euro zone country to fail which means Greece wasn’t the “isolated incident” many made it out to be and there are fears that the contagion may spread to bigger economies like Spain and Italy which could threaten the very existence of the Euro itself.

To satisfy the prospective lenders, Cowen has been asked to produce a 4-year budget plan, even though he probably wont be in power to implement it. Cowen continues to cling to power by his fingernails, all the time renouncing any blame for his own part in the mess, using Lehman brothers as the principal scapegoats. The Irish public now demand a general election but the power to do so remains in his hands for the time being, though there are some within his own party who threaten to take it down. Constitutionally he doesn’t have to dissolve the government until 2012.

The 4-year plan was announced last Wednesday and not surprisingly the most unpopular aspect of it, ie the decrease in the minimum wage, was blamed on the IMF. There is also speculation that Ireland’s favourable corporate tax rate of 12.5% is under threat though Cowen flatly denies this.

All this failure of what we call “crony capitalism” has led to a shift to the left by the electorate, to the extent where it’s considered a distinct possibility that after the next election Ireland may have its first-ever left-wing Taoiseach.

Of course, what I have outlined is the tip of the iceberg, and let me know if there’s any clarifications you may need.

JLP

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a lesson in how not to govern

2010-11-23T10:50:00.001Z

Haven’t blogged on this “main” site of mine for ages, partly due to rugby season, party due to the fact that whatever I want to say about the government’s mis-management of Ireland’s economy I’ve already said.

As far back as May 2009 I gave my verdict on Brian Cowen, and I suppose I could have amended the post with the gagillion things that have happened since then, but what’s the point. And back in December of last year as I reacted to Brian Lenihan’s budget, I gave my opinion that Ireland badly needs its first-ever left-wing led government if it’s ever to have a hope of preventing this crisis happening again.

And with so many opinions being given 24/7 about the rights and wrongs of bailouts and budgets, not to mention the recent flurry of bungled announcements threatening to change everything and ultimately changing nothing, I see only futility in attempting to contribute more.

But I will say this, because I haven’t heard anyone say it lately…

This 30th Dáil and the Governments that have come with it have been rotten from DAY ONE, and should be used as a blueprint for Ireland “going forward” as a demonstration of how NOT to lead the country.

Trevor Sargeant campaigned for the Green Party in 2007 with the proviso that he would never lead them into government with Fianna Fáil, yet although he stood down once the coalition was formed, he did so only AFTER putting his name to the Programme for Government. How the hell were we to expect to trust them to follow through when they had a different leader?

And we can all have our own interpretations as to what mandate is afforded by a general election, but when the PDs, who had been in coalition power for the preceding 10 years got their seats cut from 8 to just 2, there was no need for debate. The people had spoken, they wanted them out of government. Yet there was Mary Harney’s name both on the PFG AND over the door at the Department for Health and Children.

As far as I’m concerned, a Programme for Government is second in political importance for Ireland only to the Constitution, and should be treated accordingly.

But how can we take it seriously when they let us down so badly even before the ink is dry on the bloody thing?

We’ve heard and read reams of rhetoric on subsequent happenings like the Mahon Tribunal, Bertie’s coronation of Cowen, Lisbon, Lehman Brothers, banks demanding guarantees, NAMA, FAS, garglegate, IMF bailouts, whatever…and there’s surely more to come.

But as much as I want a general election, I also fear for what kind of mandate we’ll be handing the new leaders, whomever they may be.

The discussion throughout the campaign will mostly be about the future of our economy, and rightly so.

But the discussion will also be about the prospective relationship between coalition partners, less rightly so in my book.

Why can’t we simply let them outline their policies? SO WHAT if Fine Gael’s position seems far away from Labour’s. That’s why they’re different parties FFS!!!!

What should happen is, we vote them in, they lock horns over their policies, they produce a Programme for Government, and HERE’S the clincher – WE HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE TO IT FOR THE NEXT FIVE YEARS.

And if anyone comes to my doorstep, I’m not going to grill them on the economy. I’ll want to know what they intend to do to make the 31st Dáil restore my faith in democracy on these shores.

Technorati Tags: paganoireland,Brian Cowen,Mary Harney,Irish politics

this is england ‘86

2010-10-07T11:56:00.001+01:00

It’d be hard to knock Shane Meadows’ equally-nostalgic follow-up to his 2006 movie. He explores strong themes other than racism, he executes black comedy to perfection, he evokes powerful performances. Still, the ending was far too abrupt – perhaps another movie would’ve given a better timeframe to work with?

Technorati Tags: my fifty word review

the “b for bank” all and end all

2010-09-29T15:42:00.002+01:00

This is my first attempt at a “Tweet Free Day”…twitter’s ability to give me a quick fix for my need to make my thoughts public has meant a drastic reduction in posting, so I devised this midweek 24-hour cold turkey spell to see if I could get my blogging mojo back even just a little.

Yeah, I like sports. In fact I love ‘em. You can probably tell by scouring over my blog posts here, let alone over on my rugby-only site.

And if you read the posts, you can probably tell that although I may not be the world’s leading expert on topics like rugby and soccer, I do know a fair bit about them, so my opinions at least have some basis.

Just so we’re clear…my interest in spectators sports, along with my writing about them, is merely a hobby. I actually DO have other priorities in life, most of all my family. And I’m hoping it goes without saying that their well-being come first no matter what is happening in the world of sports.

I have also been known to write about politics over the years. And since Ireland has been led through a recession by the party who helped create it, I have had several opinions to give, most of them unfavourable to Brian Cowen & co.

But although following the news cycle gives you something specific to rant about each day on the matter of the nation’s mis-management, there are times you have to take an overall view of how you see the “big picture” so you can better articulate your views, and yes, I’m about to borrow an annoying phrase often used in contemporary government spin, going forward.

Here’s my thing…when it comes to the government’s role in running the country, are the banks REALLY that important?

Yeah, yeah, go ahead, call me a loony lefty all you want. I’ve heard it all before. People have gone to great lengths to explain to me how society would crumple without banks even though not ONCE have I ever suggested we actually do away with them.

So if you’re willing to let me explain what I mean, read on.

Of course an economy is an important aspect of our society. But that’s all it is. ONE aspect of our society.

I’m fully aware that every department of government relies on a budget to get its job done, so naturally a budget requires money. That’s not my point.

I appreciate the importance of money as a means of exchanging goods, but as we all know, the financial sector is about much, much more than that.

As far as I’m concerned, people can play the stock-markets, the bond markets, the equity markets, the currency markets, all they want, if that’s how they choose to use their money.

ONCE THEY KNOW THEIR PLACE.

If I bet on a horse to win and it doesn’t, I lose the money. And if the amount I bet happens to be my life savings, that’s a risk that I have undertaken, and since it’s a risk, there is of course a chance I could lose it all.

What we have essentially seen during the so-called “Celtic Tiger” years is the financial sector, along with the construction industry, setting off on a gambling spiral, continuously taking all the winnings from a previous gamble and betting it again on something riskier until everything was gone. Not only did the government stand by and let them, when it all came crashing down they’ve done everything in their power to protect them.

And day in, day out all we hear in the media is expert after expert after so-called expert either tell us they told us so all along, or scold us for moaning too much rather than roll up or sleeves and help lift us out of this mess.

Well here’s one analysis I haven’t heard the economists offer, for obvious reasons…WE’VE TAKEN ECONOMICS TOO BLOODY SERIOUSLY.

Let them take their gambles. Let them trade their shares. Let them track their bond yields.

But also, let them know they’d damn well better follow regulations or the people will blow the full-time whistle on their games.

For too long we’ve let politicians, and to a large extent the media as well, tell US what we should consider important.

Though I can’t condone the deed for safety reasons, I have to admire the symbolism of driving a cement truck through the gates of Leinster House...a large slice of the population are sick of things that matter to them being ignored while a tiny minority of people, known as "the markets", are considered to have the final word on how the country is run.

Health, Education, Policing. THAT’S what government should deal with first. With healthier, better educated, law-abiding citizens, you have yourself a workforce investors will fall over themselves to employ.

So in my book, a government should make THOSE their priorities instead of bending the rules so a bunch of glorified gamblers to cut their losses.

Put simply, any party which could convince me the above was their raison d'être would get my vote at the drop of a hat.

In the meantime, I’ll probably vote Labour.

six years ago today…

2010-09-22T14:48:00.001+01:00

…I began blogging with this uninspiring post. And I love it. Trouble is, I have since started twittering, that has become a much better pad from which to launch my twisted thoughts into cyberspace.

Today is “National Car Free” day here in Ireland, and the fact that it falls on the anniversary of my blog has given me the idea for a “tweet-free day” which perhaps I can do every week to force myself to do a post on this blog. Having a separate rugby blog, for which I’m inspired to write whether Leinster & ireland are playing or not, doesn’t help much either.

But I’ll certainly do my best. It’s not as though there hasn’t been much happening for me to write about! Hung over political leaders, corrupt bankers and developers, Republicans in America successfully shifting the blame from themselves over to the incumbent President.

Tell you what. Today is Wednesday. Let’s try the tweet-free day a week from today and see how we go. I reckon I should take a softly softly approach to begin with, such is my tweetaholic nature…

the comeback

2010-08-24T15:12:00.001+01:00

Most people’s “least favourite Friend” Kudrow showed great courage creating an “American female David Brent” role…luckily, it works, as tragic heroine Valerie Cherish flashes a “forced” smile at all around, who give excellent support. How this got just one season while “Everybody Loves Raymond” got nine, I’ll never know.

Technorati Tags: my fifty word review,Lisa Kudrow,The Comeback

the men behind the mosque

2010-08-23T13:32:00.002+01:00

The right-wing media’s obsession with this non-story is similar to charity mugging in my book.

The way these “chuggers” are deployed create an impression that if you ignore them, you care nothing about the cause they’re collecting for.

Similarly, Faux News have flooded the American airwaves with an over-hyped, poorly supported argument that the building of an Islamic cultural centre two blocks from the scene of 9/11 is somehow insensitive.

And if you don’t agree with them, you may as well have flown the planes into the twin towers yourself.

Hey, if they can resort to hyperbole, why can’t I?

But since I’ve been forced to give some thought to this issue, let me look for precedent….

there’s a Catholic Church in Omagh
there are several Japanese cultural centres in Honolulu not far from Pearl Harbour.
there’s plenty of “American cultural centres” (ie McDonalds et al) in Hiroshima.

PLEASE tell me how my examples there are any more ludicrous than that of the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” which, as anyone who actually took 5 seconds to do proper research will know, ISN’T a mosque and ISN’T at Ground Zero?

I’ve found myself comparing news events to things I’ve seen my kids do a lot lately, and this is no exception.

Every so often my 16-month old son will fall over, as small children are wont to do. And like the rest of them, when he falls over, he engages in a brief thought process. Will I wail or not? Is it important for me to continue on to where I was headed, or will I give it up as a lost cause and get some sympathy from Mummy and/or Daddy instead?

THIS is how Murdoch’s media machine reacts when stories like this come on the radar. Can it be spun to attack the lefties? If so, let’s do it to the max!

And the genius of this ploy is that even when President Obama makes a speech which basically says “live and let live”, they still find a way to attack him with it, choosing in the end to claim he shouldn’t have gotten involved. You can be damn sure if he had said nothing they’d have been at him for that as well.

This is a HUGE non-story when stripped to its bare bones. Those who choose to lie on the ground banging their fists and wailing are doing nothing but fuelling hatred against people who aren’t any more terrorists than they are.

biffo taking the fifth

2010-08-18T10:19:00.001+01:00

Most parents moan about having teenage kids and having two myself, I can relate. Not that we don’t love them of course, just that they’re in that zone where they remind you of what you were like at that age and thus are guaranteed to drive you bananas at almost every turn.

But they do have their uses…and one of these is as providers of analogies for bloggers wishing to comment on current affairs.

I recently did an Audioboo on the whole Ivor Callely debacle, likening his defence of his actions to a teenager who claims they did something bad because you never specifically told them not to.

Now I see that Newsweek have only gone and placed our Taoiseach Without Mandate Brian “BIFFO” Cowen as high as FIFTH in their survey of the “World’s Greatest Leaders.”

Cue my teenage analogy…

Having not inspected it for ages, young Brian’s parents finally inspect his room and see it is an unholy mess.

“What is the meaning of this?” they demand of the young teenager.

“Oh, uh, these American brothers came over and messed it up, it’s not my fault, HONEST!” comes the tearful reply.

“Well, whoever did it, clean it up immediately, we have guests coming over!”

“OK, I’ll do it, but only on one condition…”

This makes the parents angry, but with the guests about to arrive, they have no choice but to listen.

“I’ll tidy my room now, and you can show it to your guests when they arrive, but you can’t inspect it properly until 2012!”

“*sigh* Deal!”

And as soon as they leave, Brian rings his classmate John who owes him a favour and he reluctantly agrees to come over and help him pick everything up and throw it in the closet, with so much stuff going in that the door is close to bursting.

When the guests arrive, the parents take them on a tour of the house, and as they pass Brian’s room, they look in.

“Wow! That’s quite a tidy room you have there, Brian!” they exclaim, “Shows what a neat individual you must be! We’ve been to other people’s houses and their teenagers don’t seem to know what it takes to keep their rooms this clean!”

And so the guests left the house believing that Brian was a good boy, even though his parents knew otherwise.

I could’ve stretched that out a lot further I know, but time was a factor.

Let’s just say I can’t wait to give final judgement of the state of Brian’s room in 2012. Hopefully he’ll get a grounding he’ll never forget.

spurs season preview 2010/11

2010-08-14T10:02:00.001+01:00

I’ve been following Tottenham Hotspur FC for nigh on 33 years at this stage, and in that time, we have won FA Cups, League Cups and a UEFA Cup.

And although we won no silverware during the 2009/10 campaign and have actually finished higher in England’s top tier while I’ve been a supporter, the 4th place Premiership finish we clinched with a 1-0 win at Eastlands has to be the most significant outcome to a season since I first shouted “Come On You Spurs”.

It’s hard to argue…Champions League football is where it’s at. Ask any Spurs supporter, even ones like me who rarely make it to White Hart Lane, and they’ll tell you how much the sound of the famous “the Chaaaaaaaa-mpiooooooons” anthem around N17 will give them goosebumps should we overcome the Young Boys of Berne over two legs.

But even though the season could go two ways, in my opinion anyway, our goals for the season should be the same…

(a) we “do an Everton” and come a cropper in the play-off, finding ourselves in the group stage of the Europa League. Redknapp has said how little he cares about the continent’s junior competition, so no doubt he’ll field a weakend team for those troublesome Thursday fixtures and worry more about the weekend ones.

(b) we win against Young Boys and reach the promised land of the Champions League group phase. That gives us 6 matches, mucho dinero, and as far as I’m concerned anyway, anything else would be a bonus. Of course we’d also want to compete and try to get out of the group but I’d still want Harry’s focus to be getting back into the Top 4 of the Premiership.

The only question is…CAN we stay in the dizzy heights of the Top 4 with virtually the same squad as last season?

THAT is where the play-off outcome becomes key. Chairman Daniel Levy has made it pretty clear he doesn’t want players sold for next to nothing, and with funds tied up in the troubled new stadium project, it seems only the promise of Champions League money will realistically lead to new signings.

So I guess what I’m trying to say, having gone around in circles, is that even though a Top 4 finish in the Premiership is key, today’s league opener with pretenders Manchester City can’t be viewed by Harry without at least half an eye on next Tuesday in Berne.

I really want to be an optimist and say we’ll beat City today, get past the Swiss and dare I say even get out of our group into the last 16.

But then my realism chip kicks in and I say that my personal measure of success for the upcoming campaign will be another Top 4 finish whatever happens in Europe.

And based on our current squad, here’s my ideal starting XI…

Gomes

Corluka    Dawson    King    Bale

Lennon    Palacios   Modric    Krancjar

Pavlyuchenko    Defoe

It’s a tough team to pick. Sometimes I want Bale’s defensive duties taken off of him, but that leaves either Luka or Niko stranded. I also prefer Luka not to be tied to the left side of the park and to instead give him free reign to be the string-pulling maestro he is behind the front two.

Then there’s the players you’re leaving out…Robbie Keane who’s had a good preseason, Peter Crouch who scored so many vital goals for us, Sebastien Bassong who was arguably our most important signing last season, dos Santos who had a good World Cup, Tom Huddlestone who can also be the string-pulling maestro, and Benny Assou-Ekottu who has come in leaps and bounds in the last 12 months. And what of the new boy from Brazil Sandro who’s likely to have a Copa Libertadores medal in tow when he arrives at the Lane?

But those are headaches a Premiership manager wants, right? Well, Harry’s got em, and when I think about where the team was when he took over, I’m left in no doubt that he’s the man to take us into what will hopefully be a season to remember.

COYS.

Technorati Tags: paganosports,paganospurs

remember japan's 9/11

2010-08-06T07:07:00.002+01:00

I've been focusing on AudioBoos lately so I'm afraid I'll need to re-publish another old post to keep this blog ticking over. This one is timely, though...it was written exactly 5 years ago on what was then the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the first bomb. It was also exactly 20 years since I had written my first ever serious song at the age of 16 so I have tacked that on as well. The post got a decent reaction at the time, from one guy in particular who accused me of supporting everything Japan has ever done in a wartime situation. Amazing how people read what they want to read.

I love every member of my family, despite our flaws, despite mistakes each and every one of us has made in the past.

Those mistakes cannot be ignored, nor can they be forgotten. If we can bring ourselves to at least acknowledge them, they can serve to help us get on with our future.

The same applies to my country. I am an American citizen, and I am very much happy to be one.

On July 4 of every year, The United States of America celebrates everything about herself for which she is proud, and rightly so.

I believe August 6 should be a day of reflection for all Americans, where we take in everything that happened around that day sixty years ago, and maybe, just maybe, we can look at the world in a light that doesn’t follow the over-simplistic “good guys/bad guys” mentality many would have us believe is reality.

Pearl Harbour, Nazism, 9/11, Bali, Madrid and most recently London all were human tragedies.

So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In retribution for attacking a military target, Weapons Of Mass Destruction were unleashed by the US on two civilian towns in Japan in 1945. The radioactive legacy remains in both regions even today.

These are facts that noone can airbrush out of history.

I have yet to be convinced these events are not right up there with the others. I am constantly amazed by the way so many from a race of people are in such collective denial that this event was an atrocity when they in turn are so willing to acknowledge atrocities performed by others.

What will we learn from it all?

How should we explain it all to our children?

Just to be clear - the point I am making here is not about which atrocity was greater or more terrible than the other, just the fact that they should all be defined as such.

The USA has done much more good since 1945, but this was extremely bad. I for one am willing to come to terms with that fact, and I believe one day out of each year to both commemorate it and learn from it is appropriate.

These pictures are from an excellent set I found on BBC.com – click here to see them all.

Between 2,000 and 6,500 children are believed to have been orphaned by the atomic bomb, although the exact number may never be known.

Now, Hiroshima is an important industrial city with a population of 1.1 million.

About a third of Hiroshima's population was killed within a week of the bombing. Many more have since died through radiation sickness.

The first atomic bomb used in war was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August, 1945. The A Bomb Dome, the former Trade Promotion Hall, is one of the few buildings near the epicentre of the blast still standing from that time.

A powerful focus for children in Hiroshima is a memorial to Sasaki Sadako, a 10-year-old girl who died from leukaemia as a result of the radiation. She believed that if she could make 1,000 paper cranes - Japanese good luck symbols - she would be healed.

The Peace Memorial Park near the A Bomb Dome has a number of different monuments and statues. In front is the Memorial Cenotaph with its Flame of Peace, which will burn for as long as there are nuclear weapons.

Contemporary pictures by Mike Coles

THE BOMB

The scene at Buckingham Palace gate
In London, 1945
The people of England celebrate
They’re all amazed they’re still alive
But cast your eyes to the other side
of the world, where war is still waged
An emperor who can’t swallow his pride
A president who won’t calm his rage

Harry goes into the conference hall
Can he survive through one more day?
In three months he thought he’d seen it all
Till an army commander gets up to say
“Mr President I’m afraid our boys
would die in their thousands if war goes on”
Harry says “Then, we’ve got no choice.
Go ahead and drop the bomb.”

So many people know it was wrong
And our cries are much too late
But the fact that we’ve been fighting for years
Doesn’t mean that there’s no room for change

The man on the radio does his job
The news they’d all been waiting for
He says they’ve built a great new bomb
Its purpose is to end the war
Mother looks up from her knitting and prays
“Maybe our son will be home someday!”
Daddy looks up from his paper and says
“Maybe at last those Japs will pay.”

One man got more power
Than he could ever need
An evil that was born with fear
And driven on by greed
But we can’t just say it’s all his fault
For we all must take the blame
From world wars to family rows
When will we see they’re all the same?

Now the runway’s clear and the engines roar
Enola soars into the sky
Waiting to release her load
She doesn’t care how many humans die
Now what you’re witnessing is the destruction
Of the Land of the Rising Sun
It’s amazing how the lives of millions
Are put into the hands of one

It may be hard for me to complain
Since I wasn’t even there
But it’s not to hard to feel the pain
And I’d be foolish not to care
If it was only there to make the “peace”
Then the killing has just begun
It all happened as a war was won
It all happened on the day they dropped the bomb

© JL Pagano 1985

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

why should we, gay?

2010-08-02T17:08:00.002+01:00

I need to get back to regular posting on this blog pronto! Well, it has been a bank holiday weekend here in Ireland, which I spent with herself down in Cork and had a great time, so I suppose I can be forgiven.

Still to stay semi-topical I'll re-publish these lyrics I wrote back in 2007. Every bank holiday, car accidents are on the increase, and thus awareness is on the increase. Or so you would think.

Sing to the tune of “YMCA”

Young man!
You got yourself a car
I said, young man!
You love to drive it far
I said, young man!
Like the stud that you are

It’s the speed…that…makes…you…ha…ppy

Young man!
There’s a chap called Gay Byrne
I said, young man!
Your respect he should earn
I said, young man!
So you won’t crash and burn

He just wants…you…all…to…slow…down

Yet all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?
Yes all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?

He says “Tell all your peers
To stop driving on beers
Cos it’s gonna all end in tears!”

Yet all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?
Yes all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?

He’s gone down on his knees
And he’s begging you please
Take the pressure off A&Es…

Young man!
I think one hundred twenty
I said, young man!
Is a limit plenty
And yet, young man!
Even a ban lengthy

Will not make…you…stop…and…li…sten

Young man!
So take a look at yourself!
And say, young man!
I’m gonna wear my seat belt!
And then, young man!
Remember somebody else

Could be co…ming…round…that…next…bend

Yet all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?
Yes all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?

He says “Tell all your peers
To stop driving on beers
Cos it’s gonna all end in tears!”

Yet all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?
Yes all you say to him is…
WHY SHOULD WE, GAY?

He’s gone down on his knees
And he’s begging you please
Take the pressure off A&Es…

the right thing to say

2010-07-24T07:10:00.003+01:00

Laptop fixed, hiatus over. Sadly, there's little or no time to do a new post, so it's archive-delving time, to this Lifeslice story from May 2005.

I was reminded of this story by the following piece by Chuck over at “Burst Transmission”, though he actually posted it on KBB’s “What Middle America Thinks”. They are both excellent thought-provoking blogs, as my post goes to show.

Fidelitas

Of all personality traits, I value loyalty the most.

I will admit that I make certain caveats to my value of loyalty. My loyalty to someone ends to a great extent as soon as I feel that person has not been loyal to me.

I don't tell secrets people expect me to keep - especially those most damaging to a person's life. I expected to be treated the same.

I expect my friends not to publicly side with others in arguments. Friends will surely disagree from time to time, but true friends stand together in public and handle their differences in private.

I have more thoughts on this, but for now I'll pass the subject to the readers. What constitutes and doesn't constitute loyalty for you?

You can’t spend 12 years going out with/married to someone without a few of their personality traits rubbing off on you, no matter how bad the break-up was. One thing I inherited from my ex-wife was a tendency to do the exact opposite of what Chuck claims a friend should do as described above. If we were in company and I launched into a certain point of view with which she disagreed, she would put forward her point regardless of how it would make me (and us) look. This never actually bothered me at the time, though you won’t be surprised to learn that it does now. It never occurred to me to say to her even when we were alone that maybe it looked better if we presented a more united front when in company. Who knows, maybe the people who witnessed us constantly disagreeing saw the demise of our marriage coming a mile away. I sure didn’t.

One fine Sunday my fiancee (the debate whether to precede that with the word “current” still rages in my head; these parenthises provide a stop-gap compromise) Sandra and I spent the afternoon in her mother’s house, which we often do. Due to the good weather we brought her golden retriver Jessie down to the local park for a bit of exercise. One good thing about this tale is that it gives me a chance to post this picture yet again :

This was taken by my mobile phone on a different bout of Sunday dog-walking when my kids were with us. The blurred nature of the pic makes it look like a painting and in my opinion it encapsulates what sunny Sunday afternoons are all about.

ANYWAY – on the day in question it was just Sandra, myself and Jessie. We went all the way to the far side of the park and sat on a bench for a while, shooting the breeze while the pooch regained her breath. Jessie is about 12 years old so obviously she is not as lively as she may have been before.

So there we were resting, minding our own business, when two middle aged ladies jogged by. They were passing a good few yards ahead of us, and for some reason, when they came into Jessie’s sights, she decided to bark loudly. She didn’t pounce, she didn’t run towards the women, she just barked. As Sandra has always maintained, she is a gentle sort that wouldn’t harm a fly.

Both ladies were scared out of their wits. Sandra admonished the dog and apologized to the pair. Seemingly my partner’s remorse was not as contrite as it could have been according to one of the ladies.

“That bloody dog should be on a leash for God’s sake!” she exclaimed, her faced bathed in red from a combination of anxiety and jog-induced exhaustion.

Then, from out of the blue, someone retorted :

“Oh yeah? Well maybe if you weren’t so goddam ugly she wouldn’t have barked in the first place!!!!”

I chuckled to myself : Who the hell said that? Whoever it was, fair play to them, for while it may have been unnecessarily cruel, the lady could have at least accepted the apology.

With that the pair put their noses in the air with perfect synch, and proceeded to jog off at a pace understandably more brisk than before.

Once they had gone, Sandra nearly fell off the bench with laughter.

“Jeff, that is the funniest thing I ever heard! I really thought you were going to give out to me in front of them!!!”

Surprise hit me on two fronts – first, that it was actually me who hurled the insult, and second that yes, indeed, it would have been more likely that I would have publicly scolded my partner in the past.

Sometimes the right thing to say just isn’t the right thing to say.

I was delighted to discover that at least one of my ex’s legacies had been banished for good. I wonder if she in turn is getting over a habit of getting Pringles crumbs all over her computer keyboard?

Click here for a full list of the "Lifeslice" stories

Hiatus

2010-07-16T08:42:00.001+01:00

Sorry for the abrupt end to posting during the World Cup, simple reason being my laptop died. I'm still active on Twitter and I've also been trying out AudioBoo for size, click the link in the corner there for my latest rants, they're not all football related.

Although I have downloaded this blog writing app for my iPhone I hate typing on the tiny keypad for too long so I won't be posting too often until I get my laptop back.

the eagles have landon

2010-06-24T12:34:00.001+01:00

To follow my World Cup thoughts via Twitter click here > @ThierryEyed

What a day of sport yesterday was.

Not only were there two sets of nail-biting final group matches in the World Cup, but not to be outdone, Wimbledon produced the longest tennis match in history which at time of writing STILL isn’t finished.

The set up in our living room can be described as brilliant by some, sad by others. Basically I’ve two tellies on the go so we can watch both games at the same time and not miss a thing. My reasoning is, we have an old portable that works, so why not use it? I received spousal approval on the assurance that it was only for four days.

So as England were beating Slovenia on the big telly, my son and I were glued to the small one to see the Americans seemingly do everything BUT score to get out of their group. They hit the post, missed an open goal, had yet another score waived off for no apparent reason, and as the clock ticked past 90, it seemed the American soccer-haters were to get more ammunition to attack the world’s greatest game with.

But then up popped Landon Donovan to not only begin the move, but also to be the one Yank on the pitch you’d want to be there faced with a portion of the goal to slot the ball into. Definitely deserved, definitely a wonderful achievement by Bob Bradley’s men but still I’m definitely wondering…will they give a damn back home?

In any other country on the planet, even though as a result of the goal the team only progressed to the last 16 of the tournament, Donovan would be a national hero no matter what happened next. But although some Stateside like Jon Stewart on his Daily Show put him on the achievement on the pedestal it deserves, I can pretty much guarantee that the general mindset of the American sporting public is more preoccupied with the aftermath of the 7-game NBA finals, the upcoming NFL campaign, or the “national pastime” which isn't even halfway through its marathon regular season.

Well, though it won’t be easy by a long stretch, the USA have every chance to progress even further as they’ve been placed in a bracket. And to be honest, they shouldn’t be doing it for approval of the mainstream back home, they should be doing for themselves and the service they’re doing for the sport whatever anyone chooses to call it.

As for the English, well it wasn’t pretty, but they did enough to qualify, so that has to be acknowledged. And surely if you want to win a World Cup you can’t do so without getting past the likes of Germany and Argentina so it’s up to Fabio & co to get over the travails of the group phase and get their heads straight by Sunday.

In the meantime, I’ve still got eight matches to watch two at a time (though Friday afternoon could be tricky due to, you know, life & stuff).

Technorati Tags: paganoworldcup

Ch-ch-changes

2010-06-22T14:21:00.001+01:00

I’m one of those people who has a similar passion for both soccer and rugby, but one thing I normally give the round ball code credit for over the other is its reluctance to make drastic change to its rules.

Even when rugby union was an amateur sport it was plagued by confusion over what was or wasn’t allowed to be done at what they call “the breakdown”, what lay people observe as a pile of bodies on top of each other after a player is tackled.

The result of that confusion is that every new rugby season, it seems refs, players, pundits and fans alike have to come to grips with new sets of “interpretations”, and with seasons in northern and southern hemispheres overlapping as they do, it all becomes beyond farcical.

Having said that, this year’s World Cup in football has showed us all the other side of that coin. FIFA are generally reluctant to bring in radical new rules, and over the past twenty odd years, the goalie back pass and the electronic board for injury time are really the only major changes I can remember.

Yet the debate rages on re: the use of video ref technology, and in my view, rugby has that right, and the other night’s World Cup clash between Brazil and the Ivory Coast gave us numerous reasons why it should be brought in for soccer as well.

First, let’s consider Luis Fabiano’s goal which made it 2-0 and changed the game dramatically. In true Henry-like fashion, he handled it not once, but twice before crashing it home. As the striker trotted back to his own half for the restart, the referee, who had clearly been informed of the handball on his headset but could do nothing, actually had a joke with him about the foul like it was a Sunday morning kickabout.

Then of course we have the Kaká sending off. In my opinion, the second yellow can be justified, but only because I reckon he did elbow Keita in the chest. Still, there was no need for the Ivorian to collapse in a heap as if his eyes had been burned from their sockets, and if the ref knew he was play-acting, he should have booked him as well for simulation.

So here’s my contention. Say, for arguments sake, football had the exact same video ref format currently employed by rugby, whereby the referee on the field has the option to go to the booth in certain circumstances. WOULD Luis Fabiano have pretended he didn’t handball? WOULD Kaká have thrown the elbow? WOULD Keita have held his hands so dramatically to his face? And of course you know I have to add this one…WOULD Henry be the most hated Frenchman in Irish history right now?

Not to mention the countless other examples from club football, surely everyone has one from their team; but for me being a Spurs fan, I can’t help but dig up Pedro Mendes’ 2005 “goal” that wasn’t allowed which would have meant an all-too-rare victory for us at Old Trafford.

Sure, I know video technology has its drawbacks, and sure, I know FIFA want to make the experience in their World Cup finals as similar to the Sunday league matches as they possibly can.

But if that’s the case, why don’t they pay the Sunday league players hundreds of thousands a week?

Because the stakes are much higher at the top level, I would’ve thought it’d be part of Sepp Blatter’s job description to make sure everything was being done to ensure the right calls were being made every time.

Maybe Mr Blatter sees his job differently?

Technorati Tags: paganoworldcup

England-0 Algeria-0

2010-06-19T07:57:00.008+01:00

To follow my World Cup thoughts on Twitter click here > @ThierryEyed

I’m not one of those Irish football fans who loves seeing the English suffer, far from it. But for the life of me I couldn’t make head or tail of what was going on in Cape Town last night, and judging from his histrionics throughout on the touchline, neither could Fabio Capello. Clearly there is something seriously wrong in the England camp and it needs sorting pronto. Football is a game where no matter how good your players are, you need key partnerships to be on the same wavelength and take your pick…be it Rooney & Heskey, Lennon & Johnson, Terry & Carragher or Lampard & Gerrard, that just wasn’t happening. It might be my Spurs allegiance getting to me but I felt most sorry for Aaron Lennon – his forte is running at full backs, but they were simply not passing to him EVER, so he came inside to get the ball then got substituted for it. And being the first change on the night, the coach made it out like Lennon was the problem, which clearly he was not. I really do hope they can turn it around before Wednesday.

Meanwhile what a match the USA/Slovenia game was. Talk about a game of two halves! And though I’ve done my best to hold back from complaining about the referees at this tournament so far, I can’t for the life of me work out where the American “foul” was that caused what should’ve been the winning goal to be disallowed. Still, this group is incredibly poised for the final series of matches next Wednesday, and I GUESS I have to say I still think the USA and England will advance.

As for the German defeat, many were questioning the ref for Klose’s sending off, but I actually see a case for his defence. He actually warned the lanky striker for tackling back yet he did it twice afterwards anyway. Not sure what else the ref was supposed to do other than NOT warn the guy in the first place? However - I did feel the official bottled it with the German penalty. If Vidic DID intentionally handle the ball in such spectacular fashion as the awarding of the penalty suggested, the Man United defender should’ve seen red. None of that would have changed the fact that Podolski took an atrocious penalty, though.

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France-0 Mexico-2

2010-06-18T08:11:00.002+01:00

to follow my World Cup thoughts via Twitter click here > @ThierryEyed

Back when I was choosing the name “Thierry-Eyed” for my World-Cup-blogging persona, it was a simpler time. I actually believed that the worst thing that could happen in the tournament from my perspective would be for the French to do well. Last night I was shown something worse. As if it wasn’t bad enough for Henry’s sickening opportunism to deny Ireland a place at the finals, we now know that to a man the French squad couldn’t have been arsed taking part in the sport’s greatest festival, and all because they didn’t like their coach. Maybe those Irish fans who sided with Roy Keane back in 2002 can appreciate it, but this one sure can’t. Not only is an insult to us, it’s an insult to children up and down France who dreamed to one day get the chance to play at the World Cup finals. Well the way this sporting year has gone so far, you can be sure a good deal of those French kids are now playing rugby. Shame on you Domenech, Henry and French senior football in general. And well done, of course, to Mexico for capitalising on their disinterest…at least one green army gets to celebrate in South Africa.

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Low scoring = boring?

2010-06-16T18:03:00.001+01:00

to follow my World Cup thoughts on twitter click here> @ThierryEyed

For the first few days of this great tournament I’ve been giving brief summaries of individual matches but to be a bit different today I’ll go on a bit of a rant and return to normal tomorrow.

Much as I’ve expected, Twitter has added a whole new dimension to these World Cup finals. Everytime I watch a match it’s like having thousands of people in my living room without having to tidy or even wear trousers. And take it from me, there’s a lot of hilarious people out there and now I couldn’t imagine enjoying the spectacle more without Ireland being there.

And naturally, not everyone in the twitterverse is going to be of the opinion that the World Cup is a great thing, and I totally respect that. What I DON’T get is those who drone on, and on about “how boring it is”, especially when I see their reasons why.

I’ve been following team sports for more years than I care to remember, on BOTH sides of the pond. And it is my view that if you equate sports excitement with scoring, you just don’t get sports. For me, that’s like saying Star Wars is about people shooting laser beams at each other.

Now remember, I’m not saying everyone should “get” sports. But if you don’t that’s fine, just don’t try and ruin it for those who do! Not that you have a hope in hell of ruining it, I’m just pointing out that these people make themselves out to look extremely sad.

Do I REALLY need to point out that for everyone trying to score in a team sport, there’s someone trying to stop them? DO I REALLY need to point out that sometimes a 0-0 can actually be an amazing achievement for a country, and even scoring one goal in a losing cause as North Korea did last night can be the same?

It should be obvious really. These footballers have trained mostly from a young age, and now, here they are, in the biggest tournament LITERALLY on the planet. What would you have them do…listen to the coach or go hell bent to score just one goal even though it could well allow five to go in the other end to keep the doubters happy? Especially since those same doubters would probably mock the shoddy defending in that case anyway?

Any team sport, but football more so than any other because of its global appeal, is SO much more than a scoreline. It’s a gripping drama. For every match you have characters on both sides, you may have personal allegiances be they for national loyalty or even because you’ve put a few solid wagers on. And if you can keep an open mind for 90 minutes, you’ll see that the drama unfolding on the field can indeed be viewed as entertainment, whether the result goes your way or not.

For me, these finals have been anything but a disappointment so far, particularly since I know that every team must play three matches in the first round and everyone is so worried about starting off with a loss, they’re bound to be cautious. Things will hot up in the next few days and from next Tuesday, we’ll have the groups reaching a conclusion with 2 games simultaneously and the drama will intensify even more.

Oh, and you can stop bitching about those horns as well while you’re at it. They’re not going anywhere, for me they give this tournament even more character, and what’s more, we’ll be so used to them come the final that it’ll be hard to watch future matches without them.

Rant over. On with the spectacle.

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Italy-1 Paraguay-1

2010-06-15T07:58:00.003+01:00

follow my World Cup thoughts on Twitter www.twitter.com/ThierryEyed

Like many of the first round clashes to date, this was as murky as the conditions it was played in, but the South Americans made it interesting by taking the lead thanks to a well-taken header. Still, the Italians are notorious for taking the scenic route out of a group, so when they got their equaliser it was practically a certainty that would be the end of the scoring. These two will probably both reach the last 16 at New Zealand and Slokvakia’s expense, and then surely the Azzurri will badly need the creativity of Pirlo back in their lineup.

HOLLAND-2 DENMARK-0

JAPAN-1 CAMEROON-0

Holland’s performance brought to mind the cliché that the best teams can get results even when they’re not playing at their best. The scoreline flattered thanks to a bizarre own goal (which the culprit seemed to take rather well judging by his grin) and a piece of opportunism from Dirk Kuyt. Meanwhile the Japanese capitalised on a disappointing performance by the highly fancied Cameroon…it didn’t look like they could buy a goal. Honda’s winner was well finished and he and his team-mates knuckled down to bring it home. For me, this group is still wide open.

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Germany-4 Australia-0

2010-06-14T10:38:00.002+01:00

They say the Germans are famous for being well prepared to the finest detail, and nothing showed this more than Miroslav Klose’s goal which put his side 2-0 up. ITV’s so-called expert Jim Beglin bemoaned the Socceroos’ keeper & defender but in my book Lahm’s perfectly weighted and aimed cross took them both out of the play. Before we engrave their name on the cup, however, remember they only capitalised on their 2-0 lead after a harsh straight red on Tim Cahill. As for the Aussies, they’ll need one hell of a turnaround to get out of this group now.

ALGERIA-0 SLOVENIA-1

GHANA-1 SERBIA-0

There was barely enough excitement in both these matches to allow for one half-decent World Cup fixture so they just get one report between them. If Robert Green’s howler was a 10, then his Algerian counterpart’s was a 6, but still bad enough to lose them the game. That was a shame, since African goalkeepers have acquitted themselves very well in this tournament so far. As for Ghana, they deserved their good fortune in being gifted a penalty by the Serbians…do these people (also Algeria’s red-carded sub) not know only Henry gets away with such handballs?

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England-1 USA-1

2010-06-13T07:03:00.002+01:00

Sure, the headlines will mention poor Robert Green’s dreadful howler, but the fact remains that England, a side many felt could go all the way in this tournament, had 50 minutes to atone for the mistake and didn’t. Credit must go to USA keeper Tim Howard plus centre-halves Onyewu and DeMerit for limiting their opposition to Gerrard’s early strike, but coach Capello won't be happy with his team’s inability to cash in on their squad's vastly superior experience on the big occasion. It’s not all doom and gloom, however, since surely neither Algeria nor Slovenia will prevent these two advancing.

ARGENTINA-1 NIGERIA-0

After Kuhne impressed in the tournament opener, Nigerian Enyema ensured African goalies made the right kind of headlines with a superb display that kept this contest from becoming a rout. Lionel Messi showed enough mesmerising touches to deserve a goal to add to Heinze’s early header but was denied every time. Nigeria will need to go back to the drawing board if they are to get past the Koreans, while Maradona, whether he’s actually influencing the squad or not, should expect to win this group from here. I don’t feel so bad now having tipped them to win it all.

SOUTH KOREA-2 GREECE-0

Now I love football as much as the next guy, probably a little more, but even I can’t justify sitting through three whole games in the one day, especially when the weather is good outside and my 12-year old son is itching to get out and have a kickaround with a football. So this match had to be sacrificed, and I didn’t regret it for a minute. What’s the point introducing this famous tournament to your kids if you don’t also encourage them to play? Good start for the South Koreans, and it seems Greece were, um, bankrupt of ideas.

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France-0 Uruguay-0

2010-06-12T07:49:00.002+01:00

Here’s how my World Cup blogging works. 100 words on every match whether I get to see it live or not.

This was classic example of an opening World Cup match – both teams more interested in not-losing than winning. However, the Henry Factor made it fascinating for Irish fans, even if he didn’t start; he provided plenty of drama at the end with his free-kick and ironic handball appeal. The French had the better of the play, but it was clear that both sides fully expect to emerge from Group A, and they could be right. The scouting report on Forlán was he does little work but always scores, instead he did the opposite. Only Toulalan impressed me for France.

SOUTH AFRICA-1 MEXICO-1

I reckon both these teams had their gameplans all wrong. Mexico pushed bodies forward from the start to try to get an early goal to silence the crowd, while the host nation were conservative going forward. In both cases, they failed to note South Africa’s defensive frailties. The Mexicans could have been more patient while the Bafana Bafana should have tried to make the most of every foray forward, as their stunning goal plus their last-gasp strike against the post proved. Dos Santos was impressive and unlucky to find the scoresheet thanks to a super display by home keeper Kuhne.

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who would you insure?

2010-06-11T10:42:00.005+01:00

All the nostalgia, hype and speculation re: World Cup 2010 comes to an end today at 3pm in Soccer City Johannesburg when host nation South Africa kick off against Mexico.

So for a few weeks at least, I’m going to do my level best to ignore what’s going on the “real world” and focus my social media efforts on this great tournament.

Basically I plan to do no more than 100 words on each game I watch, plus other observations via Twitter as @ThierryEyed and on AudioBoo by way of daily fake news bulletins.

And to celebrate the beginning of my coverage, First Quote are offering a €50 iTunes voucher to the person who gives the best answer to their competition question.

As you can see by the YouTube video. the question is : “Which footballers’ legs would be most expensive to insure?”

The rules are simple…

Come up with a suitably witty reply
Visit the First Quote website, make note of their phone number.
Email your reply to this address and use the phone number as your subject line (don't worry about spaces, just the number in full is fine any which way) [In case you cant follow link, addy is paganoblogATgmailDOTcom - I will acknowledge every VALID entry I receive]
Best answer wins a €50 iTunes voucher, which you can use to buy music, apps or movies. Winner will be notified by email, then announced in the comments section of this post.
Competition is for Republic of Ireland only, but once you live there, you can enter as often as you like.

Competition will run until fulltime in Sunday evening's match between Germany and Australia. Give it your best shot and enjoy the tournament! And best of luck from me to everyone but France!!!!! ;-)

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deutschland 2006

2010-06-10T08:13:00.004+01:00

I was blogging by the time Germany 2006 came along…in fact, all the posts below about previous finals were written in the weeks before it. Once the tournament was over I did this post to summarize, and as you can see it leads nicely into what is due to happen in South Africa tomorrow.

SPRECHEN SIE FUßBALL?

Though the so-called mainstream media will have you thinking otherwise, I feel my little collage above fully captures the memory which will last the longest from the German World Cup extravaganza over the past month.

I will refer briefly to the head-butting incident. At first, I was relieved that such an action was not rewarded by ultimate victory. Then, I was disgusted that simple taunting actually could be. Now, I am relieved to hear that FIFA will be investigating what Materazzi supposedly said to Zidane – though in a way they have to, since “Kick Racism Out Of Football” is quite rightly one of their banner campaigns this weather.

As for the match itself, I thought the bloody thing kicked off at 8pm my time. I had it all organised – my kids were with me, and we were going to get a Chinese dinner from the take-away across the road. I ordered it at 7:15, and went to collect it fifteen minutes later, only to discover to my horror that not only did it start at 7 but we had missed two goals!

Alas the rest of the game was not to amount to much as a football contest, but considering what was at stake, it was tense right to the end. Taking the entire night’s action into account, even without Zizou’s folly, the Italians were worthy winners overall in my book. And I suppose if any outcome was going to make the third place playoff worthwhile, a German victory was just the thing.

But enough of such nonsense. This tournament went above and beyond what I expected it to be. My kids loved every minute, from the opening ceremony right up to Grosso’s final penalty in Berlin. They now know the flags and the location of 32 nations, and what’s more, they have a keen interest in the world’s most popular pastime.

And what about that support from the fans? Each and every nation proudly represented, and my picture only depicts the fans of those who actually qualified – thousands upon thousands of fans from the 167 nations who failed to reach the finals made the trip to the sporting mecca bearing their colours as well.

This four-yearly event is not just about some guys kicking a ball around a park. It’s not even about being proud of where you come from. I ask you – how else would countries like Mexico and Iran, or Togo and Switzerland come together but in a World Cup finals encounter? It is a celebration of humanity’s diversity more than anything else.

And what better place for diversity to be celebrated in the next instalment than in South Africa in 2010.

You can be sure I’ll be blogging every step of the way.

Pictures courtesy of www.bbc.co.uk

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japan/south korea 2002

2010-06-10T07:39:00.002+01:00

There’s always drama before a World Cup finals tournament, but I doubt it will ever come close to that which happened in the Ireland squad before the 2002 event…

THE BATTLE OF SAIPAN

Who says it’s only religion that can divide the Irish from within?

It was one of those moments when you will always remember where you were when you first heard the news. In my case, I was driving on the M50 motorway in Dublin on my way to work when this came on the radio.

“In sensational news from Saipan, we have just learned that Irish international captain Roy Keane has been sent home by manager Mick McCarthy and will play no part in this summer’s World Cup finals.”

I was absolutely stunned. I really believed that this time we had a team, with the world-class Keane at its centre, that could go further than Jack Charlton’s men had done in ’90 and ’94. Instead we had a clash of personalities that should have been resolved behind closed doors spilling out and affecting the entire country let alone the squad.

Never before has a sporting incident divided a nation right down the middle so. You were either for Keane or you were for McCarthy. I’d even be afraid to tell you what was supposed to have happened because depending on where you were coming from you would here contrasting versions of the truth.

If a gun were put to my head I would have to side with McCarthy. He was in charge of the team as a whole, and if Keane had a problem, as team captain he should have approached him in private so they could show a united front before the rest of the squad.

Having said that, the two of them appear to have been as bad as each other when it came to failing to resolve their personality clash which appears to have gone back to the ’94 finals in the USA when McCarthy himself was captain and Keane was a young substitute.

And so in the weeks coming up to the kickoff of the 2002 World Cup finals, the Keane/McCarthy saga was all anyone could talk about. Rumours were circulating every day that Roy was at Manchester airport ready to take a flight back to Japan to rejoin the squad, but they never materialised.

Steve Staunton stepped into the breach and the remaining players were forced to embark on their tricky group which included Germany, Cameroon and Saudi Arabia without their world class skipper.

This was a catastrophic turn of events for the Irish who had done so well in reaching the finals having seen off the Dutch in the qualifying tournament. With players such as Damien Duff, Shay Given in goal, and Robbie Keane up front, plus the experienced heads of Roy, Staunton and Niall Quinn, it really did look like we could make an impact.

As it turns out, the boys in green made a pretty good stab at it anyway. Having drawn with Cameroon in their opener and gotten an unlikely last gasp equaliser against the Germans, they knew a win by two goals against the Saudis would ensure them a spot in the knockout stages, when as we all know anything can happen, and they secured their victory comfortably in the end.

That left us to face Spain in the last 16, a team which always seems to disappoint in the finals, so confidence was high. My fiancée Sandra and I booked a night in a hotel the night before the match so we could be sure of a good spot in a bar to watch the game. Once more, we relied on a last minute equaliser to keep us in the competition, and the match went to an agonising penalty shoot-out.

On a side note, I still have a scar on my leg from the moment the goal went in. Having jumped in the air in glee, as I came down my shin scraped against the side of a chair and left me on the ground in agony, while absolutely nobody around me noticed or cared and I think I must have had at least one full pint spilled on me as I lay writhing in pain!

I managed to compose myself for the shoot-out, however, and we were all gutted to see the normally reliable dead-ball kicker Ian Harte miss the kick that knocked us out and sent the fortunate Spaniards into the next round.

And of course, as many predicted, we all wondered how far we would have gone if the Keane/McCarthy bust up never happened.

As has become the norm with World Cups with Irish involvement, the rest of the tournament appeared to be nothing more than a sideshow, though this time there was a lot to capture interest.

The 2002 tournament will probably be best remembered not only for being the first to be held in Asia, but also for the success of several countries that were previously considered to be “unfashionable”.

The tournament kicked off with the highly unfancied African nation Senegal defeating the reigning champions France, who were considered invincible as they had also captured the European Championship in 2000. The Japan/Korea experience was to prove to be their downfall, and they went all three first round games without so much as scoring a goal.

Host nation Japan joined Senegal in the second phase, but their co-hosts South Korea went not one, but two better, battling all the way to the final four. Another unlikely semi-final participant was Turkey.

Honourable mention must also go to the USA, who capitalised on an amazing 3-2 win over the much fancied Portugal in their opening match to progress through to the quarter-finals where they were unlucky to fall to the Germans.

As for England, at least they didn’t fall to penalties this time – instead it was to a bizarre lob by Ronaldinho in the quarter-finals that their usually dependable keeper David Seaman appeared to allow fly over his head after a woeful error of judgement.

It was those same Germans and Brazilians that were to meet in the final in the Yokohama stadium, and though it was an error from the previously unflappable German keeper Oliver Kahn that changed the game and allowed Ronaldo open the scoring; perhaps it was the absence of Germany’s playmaker Michael Ballack that proved the difference on the day.

Whatever the reasons, Brazil’s 2-0 win secured them an unprecedented fifth World Cup title, a record which will no doubt stand for decades even if it is not improved upon. Skipper Cafu became the first player to appear in three finals and proudly lifted the trophy when all was said and done.

Back in the Irish camp, McCarthy was unable to get morale back after the tournament and suffered heavy defeats in his next two outings. Needless to say Roy Keane did not feature in either game, though having claimed to have been “tired and emotional” around the time of the bust-up, he ended up having a full recovery once his nemesis stepped down from the manager’s job.

Alas, our national team just wasn’t to be the same since the Battle of Saipan, and we have had two unsuccessful qualifying campaigns since. Now, with Steve Staunton and Bobby Robson at the helm, we can only hope for a return to the glory days.

In a bizarrely-timed twist on the morning I was to publish this post, I hear that both Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy will be applying for the currently vacant manager's job at Nottingham Forest, the club where the Corkman began his professional playing career. It seems the battle is not yet over.

Next – Sprechen Sie Fußball?

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france ‘98

2010-06-10T07:25:00.002+01:00

Maybe it was because I had gotten used to Ireland qualifying so failing to do so for France 98 was a disappointment, but the ‘98 finals tournament was for me anyway the most forgettable, so as you can see I didn’t have a lot to say about it.

ALLEZ LES BLEUS

Noone would argue it was a great French team, many would argue it was an anti-climax of a tournament

If a clairevoyant had told me in the early on in 1998 that I would get my first dose of chicken pox that summer AND be able to take time off work to watch a world famous sporting event staged in France, I probably would have kissed him or her.

I was working as manager of a sports store at the time, and between long hours and commuting PLUS two young children to see to at home, I would have barely had the time to turn on the telly let alone watch any of the World Cup being held in France.

Unfortunately for me, my illness was to strike right AFTER the competition ended, which left me at home for two weeks with nothing but the bloody Tour de France to provide sporting distraction.

Still, missing out wasn’t such a bad thing, since Ireland had not quite qualified, missing out in a play-off to the Belgians. Also, for me anyway, it was a pretty forgettable tournament overall.

It didn’t even start with an upset as previous competitions had. Many fancied Scotland to get something out of the holders Brazil on opening day, sadly they fell 2-1. Most of the fancied teams coasted through their first round groups, with the possible exception of Spain. The most interesting thing about the first phase for me was that the USA had been drawn in a group with three countries with which they have had military trouble; Germany, Yugoslavia and Iran, and lost to all of them. In soccer that is.

Once again England thought they had a team to take it all the way, once again they bowed out on penalties, this time to their own former battle adversaries Argentina. The tournament’s surprise package were Croatia, who made it all the way to the semifinals.

The final was between France and Brazil, and here, all the real drama took place before kickoff, as the Brazilian wunderkid Ronaldo took something of a nasty turn and was announced unable to play at the eleventh hour. Their spirit clearly broken, the Samba boys were easily swept aside 3-0 on the Sunday night in the one game I was actually able to watch from the comfort of my armchair.

It was clearly a tournament best forgotten, though the French did have a team worthy of the trophy – with players like Zidane, Desailly and the flamboyant Barthez in goal, it could not be said that they won thanks to home advantage alone.

You could say that when the final whistle blew in Paris that Sunday evening, I was itching for the next finals which were to be Japan and Korea. In actual fact, it was because my baby son had picked up the chicken pox from his creche.

Next – JAPAN/KOREA 2002 : THE BATTLE OF SAIPAN

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usa ‘94

2010-06-09T07:25:00.002+01:00

Time is running out until the opening ceremony for the 2010 World Cup finals, so if I’m going to catch up with my re-hashing of old posts of past finals I’ll have to break with my normal blogging habits and actually publish more than one post in a day! I’m pretty sure I’ll live to tell the tale…

MAKING SOCCER HISTORY?

Jack’s Army had a score to settle with the Italians in ‘94

Say you get married, and embark on what is meant to be a trip around the world with your fellow newlywed by way of an extended honeymoon. What is the coolest thing they can do for you on your next birthday?

It was February 1993 at the Spartan Stadium in San Jose. The referee blew the full time whistle, and the spectators were put out of their misery after what had to be the most boring game of international football ever played, a 0-0 draw in a friendly between USA and Russia. I turned to my (now ex-) wife and said, “Happy Birthday, dear!”

Even though it was a travesty of a contest, and even though it was hardly the most romantic of occasions, she fully understood how important it was that we attend this particular game. One of the reasons we began our “world tour” in America was so that we could be there for the World Cup finals which were due to take place in the summer of 1994, and if you went to see this game between the former Cold War adversaries, you would be guaranteed tickets for whatever venue you chose.

Since it seemed that Ireland were well poised to qualify, I was certain that their games would be played in the Boston venue. Though we were both working in San Francisco at the time, the plan was to Amtrak across the country to be settled in the Massachusetts capital, where I also had family connections, so that we could be well poised to make the trip to the games in Foxborough Stadium.

The plan worked almost perfectly. We got our tickets well in advance, and at rock bottom prices. Once the draw was made for the final stages, naturally the value of the tickets soared. Not ones to be overly greedy, we sold tickets for two of the games for the value of the entire package of five to break even.

It has to be said it was quite a shrewd move by the sport’s governing body FIFA to stage the finals tournament in the land of the free. Because of the popularity of all the more traditionally American sports like baseball and gridiron football, the game of “soccer” was finding it extremely difficult to find a niche at the highest professional level.

What made this all the more paradoxical was that soccer was and indeed still is the most popular sport for America’s youth. The simple reason for that is, the game requires you to buy the minimum of equipment, just a uniform and a ball. The lack of helmets, bats, gloves or excessive padding went a long way to creating the phenomenon known as the “soccer mom”.

Despite the fact that pretty much everyone played up to the age of 9 or 10, once over that age, kids wanted to emulate the sporting heroes they saw on the TV where the world’s greatest soccer players were nowhere to be seen in America, unless you tuned into Spanish language channels. A good friend of mine who lives in California told me her son was of the impression that the sport was considered “gay”.

And so, FIFA made its decision to try and conquer this final great frontier for its pastime. Nine cities were chosen across the nation, and the one thing they could be absolutely sure of, they had the best race of people on the planet when it came to marketing.

“How to play the game of Association Football. Two teams of eleven men kick a ball around a field. At the end of ninety minutes, the Germans win.”

…is roughly how I remember one of their more amusing warm-up ads sounding. One other slogan I found particularly ironic was the one that went “USA ’94 – Making Soccer History”. The double meaning of that phrase was not lost on me – clearly they meant it in the positive nature, but since I knew so many Americans thought it was just a dumb boring European sport, I was sure there were many that would actually like to make the game history.

And so we settled in Boston, and I got a job in a sports store downtown right near the Common. I was hardly surprised that the management of the store had little knowledge of the impending tournament. They were generally more interested in how the Red Sox or the Bruins were doing. After much nagging I finally managed to persuade them to get their suppliers to send them reasonable quantities of the replica jerseys in time for the competition.

Ironically enough, the one shirt they could not acquire was that of Ireland. This was because people were selling them on the sly all over the Irish pubs around the city. I had to wonder about their authenticity, however, when on of the managers, of Irish ancestry himself, proudly proclaimed that he had bought such a shirt, and the reason the seller told him he could be sure it was genuine was the fact that it had the brand name “St Bernard” right there on the label!

Speaking of Ireland, the good news was, they qualified for the finals. The bad news was, none of their games were to be in Boston. They were drawn in a very tricky first round “group of death” with Mexico, Norway, and their conquerors from 1990, Italy, and the games were to be in New York and Orlando.

The biggest team to be involved at the Boston venue for the first round was Argentina, and it was to a couple from Buenos Aires that we sold our tickets. That left us with our first taste of live World Cup football as the group game between South Korea and Bolivia.

Once we took our seats, which were impressively close to the front row, we soon realised the cosmopolitan nature of this event. There was a drunken Argentinian chap beside us, an English couple on the other side, and what sounded like some Scandinavian men behind us. The most entertaining fellow spectators, however, were seated in front of us.

They could only be described as the “typical clean-cut all-American family”, straight out of a Disney movie. There was Dad, Mom, early teenage daughter, and a boy and another girl both under ten. They arrived just before kick-off, complete with trays of munchies. All of them were wearing the same World Cup souvenir t-shirts.

What made me laugh about them most, however, was when the elder daughter turned to her mother ten minutes into the game and asked, “Which team is which?” Remember – the teams were South Korea and Bolivia, and we were easily close enough to see the faces of the players. My amazement was doubled when the mother didn’t know, and it was tripled when she asked the father and even he didn’t have a clue.

Unfortunately, this game was an even more boring 0-0 draw than the one in San Jose a year before, though I suppose the carnival atmosphere made up for it. Next up for us was to take our place at The Kells bar on Commonwealth Avenue for the first Irish game against the Italians.

The pub was full to bursting with several having recently arrived in the States and well versed on the new breed of Irish players such as Jason McAteer. As we pounded both bottles of beer and our fists against the bar in excitement, the Boys in Green held on to their early 1-0 lead courtesy of Ray Houghton for an incredible victory over one of the tournament favourites. Once again, we had the feeling that we had won the tournament, and we were also able to banish the demons caused by those who made fun of us for not even winning a game back in 1990!

Our last two games in Foxborough both involved Nigeria. Their fans were extremely colourful, and made a carnival of the train ride there and back by forming a conga line and dancing up and down all the carriages. They were very unlucky not to get past the Italians themselves in the knockout stages, with only a Roberto Baggio penalty in extra time separating the teams.

Unfortunately, Ireland fell to the Mexicans in their second group game, 2-1 in Orlando, but John Aldridge’s late goal meant that we still had a good chance of progressing courtesy of a result from our final game with Norway.

The Irish-American manager of my store arranged to have the day off so he could come with me and MyEx to the Kells to see what all the fuss was about. He was to be amazed by the atmosphere, particularly when you consider that it was yet another 0-0 draw. The tension was created by the fact that the Mexico v Italy game was taking place at the same time, and as goals went in there, the standings in the group changed dramatically. Suffice to say, whatever way the maths worked out, the Irish had made it through yet again.

This time, we were to face Holland, and unfortunately, our bubble was to burst. A mishap by fullback Terry Phelan let them in for an opener, and with us well poised to get an equaliser, our hero of a goalie from Italia90 Packie Bonner allowed a relatively easy shot slip through his fingers for a crushing second which meant the Irish dream was over for another year.

I remember the day of the Dutch game well. It was a typical New England summer’s day, extremely hot and humid. Between that and the USA v Brazil game in the evening, I managed an hour’s sunbathing on the roof of our apartment building. With new unlikely role models like the flame-haired, goatee-sporting Alexi Lalas, the host nation were then extremely lucky to bow out only 1-0 having had an impressive first phase which included a win over Colombia, which was to provide one of the talking points of the tournament.

The Colombians were well fancied as an outside bet to go all the way, with stars such as Carlos Valderrama on their team. The defeat to the Americans, however, was to bring home the significance of this event to the general public when Andreas Escobar, who had scored an extremely fortunate own goal in the game, was shot dead outside a nightclub shortly after returning home when his team had been eliminated. Of course this had more to do with the drug culture than football, but it was still hard to believe.

Among the other surprise packages of the finals we had Bulgaria, who bravely ousted the Germans in the quarterfinals inspired by the great Hristo Stoichkov. Sweden also got to the semis with their well organized squad.

And so it came to the day of the final between Brazil and Italy, who had progressed this far despite their earlier defeat to the Irish. I watched the game in my cousin’s apartment on Comm Ave. Considering the games I had been to before, it was rather fitting that this was to be yet another 0-0 draw, but since it was a final, there had to be a winner on the day.

The World Cup final of 1994 was indeed to make soccer history in that it was the first to be decided by way of a “penalty shoot-out”. Nobody would have guessed that it would be the Italian superstar Roberto Baggio that lost his nerve first, as his kick sailed high over the bar, leaving their opponents victorious for the fourth time.

As had been the norm with every victory throughout the tournament, the Brazilian fans took to the streets for a Samba party shortly after the end of the game. They waved gigantic green and yellow flags out of their car and you would be led to believe you were actually in Rio. Bemused Americans looked on, most of them totally oblivious to the reason for their celebration.

All in all, it has to be said the USA experiment was a success. A professional soccer league was formed shortly afterwards, called Major League Soccer. Though it never professed to be able to match the home-grown sports, it successfully drew support from ethnic communities and despite a few setbacks it still exists today.

Still, I doubt the Yanks will ever fully embrace the world’s most popular game. Maybe it’s because they cannot handle seeing themselves stacked up fairly against other countries, particularly when they will have to work hard to come out on top. Sounds like a grand case of sour grapes to me. “We’re not number one? Ah, it’s a dumb boring sport anyway.”

Next – FRANCE ’98 : ALLEZ LES BLEUS

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italia ‘90

2010-06-08T06:39:00.004+01:00

Time’s running out until the opening ceremony in the first World Cup finals ever to be played on the African continent. This time I’m looking back to 1990 when another first took place…the Republic of Ireland’s maiden finals tournament. Best summer for televised football EVER.

HOW “OLÉ” BECAME AN IRISH WORD

the moment an entire nation held its breath

Anyone who was alive and not wearing diapers in the Republic of Ireland for the summer of 1990 should have a World Cup story to tell. The funny thing is, a lot of them, myself included, may have trouble remembering who actually won the tournament itself!

At the time I was breezing my way through college learning much more from my job behind the bar at Gleeson’s of Booterstown than I was cracking Psychology books at UCD.

Although the pub in question had much closer ties to the game of rugby, the World Cup of 1990 which was staged in sunny Italy was to be the first to embrace the now customary global tradition of viewing major sporting encounters in a drinking emporium.

I clearly remember both John and Ciaran Gleeson pleading with their father Frank to invest in the big screen technology the minute it was confirmed that The Republic of Ireland soccer team had qualified to take part in the tournament. Oh what a worthwhile investment that turned out to be.

Allow me to demonstrate by way of a brief anecdote just how popular the local pub was as a vantage point. For Ireland’s third group game against the Netherlands, we put signs up everywhere we could, advertising that our Willow lounge was the place to be to get the best atmosphere. The fliers clearly stated that the doors to the lounge would open at 6pm sharp, so punters were advised to arrive early to avoid disappointment.

I was the lucky member of staff who was elected to man the door as the line began forming just after 5:30. People stood in eager anticipation and traded pleasantries with me as they waited and I gave them advice as to where the best seats would be once I opened the doors.

Unbeknownst to me, a hoard of regular patrons had already petitioned the four-strong management team for special treatment, and they were allowed into the Willow lounge via the kitchen. This meant that when I was allowed to swing the doors open on the dot of six, the lounge was already full to capacity! The second I realised this I was able to escape the bemused throng at the door and take my dinner break!

In actual fact, being a pub of multiple lounges, it was clear after the first group game against the aul enemy England that one big screen was nowhere near enough to satisfy the congregation. Smaller tellies were commissioned so that everyone with a pint in their hand could savour the action. Even we the barman were allowed a set on the counter so we would not miss out.

So where did this soccer frenzy come from?

When Ireland had failed yet again to qualify for the Mexico ’86 finals, and their little cousins up in the North managed it for the second time in succession, the governing body south of the border, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), made its most intelligent and yet most courageous ever executive decision.

Realising that success breeds success, they chose to appoint Jack Charlton as national team coach. The intelligence came from the fact that Jack himself had won the World Cup in 1966 as a player. The courage came from the fact that he was not only foreign, he was English.

Finally we had a pair of eyes to look at the setup from the outside. Jack’s biggest contribution was to scrutinize the FIFA regulations regarding eligibility to play for a particular country. He noticed that so long as you could prove that at least one grandparent was naturally Irish, you could don the green jersey.

Since our Great Famine had sent people far and wide around the globe, most notably across the water to England, Charlton realised his pool of players was much wider than it first appeared. He could then pull his many strings in the English game to convince top quality players who, though not quite good enough to play for their country of birth, may still have a chance to experience international football.

And so to join our native stars such as Liam Brady, Pat “Packie” Bonner and Ronnie Whelan, we now had the likes of Tony Galvin, Chris Hughton (both from my team Spurs) and Ray Houghton to call on. Jack Charlton instilled in his new charges a confidence and a style of play which involved making up for technical shortcomings against superior opposition by harrying them like Irish wolfhounds whenever they had the ball.

This new “put ‘em under pressure” style of play brought instant success and in 1987, Ireland qualified for its first major finals tournament, the European Championships in Germany. Since I believe I have some Scottish readers, I should point out that their 1-0 in Bulgaria greatly helped our cause that year! Thanks lads! Unfortunately the luck of the Irish was not to carry over to the tournament itself, for despite bravely conquering England 1-0 and holding the USSR to a 1-1 draw, we bowed out of the tournament courtesy of the Dutch.

Nonetheless, the German experience created a whole new generation of soccer fans in the country, one that was rabidly hungry for more success when Italia 90 came along.

It seemed inevitable that we would be drawn to play England yet again in the first round, with the Dutch and the so-called outsiders Egypt making up the group. And so the nation gathered to take in the excitement of our first taste of World Cup finals action.

We thought it had all gone pear-shaped when Gary Lineker put England 1-0 up in our opening encounter. I will always remember how our equaliser transpired. Goalkeeper Bonner had the ball in his hands and as he kicked the ball out towards the forward line his face showed a determination best demonstrated by the Irish turn of phrase “go on, ye boy ye!”

A matter of seconds later, Kevin Sheedy was slotting the ball into the net down the other end. Well you would have thought we had just been crowned World champions. It’s amazing how a 1-1 tie seems completely different to the two teams and their fans depending on who scored first!

The Egypt game that followed was quite possibly the most frustrating 90 minutes of football I have ever watched. Unfortunately the Irish tactic of stifling more skilful opponents was no good as the canny Africans gave us a taste of our own medicine and forced a 0-0 tie. This meant we were forced to get some kind of result against the Dutch to make the knockout stages.

Once again we went 1-0 behind, only to equalise by virtue of the lanky Niall Quinn, as his girlfriend Gillian watched in that very same Willow lounge in Gleeson’s, I might add. I knew this because I thought I was flirting with her until I was advised that she was somewhat spoken for!

Luckily for the Irish, even though our three first round matches resulted in draws, it was still good enough to get us into the knockout “last 16” phase, when we were to face Romania.

By the day of the game in Genoa, the entire nation was well used to the new temporary Irish national anthem:

We’re all part of Jackie’s army
We’re all off to Italy
And we’ll really shake them up
When we win the World Cup
Cos Ireland are the greatest football team!
Olé, Olé, Olé, Olé
Olé, Olé [repeat Olé’s ad nauseum]

Come to think of it, I'm not quite sure exactly how a Spanish word became synonymous with the Irish team's involvement in a competition in Italy, so maybe my title is a bit misleading. The point is, we would take any excuse to sing it, unless, of course, there was a post-game interview with the mighty Jack himself, when you could hear a pin drop in any pub!

Well, I doubt anyone remembers anything from the Romania match, at least the 120 minutes of play and the first lot of penalty kicks. Only when Lupescu took his team’s fifth kick and it was bravely saved by Bonner did the memory banks kick into gear. This meant Dave O’Leary needed to slot home his effort to earn us an astonishing quarterfinal berth.

Unbelievably, as he placed the ball on the penalty spot, a kid aged around 13 caught my eye at the bar and actually asked me if I could get him a Coke. Whatever my exact reply, I hope it was polite, but I can guarantee the gist was “no, go away”. I wouldn’t have been able to get it anyway, for when O’Leary’s kick smashed against the back of the net, there were more drinks spilled than poured!

The rest of that day for bartenders like me involved hard work yet for the rest of the nation it meant drinking out in the streets waving at every car passing by, whose drivers of course were honking their horns furiously in celebration. It was an amazing atmosphere. Every man, woman and child was smiling. Even those who would treat such sporting exploits with disdain couldn’t help but join in the fun.

After that dramatic day in Genoa, Jackie’s army could do no wrong in our eyes. Faced with a quarterfinal with the host nation Italy, I think we all knew there was a good chance our run was over, and sure enough, we succumbed to a goal from another unsung hero, “Toto” Schillaci.

The Irish team came home a few days later to a welcome the country had not seen since the Pope himself had visited 11 years earlier. By taking their place among the top eight nations in the football world, these men had written themselves into Irish cultural history, and their legacy touched every player that dons the green jersey today.

As for me personally, I made a solemn vow that whatever happened I would be the fun side of the bar the next time Ireland qualified for a World Cup finals.

What about the rest of the tournament?

Well, Paul Gascoigne cried and West Germany beat Argentina in the final by virtue of a controversial penalty. That was about it really, and I actually had to look up that latter bit of information to be sure.

Next – USA ’94 : MAKING SOCCER HISTORY?

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mexico ‘86

2010-06-07T07:33:00.003+01:00

Time for the latest instalment in my series going back over previous World Cup finals tournaments. The 1986 event was the least memorable for me, but that had nothing to do with the actual football itself, as you can see by this post first published February 24, 2006.

THE FINALS THAT GOT AWAY

English soccer fans talk about this moment more than they do about 1966 when they actually won the World Cup!

A lot changed for me in the four years that passed between the World Cups of 1982 and 1986. I think they call it puberty.

I went from a nerdy kid in his early teens to a nerdy horny kid in his late teens.

Given that, I could hardly pass up the opportunity of travelling from living with my grandparents here in Dublin to go stay with my mother in San Francisco for nine long weeks of the summer of ’86. I knew staying with her would offer me a sense of independence that I badly needed. By independence, of course, I meant that I was sure I was going to be able to stay out every night drinking and getting laid.

Well, whether I succeeded or not in that quest may make for a more interesting story, but it has no place here. I also travelled with the assumption that I would not miss a moment of the World Cup finals, I mean, for crying out loud, since they were being held in Mexico, I was actually going to be nearer to them than I was in Dublin!

As a point of information, these finals were originally meant to be staged in Colombia, who turned out to be either too poor or too run by drug barons to host the event.

My mother, who is known for her hatred of television, was under strict instructions to have a set in her apartment ready for me to watch the football. Well, she managed to beg, borrow and steal a set from somewhere, and I was supposed to be grateful that it was a colour one at that.

Too bad she didn’t realise you also needed a thing called a “cable box”. When I got there and tried all the channels to see if one was showing the opening game, I was quickly disappointed. She offered to get one of her friends to try and both obtain and hook up the right equipment, but at the age of 17 I was aware enough of my “spoiled-only-child-raised-by-his-grandparents” profile to be too proud to want any kind of special treatment. With that, I told my mother to forget the whole thing, and resigned myself to missing the entire tournament.

Such was the apathy the mainstream American media had towards football back then that for the whole month the sport’s main event was taking place, I did not hear one word about what was going on, save for a couple of column inches in the San Francisco Chronicle. I did hear a lot about a sensational rookie first baseman for the Oakland A’s called Mark McGwire, however.

Though it was a royal pain in the ass, not to mention unbelievable that my nation of birth did not embrace the beautiful game, I managed to have myself an enjoyable summer all round, even if I never did get laid.

One weekend, when I was staying at my Uncle’s house out in the “sticks”, I was on my own as everyone was out running various errands. Although clouds are considered UFOs in that neighbourhood, and it would seem to make more sense to go outside, I was always one to see what was on TV first before I did so.

My uncle DID have a cable box, so I flicked around the channels. To my amazement, I found a game between Argentina and West Germany, though the commentary was in Spanish. After about five minutes, I worked out that it could not be a live transmission as I had first hoped [it would have been two weeks AFTER the final – yes, it’s true, I still hadn’t learned who had won the damn thing].

In those days you still didn’t have the time and score conveniently placed at the top corner of the screen for you, so I was at the mercy of the Mexican TV director to inform me that it was early in the second half, and Argentina were winning 2-0. Just my luck, I thought, even though I do get to see some action without knowing the outcome after all, it seems to be over as a contest.

Well, with a bit of luck, the two finalists managed to turn the game into arguably the most exciting final ever, with the Germans surging back to make the score 2-2 before the Argentinians took the lead for good once more which led to a rollercoaster of emotions from the two sets of fans. It didn’t matter that the commentary was in Spanish – the only word you needed to understand was “GOOOOOOOALLL!!!”

And so I felt I had least tasted some of the excitement of Mexico ’86 as I watched the new world superstar Diego Maradona lift the trophy with his team-mates and celebrate. When I was to eventually return home to Dublin, however, I was to learn that this was not the only game to produce drama by any stretch of the imagination.

The English club season was well under way by the time I got back, but all the talk in the news media was not about how the great teams of the day such as Liverpool and Arsenal and the like were doing. Seemingly all of the Queen’s subjects had converted to religion, since their favourite three words had become “The Hand of God”.

Once again the Republic Of Ireland had failed to reach the finals – I knew that much before I left. Of the “home” nations, three had made it, precisely the same three that had done so in ’82 – England, Scotland, and plucky Northern Ireland. Sadly, the latter two had dismal first round campaigns in Mexico. It was left to the English to keep the home fires burning in the second phase.

Now that the sport’s governing body FIFA had the new “penalty shoot-out” method of deciding tied contests at their disposal, they decided to make the competition a “knock-out” one after the first round groups were completed. And so, 24 was whittled down to 16, and from then on it was sudden-death.

England were shaky at first, but after their 3-0 over Paraguay, they felt as confident as any that they had a chance to go all the way. Enter one Diego Maradona.

See the picture at the beginning of this piece? That’s Diego, jumping for a high ball with England keeper Peter Shilton in the quarterfinal. A split second after that historic picture was taken, Shilton was picking the ball up out of his own net with complete disbelief, as the goal had been allowed to stand. When Maradona was quizzed about it afterwards, he apparently coined one of the sport’s most famous phrases which suggested divine intervention.

Well if we thought English fans were a pain in the arse whenever they won something, we were to discover that they’re even worse when they feel they lost in questionable circumstances. They still bitch and moan about that bloody hand of God even today, twenty years later. Not even the fact that Maradona went on the score a dazzling solo goal with a run from inside his own half that beat virtually everyone in an England jersey keeps them quiet – they would tell you they should not have been 1-0 down in the first place.

As always, the competition had its interesting sub-plots, such as Denmark seeming invincible in the first round, scoring nine goals and winning all three of their games, only to get hammered 5-1 by the Spaniards in the next phase. Then there was Morocco, who furthered the cause of increased African participation by actually winning their group which included both England and Portugal, and only allowing the Germans to edge them 1-0.

Honourable mention should also go to the French, who managed to conquer the reigning champions Italy in the last 16. Finally there was Belgium – who seem to sneak unnoticed past everyone into the semi-finals only to succumb to yet more Maradona magic.

Looking back I suppose you would have to say that it appeared to be destiny that Argentina would lift their second World Cup, just as it was destiny for me to miss the all the action as it happened.

I was determined that no matter what the attraction of travelling abroad in 1990, I was going to be near a television that was showing the World Cup that summer. My wish was to be granted, but nowhere near the way I thought it would be.

Next – ITALIA ’90 : How Olé Became an Irish Word

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españa ‘82

2010-06-02T11:56:00.004+01:00

My blogging buildup to the World Cup 2010 in South Africa continues with another trip down memory lane, this time the Espana 82 tournament.

ARE THEY IRISH OR NOT?

Paolo Rossi had much to celebrate in ’82, but it isn’t just the Italians who will have fond memories of the tournament.

It was with a far more educated eye that I watched the 1982 version of the World Cup finals which were held in sunny Spain.

Though the ’78 tournament was the one that got me hooked on football, I was only 9 years old, and thus wasn’t fully aware of what was going on – it was more everyone else’s excitement that attracted me.

This time, I was 13, and I had spent the previous four years immersing myself in the weekly dramas of the English professional game. What’s more, the club I had chosen to support, Tottenham Hotspur, were going through a purple patch, having won the previous two FA Cup competitions prior to these finals, ironically with two Argentinian players in their squad.

I had also been introduced to a new aspect of the World Cup – the qualification process. Since so many countries enter the event, the sport’s governing body FIFA (who have more affiliate nations than the UN) has to somehow whittle them down to a smaller number of teams to contest the final tournament.

Up to 1978, sixteen nations qualified for the finals. Most of these would come from Europe and South America, and the so-called “unfashionable” continents of Africa, Asia and North America, were allocated just one slot each. For the 1982 finals, FIFA decided to expand the number of finalists to 24 in order to double their representation.

Despite the extra chances of qualification, my hometown team the Republic of Ireland just missed out by the skin of their teeth, with France edging them out on account of having beaten Cyprus by more goals than we did. However, that did not mean the island of Ireland did not have something to look forward to when the summer of ’82 came around.

Most people who grow up here are told stories from when they are in diapers about the country’s history, from whichever standpoint the narrator wished to tell. You can be sure that at some point in the tale, someone was bound to have been oppressed by someone else.

As for me, I was transplanted here at the age of 8. All I knew was that for some reason, there were two Irelands, and being absolutely 100% indifferent to politics, I didn’t really care why. And so, since a team called “Northern Ireland” had reached the World Cup finals, it seemed natural to me that I should support them.

I would have been totally unaware of the history of the game north of the border, particularly its extremely close links to the blatant sectarianism that has crippled the community over the years. I wouldn’t have even known that the success of the 1982 team was a legacy of the late great George Best, who despite having achieved icon status the late-sixties/early seventies, sadly never graced a finals tournament himself.

None of that meant anything to me. These guys were Irish, so they had my unconditional support. I also didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t root for the English and Scottish teams who also qualified for the finals, since having closely followed the English league, I was familiar with all of the players.

So you can be sure that once the finals kicked off on June 13th in Barcelona, I was ready for action. Of course I had my wallchart poised ready to record the results, of course I had my “schedule” totally cleared so that I could take in every second of every game, of course I was full to the brim with anticipation.

Well, what a start the tournament had. The tradition was such that the reigning World Champions would contest the first game. The Argentinians with their new wunderkid Dieg Maradona were expected to sweep all before them. Shame noone told that to the Belgians, who produced what at the time seemd to be one of the greatest upsets in World Cup history by actually beating the holders 1-0.

As it turned out, the Belgian victory would be long forgotten by the time the tournament ended.

To understand the World Cup, you have to understand the nature of a "first round group". To make sure all the teams that qualify for the finals play more than one game, the finalists are first divided by way of a lottery into “round-robin” groups of four teams each. Each team plays the other within the group once, and generally the two teams with the best records advance to the next phase of the tourament, with the other two catching the plane home.

And so, despite Argentina’s loss, they still managed to win their next two games and sneak through, at the expense of Hungary, who raised a few eyebrows themselves by calling into question the wisdom of expanding the representation of North American teams by hammering El Salvador 10-1.

The real drama of the first round, however, was happening elsewhere. Three days after Belgium’s victory, it was eclipsed by the rank outsiders Algeria, whose supporters back home would have been dancing in the streets as if they had won the trophy itself after their stunning 2-1 win over the mighty West Germans.

However, like I said, your first game does not necessarily guarantee that you will advance beyond the first phase. The games that ensued involving the other teams in the group, Austria and Chile, left it all down to the last match between West Germany and Austria to see who qualified.

Not surprisingly, there were a lot of Algerians in the crowd to watch the big game. Never before had an African nation made it past the first round of a tournament. The entire nation came to a standstill for what could have been an historic event. Being predisposed to rooting for the underdog as I normally am, I too was caught up in the hype.

What transpired was to change the World Cup for ever. When West Germany took a 1-0 lead in the game, the two countries worked out between them that if the score stayed exactly as it was to the end, they would both advance to the next round. And so, with the cameras constantly focusing on bewildered Algerians openly weeping in the crowd, the two German-speaking countries proceeded to kill the remaining time in the game by simply passing the ball around rather than try to score more goals.

The result of this was to be that FIFA was to insist that in future, the last two games in every first round group were to be played at the same time, so that noone would be absolutely sure what they had to do to qualify. This was quite a concession when you think about it, since two big games running concurrently puts a big dent in advertizing revenue.

Then there was Northern Ireland’s group. Having impressively drawn with Yugoslavia and then being disappointed in only doing likewise with Honduras, manager Billy Bingham’s side were not given much hope in their final game against the host nation Spain. Once more, the form books were to be thrown out the window as Gerry Armstrong scored a legendary goal (even if it was extremely difficult to find a picture on the net) which won the game for them 1-0.

Much like the Algerian win over Germany, the jubilation in the media back here would have you think they had won the World Cup. Whatever was to happen to them after that night, the players’ status as heroes was assured.

Elsewhere, England were impressive in winning all of their first round games, while Scotland seemed to be on the verge of an upset when they took a 1-0 lead over tournament favourties Brazil, only to let in four at the other end which was to mean they were to go home early once again.

For the second round this time, the twelve remaining countries were put into four groups of three. Northern Ireland bravely drew 2-2 with Austria yet succumbed 4-1 to the French. England were all of a sudden unable to score and bowed out to the Germans. Poland caused a shock of their own by reaching the semifinals at the expense of the Soviet Union.

Then there was Italy v Brazil. If I had thought the games leading up to this were thrilling, I had no idea what was in store. The mathematics were simple for this game – Italy had to win to advance, otherwise their opponents would. Since the boys from Brazil were considered the best in the world, I was up for the underdog.

Paolo Rossi socres, 1-0 Italy. Could there be an upset? Oops, Brazil equalize. Surely the Italians won’t score another against this great team. Up steps Paolo again, 2-1. Then Falcao curls in an amazing free-kick, 2-2. With me on the edge of my seat, Rossi completes his hat-trick to win the game. It is impossible in one paragraph to describe just how much I enjoyed this game. It was definitely football at its best.

It was such an amazing contest that the following ones were not to match up, with the possible exception of the semifinal between West Germany and France, which will be best known for three reasons – it was the first to employ the “penalty shoot-out” method of choosing a winner, the Germans came back from 3-1 in overtime, and it involved the most famous example of dirty play ever to go unpunished when German goalie Harald Schumacher executed a running ninja-style kick on Patrick Battiston.

And so after a few questionable tactics from West Germany, it was rather fitting that Italy won the final 3-1 so their inspirational goalkeeper and captain Dino Zoff could lift the trophy.

For the first time and definitely not the last, the final for me was an anti-climax. Still, I was sad when the tournament was over, in that back at the start there were so many possiblities, and the drama that unfolded was unforgettable.

Once again I was eager for the new club season to begin, but if truth be told I was bemoaning the fact that the next World Cup finals were a long four years down the line.

Next – MEXICO ’86 : The One That Got Away

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argentina '78

2010-06-01T05:00:00.001+01:00

Now that the sun has set on the Leinster rugby season, I can turn my blogging attention to the round ball game’s World Cup, thus proving that despite what many say, it’s possible to love both codes.

Hopefully my chosen title of this “blog within a blog” will reflect my disappointment that my adoptive nation won’t be there thanks to the infamous moment of va-va-voom.

Between now and kickoff down in South Africa, I’ll be re-publishing some old posts outlining how I experienced tournaments gone by, starting with my first taste of the action, the Argentina ‘78 finals. It was first published Feb 10, 2006.

The hometown team celebrate - on the ground, both the famous confetti and the dejected Dutch

THE WRITING WAS ON THE WALL

My grandfather handed me a folded up piece of paper and said in his whispery tone with a broad smile : “I think this will interest you.” Little did he know that in actual fact he was giving me my first heavy dose in what was to become a lifelong addiction to the world’s most popular game.

If you were to ask football historians to tell you about the World Cup Finals tournament which was held in Argentina in the summer of 1978, they could tell you many stories about the drama surrounding it.

First, there was the question of international outrage at General Videla’s totalitarian regime in the country, which almost led to the event being cancelled altogether. The sport’s governing body, FIFA, eager to discourage mixing too much with politics, persuaded everyone to participate regardless.

Then, there were the various sub-plots within the competition itself. There was the host nation, eager to win the famous trophy for the first time.

There was the Dutch team, playing for the first time in its heydey without the legendary Johann Cruyff.

There was Scotland’s participation, as they found themselves in the unique position of being the sole represetatives of the so-called “home nations” [the others being England, Wales and Northern Ireland, all of whom failed to qualify].

As for my home team, the Republic of Ireland, qualifying for the finals was nothing but a pipedream at this point.

The historian would no doubt tell you how Scotland came within a goal of advancing beyond the first phase of the tournament, for despite being held to a disappointing 1-1 draw by unfancied Iran, they managed to pull off a shock by beating Holland but unfortunately not by enough.

He would then tell you of the suspicious nature of Argentina’s last second phase game. Needing to win by at least four goals against what had previously been an impressive Peruvian side, their opponents seemed to be subject to some kind of Inca curse and allowed themselves to be whipped 6-0 which denied Brazil a berth in the final.

Although the 18-year-old Diego Maradona was not considered to be ready for the international arena, Argentina still triumphed in the final 3-1 over Holland with great players such as Osvaldo Ardiles, Daniel Passarella, and leading scorer Mario Kempes.

But I can assure you, absolutely NONE of the above facts mattered to me as the tournament was progressing.

My regular blog readers will know my grandparents brought me to Ireland from the USA in 1977. If you are irregular, now you know too. I was thus thrown headfirst into a new school with new boys with new accents, and they even played sports that were new to me.

Although rugby was the prevalent sport in my school, it wasn’t a very practical game to play at recess, and so instead we used to play football. Eager to fit in, I did my best to participate. Everyone would be talking about clubs like Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal, so I felt compelled to choose my own, and I plumped for Tottenham Hotspur.

Before leaving California I guess I was beginning to develop an interest in team spectator sports, but I remember the one thing that used to fascinate me more than anything – the statistics, in particular the league standings.

For some reason, probably because I was destined to be a number geek, I enjoyed looking at league standings, and working out what the numbers in the various columns stood for. I used to have graph paper and I would copy them out from the newspaper and make them as neat as possible.

When I started to follow soccer after the great emigration, I realised that this new game had just as much to offer in the line of numbers; in fact, the European leagues contained WAY more teams than the American ones. I was in my element.

No doubt my grandfather had found several of my transcripts of league tables and various stats lying around the house, which was why he approached me on this particular day with the folded up piece of paper. With great curiosity I opened it out to see what it was.

The Official World Cup Wallchart 1978. I’m not 100% sure on the actual paper it came from, but I do know my grandpa had a penchant for the English broadsheets after we moved here, so it was probably the Sunday Times. Again, such details meant nothing to the 9-year-old me.

The chart was full of pictures, packed with information on all of the 16 countries taking part in the World Cup finals, but most importantly, there were the spaces where you could fill in the results as they happened and track the progress of the event all the way to the final.

In many ways following international football did wonders for my learning about the world as a whole. When it comes to information, I can never have enough, so I had to consult our National Geographic Atlas of the World (which we still have) to see where all these countries were located.

By the time the opening game of the tournament kicked-off, I was bang up to speed with what was going on. OK - maybe I wasn’t completely sure about all the rules of the game as yet, but I guarantee you I could tell you who was playing who on any given day. As soon as the final whistle blew in each contest, I’d run upstairs and log the score on my chart, and then work out how it affected the standings, and I wondered how the outcome of the next game could affect them further.

“Man, what a geek” I hear you cry. Well, I was an only child raised by his grandparents in what was still a strange country. It all seemed perfectly normal to me.

Needless to say I was beside myself with anticipation on the day of the final. Who was going to win – the hometown boys or Europe’s remaining representatives the Dutch? Given all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the home team, my loyalty was with them. I must have also been amazed at the sea of confetti which was streaming from the crowd before every Argentina game, a sight that became synonymous with the ’78 World Cup.

I would have been on the edge of my seat for the entire game, especially since the sides being level 1-1 after the regulation 90 minutes meant there was to be an extra half hour of excitement, which led to Mario Kempes assuring himself a place in national sporting folklore by breaking the deadlock. Bertoni added a third to kickoff one hell of a party on the streets of Buenos Aires.

Back in Dublin, once the trophy was handed over and the telecast ran through its credits, I went upstairs and scribble “3” and “1” on the chart, and even added the letters “aet” to signify that the result was after extra time. Then I must have thought “Now what?”

Well, it was the end of June, so in just over a month’s time, the new English club season was due to begin. My team Tottenham were to become one of the first to sign World Cup heroes from abroad for their team when they signed both Ardiles and his team-mate Ricky Villa.

For me, the 1978 World Cup achieved one of the famous tournament’s most important goals – to attract new members to the family of football fanatics. When The Sunday Times releases it’s wallchart for this summer’s version in Germany, you can be darn sure my son will be receiving a folded up piece of paper from his Daddy.

Next – ESPAÑA ’82 : Are they Irish or not?

Technorati Tags: paganoworldcup

people children can count on?

2010-05-27T09:10:00.002+01:00

lost : remember, and let go

2010-05-25T09:24:00.006+01:00

SPOILER WARNING…THIS POST IS WRITTEN ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT EITHER YOU HAVE WATCHED THE ENTIRE “LOST” SAGA FROM START TO FINISH, OR THAT YOU NEVER INTEND TO.

Back in 1994 I was in the USA ready to experience the 1994 World Cup.

Though born in the USA I had grown up in Ireland and thus was immersed in European sports culture, and I was fascinated by the prospect of soccer’s biggest tournament being played in the one major country yet to fully embrace it.

I arrived in Boston in November and got a job in a sports store to keep me in rent and drinking money.

Well I knew the Americans weren’t exactly keen on soccer, but I was certain the arrival of the sport’s biggest event to their shores would generate even a bit of interest. How wrong I was.

It wasn’t just that the people I met and worked with there were indifferent to soccer. It wasn’t that they didn’t get it. The majority view was actually that it was a “stupid, boring game”. Yet these same people loved sports; they just weren’t getting from soccer what THEY expected, ie frequent scoring, numerous ad breaks so they could refill the bowl of potato chips & overeager analysts blinding them with exhaustive statistics.

Plus there was the fact that the USA wasn’t anywhere near the best soccer team in the world, which could hardly have helped.

Eventually I had to concede that no matter how hard I tried to convince the Americans about the virtues of association football, they weren’t to be turned. Even though soccer is much more popular today, it still lags far behind the “big four” pro sports in terms of popularity.

Ten years after the tournament was over, a TV show appeared on our screens. It was called Lost.

I watched the pilot, and thought it was absolute drivel. A bunch of people, mostly Americans, stranded on a desert island. Oh boo-hoo, I thought. How desperately we’re supposed to want them all to get home and live happily ever after amid much hugging and learning. Not for me!

I even remember being disgusted at the presence in the cast of a sinister Korean man with his subservient wife. Not to mention the dude from the Iraqi Republican guard. Why not throw in a Cuban and be done with it, I thought.

So I let Season 1 pass me by, but as I did, I heard several people banging on about it, and seemingly the finale episode was something to behold, and fans couldn’t wait to see what Season 2 would bring. Just then Channel 4 decided to show an episode a day so people could catch up, so I set about recording them to see if I could get into it.

Well as was the case for many fans of the show, it was the revelation that John Locke was in a wheelchair before he went to the Island that got me hooked. Hang on a tick, I thought. Apparently this is no ordinary Island. And I loved the way each episode featured“flashback” of a leading character to complement the story of what was happening on-Island, this was a marvellous story-telling technique.

With this technique we learned the Korean wasn’t so sinister and the Iraqi, although a former torturer, wasn’t a threat to the rest of the main characters.

And so the saga continued, right the way up to this Monday morning just gone, when Sky1 showed the final episode at the same time as viewers on the west coast of the USA were getting to see how things ended.

Since Twitter is so popular now, it was possible for me to gauge a broad spectrum of opinion about the show. Many people liked it and couldn’t wait to see how it ended, but it was the anti-Lost sentiment that intrigued me the most.

Much like soccer in America, I could appreciate when people didn’t take the Lost and simply chose not to watch it, but given how popular the show is worldwide I have to question the motivation of those who go out of their way to put it down even though, as seems to be a popular boast, they haven’t so much as seen one full episode.

So what is it that these people want from a TV show? An hour-long story featuring recurring characters which comes to a moral conclusion wrapped in a nice pretty bow each week only for a new one to start the next? Surely that format is ten-a-penny?

But it is never my intention to “convert” anyone into watching the show. All I can do is explain why I liked it myself. It wasn’t so much the story, but the method in which the story was told.

Often you’d be left with a cliffhanger the previous week, fully expecting the next episode to lead off with a continuation of the story. Alas, the writers instead would bring you down another totally random path, much as I did with this post and its opening “flashback” about football. But eventually you’d get to see how it ties in to the general theme, as hopefully you did with mine!

Mostly the writers, led by JJ Abrams, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, used a story-telling technique called a “mystery box”. If you want to fully appreciate this concept, take 18 minutes of your life to watch this lecture by Abrams, it pretty much says it all.

Week in, week out watching Lost, you’d be presented with mystery box after mystery box…some big, spanning entire seasons; some small, spanning one or two episodes.

But no matter how much attention you paid to every second of airtime, there always remained a giant elephant of a mystery box in your TV room. Just what the hell is the whole show about???

And it was this seemingly never-ending web of mystery that led to the greatest phenomenon any TV show has ever produced…thousands upon thousands of online theories. Be they blogs, podcasts or forums, there was a sea of speculation to trawl through after every episode.

Having gone through many of it I found about 90% of the internet Lost fans to be up their own asses, but there was some good stuff out there, like The Jay and Jack Show and The Lost Mythos Theorycast.

I tried to have a go myself, but even writing a small blog post every week was beyond my ability to commit so I have to give it up to those who were able to do it.

And back to the other side of the coin, when you weeded out the people who didn’t give the show a chance, it seemed the changing nature of the “overall theme” of the story is what frustrated most of the show’s detractors.

First, you think the show is about the original people stranded on the Island. THEN you realise there are “Others”. THEN you meet some of them. THEN you realise they AREN’T Others, in fact they are people who were in the tail section of the same flight. THEN you meet the Others. THEN you meet people on a freighter. THEN you’re taken back in time and meet a bunch of people who had colonized the Island years ago. THEN you meet two men, one dressed in white and one in black, who seem to be the overlords of everything. THEN you meet their psycho adoptive mother.

Some found this infuriating. I found it to be genius.

Each time another layer of characters was revealed, I was led to believe that the main story was about them. And I was also led to believe that by the end of the final episode, all our major questions about the saga would be answered.

Now HERE’S the crunch. What WERE the “major questions”? To many it was things like “What is the Island?”, “What is the smoke monster?”, “What do the numbers mean?”.

Well this is where another superb story-telling technique came into play. The writers would often “speak” to the show’s fans directly through the dialogue. Take this quote from the psycho-mom in Episode 6.16 “Across The Sea”:

“Every question I answer will simply lead to another question. You should rest.”

In other words, shut up and let us get on with telling the story as we want to tell it, the writers were saying. I, for one, was happy to do that, though of course I had theories of my own as to what was going on.

And when Jack’s eye closed and the screen went to the trademark ending of just saying “Lost”, fans all over the world cried foul. Where the hell’s all our answers? They cried.

As far as I’m concerned, we got them. It was always about Jack and his experiences on the Island.

All the mythology was just a bit player. It didn’t matter what the numbers meant. It didn’t matter what the light was under that carrot-shaped rock. It didn’t even matter what the "Man In Black"'s name was.

It only mattered that Jack realised his destiny. And in the end, once more it was dialogue that was used to explain it to us, this time by way of his father, the aptly named Christian Shephard.

“The most important part of your life is the time you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you…to remember, and let go.”

In other words, we the writers want you to enjoy the story for what it was, a story about a set of characters. We had subplots, we had cliffhangers, we had multiple mystery boxes, but at the end it was always about the characters. Remember them, and let go. It’s over.

And I, again for one, am happy with that. Besides, I have to let go…there’s another World Cup starting in a couple of weeks!

Namaste to Lost and its creators, and most of all, bravo.

Technorati Tags: paganolost

man city-0 spurs-1

2010-05-06T11:43:00.003+01:00

PROMISED LAND

When the season kicked off I had every intention of blogging each and every Spurs match of the season, whether I got to watch them or not. I got as far as the end of August.

The last game I did was our 2-1 win over Birmingham, when we were lucky to get a last-gasp Aaron Lennon winner, but still it left us with our best start in a gagillion years, four wins our of four.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only Spurs fan who was taking screencaps of the table for posterity! And why? Because being Spurs fans, we didn’t think it could last.

And that’s probably why I stopped blogging as well. This bubble will surely burst. It invariably does.

There will be injuries to key players, there will be blown leads, there will be agonising defeats to inferior opposition, there will be crushing hammerings by top four sides. It IS Tottenham Hotspur we’re talking about after all.

You know what? All those things DID happen. King and Woodgate were as injury prone as always, Modric was out for spell, Aaron Lennon’s pace down the right was denied us as well.

PLUS we were blowing leads, like a 2-goal cushion at Goodison Park.

PLUS we were losing to “weaker” sides, like Stoke and Wolves, together with dropped points against teams like Hull.

PLUS we were getting crushed at Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge, the Emirates and Anfield.

When you consider all those things happened to us over the season, you’d be forgiven to think this was just another same ol same ol season down the Lane, where we promise much but deliver little more than a 10th place finish.

But hang on.

What about the 633 minutes of Premiership football between Kevin Doyle’s goal at White Hart Lane on December 12 and Dirk Kuyt’s at Anfield on January 20? In that time, NOBODY scored against us. THAT’S not your typical Spurs?

And what about two wins in a matter of days at the business end of the season against Arsenal and Chelsea where the score was 2-1 but could easily have been more? THAT’S not your typical Spurs?

And what about a total of 21 Premiership wins in a season? THAT’S not your typical Spurs?

Let’s be clear. This is the NEW typical Spurs. Harry Redknapp’s Spurs. And you won’t see a team perform better in a crunch match away from home that you did at Eastlands last night. Nobody can say we didn’t deserve the bit of luck that led to Crouch’s headed winner, and how fitting it was that the ball was pushed into his path by blow-in keeper Martin Fulop.

To the victor, the incredible spoils…a spot in the play-off round for next season’s Champions League. A victory over two legs, and the operatic tones of “The Chaaaaaa-mpioooooooons” will ring across the white half of North London for 3 wonderful nights next winter. But even if that doesn’t pan out, nothing can take away this remarkable achievement, which even though it doesn’t yield silverware, will live on in Spurs fans’ memories for ever.

Well done Harry and the boys, and thank you.

Technorati Tags: paganosports,Tottenham Hotspur,Harry Redknapp

sandy’s army (part one)

2010-05-04T15:31:00.001+01:00

“GETAWAYOOTATHATYAFOOKINDONKAY!!!!”

Sandy took a step backwards and looked around in disbelief. Did I really just say that?

Then he realised that nobody in earshot (even though that was quite a distance given how loudly he’d roared) could possibly hack through his thick Glasgow accent to decipher what he’d said, let alone meant.

But the significance of the phrase hit him on a deeper level, one he never thought he had.

There wasn’t much of his childhood he wanted to remember. Not that he was abused or anything tragic like that, there just simply wasn’t much to remember. He and his big brother spent most of their time with their father who was unemployed while their mother worked in a bakery.

And Da would spend all of his time reading the sports section of the paper, to find out how his beloved Celtic were getting on. Or at least that’s what the young Alexander McDonald always thought he was doing.

Sandy spent ten years of his life getting to know how to watch football, how to play football and how to support Celtic when they were playing football. He trained twice a week from ten years old, he played at the weekends, he watched whenever anything to do with football was on the television.

He did all of that because his Da told them how much he loved Celtic, and by the sounds of him watching them play, he displayed an inspirational passion for the sport, and would no doubt love to see one or both of his sons don their famous green and white hooped jersey some day.

Sandy & brother Dermot would crack up every time he let loose the words “Get away out of that you fucking donkey!” all in the same breath, especially since the little men on the black-and white telly in the corner of the sitting room couldn’t possibly hear him.

But he wasn’t cracking up the day his brother told him that in fact their father had no love for football whatsoever. Especially since it was the day of the old man’s funeral.

All this time Mr McDonald had, in fact, been studying the papers for the racing form, and as soon as their mother came home from work on payday, he’d take the wage packet, dole a portion of it back to her, and use the rest for whiskey and bets.

“But he always seemed to love the football!” Sandy asked his older sibling.

“You’re old enough to know now, lad, twas all a wee act. Did yae never notice how he’d let his loud roar when nothing had actually happened in the match?”

No, I was too busy cracking up at what he said just like you, he replied in his head rather than out loud. So I suppose you were lying too, since it seems you always knew.

So in his mind, he took that information, dug a little hole, and buried it so he could get through the day. He also vowed never again to have anything whatsoever to do with football and retired at the tender age of twenty-one.

But now, almost thirty years later, as he stood on the touchline watching his Donnelly Sports XI play in the semifinal of the Dublin City Centre Security Cup, it all chose to rise to the surface as the phrase shot out his mouth after one of his defenders nearly cost the team dear.

“Jaysis, Sandy that was fucking close there, wasn’t it?” came a voice from beside him. It was none other than Podge, who had “volunteered” himself to be the team’s assistant manager, even though this was the first time he’d bothered his arse to show up for an actual match.

“Aye” came the terse reply as he stoically stared out onto the pitch with his arms folded, “this lot will throw away their lead if they’re not careful.”

“Oh, did we score? Deadly, man! Who got it?”

Maybe if ya didnae chat tae all the lassies and spent more time watching the match ye’d know the fuckin score, is what the bulky Scotsman replied in his head rather than out loud. He did a lot of that, you see.

The boys out on the pitch were indeed struggling to hold on to the one-nil lead they had, and he knew he needed to keep his eye on things to bring this match home and get them into the final.

He may have been nothing compared to Sir Alex Ferguson, but Sandy had done so well with this coaching job so far that the players had started calling him Fergie. Well, that was his theory of choice…it sounded so much better than “They’re calling me that cos I talk like him”.

Besides, this was hardly the Premiership or World Cup, just a tournament organised by security guards from retail stores all around Dublin…eight different chains had put forward teams, and from the word go the competition had been quite fierce.

The tournament was in its third year, and for the first two Sandy had steered clear of getting involved owing to his retirement. But it was his fondness for one of the assistant managers in the Donnelly Sports branch on Talbot St that led him on the path to be standing on the touchline that day.

Sandy was married to his beloved Dolores, and absolutely adored her to bits. But there was something about Sandra Wallace that intoxicated him whenever she was around. Perhaps it was the fact that, much like his own mother, she went to work with two young kids at home…their father wasn’t around, but sure neither had his own Da been in real terms.

So although his primary responsibility was for security in the Donnelly Sports chain as a whole, both north and south of the border, more often than not he’d assign himself to be stationed at Talbot St so he could talk to Sandra some more.

Not in a million years did he ever believe anything would happen between them in the real world, but the more he got to know her, the more possibilities played out in his fantasy world, and for once in his life, not all the fantasies were x-rated.

So however strongly held were his views on his retirement from football, he only had himself to blame when he was approached to manage the Donnelly Sports team for the Cup. O’Connell St manager Tim O’Leary had been “player-manager” for the past two years and wanted to just play this time and put the feelers out for someone to take the job on their own.

Sandra remembered that Sandy had confided to her the fact that he was a very keen footballer in his youth (he even dressed up the story a little by saying he’d had trials for Celtic), so when she and Tim approached him about the job, he really had no choice but to accept.

And much to his surprise, his reluctance faded with each passing moment after he took the role. Twenty years is a long time to deny yourself something you had grown to love just to spite a parent who has long since passed on. This was his chance to rekindle those emotions for himself in his own way.

Every day he’d get slagging from the lads from the other shops over his walkie-talkie, when they weren’t warning him of dodgy-looking characters about to enter his domain, of course. But despite the taunts, when the tournament kicked off, they were impressed by the squad he’d been able to put together from around the Donnelly Sports chain, and they got to the semifinal despite losing their first game.

The day after that 3-0 defeat, Sandy had gotten the boys together, pinpointed exactly what was wrong, and in their remaining two matches, they got two 1-0 wins after solid displays from their defence.

But the word on the street amongst the security guards was that Fireball were the favourites. They were a chain of young men’s fashion stores, and had at least a dozen branches around Dublin to pool their talent from. They were in the other qualifying group and won all three matches by at least six clear goals.

So dozens of staff from both companies had showed up to the football pitch near Kilbarrack on the northside of Dublin to see the seemingly unstoppable force of Fireball’s offence take on the immovable object of Donnelly Sports’ defence, and there was a great atmosphere right from the kickoff.

And things got even more interesting when Tim O’Leary let loose a thunderbolt of a shot 3 minutes into the contest to give his team the lead.

From that moment on, the game became a tense physical battle. The Fireball lads weren’t used to being behind on the scoreboard, and were trying every trick in the book to get back into the match.

So when his centrehalf played a weak back-pass to his keeper that nearly led to an equaliser, Sandy’s heart leapt into his mouth just as his father’s deceptive catchphrase leapt out of it.

Not that Podge would know anything about ANY of that. And not that his ignorance would stop him telling the group of his female co-workers how he was Sandy’s right hand man either.

“Hey, before ya go back over to yer fanclub over there, can ya do me a wee favour?”

“Sure, man! Well who wouldn’t do anything for Fergie?”

“Can you check football scores on that fancy phone of yours?”

“Eh, yeah, I can, why?”

“Well can ya check the score of the United/Arsenal match for me then? A have an accumulator ridin on it!”

“Sure, man, no problem!” and with that Podge took out his phone and started pushing buttons.

Sandy was good at a lot of things, but understanding gadgets certainly wasn’t one of them. He held out as long as he could before getting a mobile phone, and even when he did it took him two weeks to learn just how to answer a call on the damn thing.

About a minute later, Podge had an answer for him.

“It’s 0-0, midway through the first half. Who do you have to win?”

“Nobody. I bet on the 0-0. Two best defences in the Premiership? Dead cert.”

“Deadly! Hope it works for ya, man!”

“Aye, and on the back of the two nags that came home today, I’ll be looking at four figures!”

“Absolutely deadly! Well, I’ll keep ya posted, ok?”

Yeah, like you give a shit. Sandy tried to focus back on the football but he’d been rattled again. Though he had over twenty years on Podge, he reminded him of his older brother a bit too much.

There he was, Mr Charisma himself, off back over to the girls to have a laugh and make them think he had just discussed tactics with his “fellow” coach. And there was Sandy, closer to 50 than 40, off back to watching his makeshift football team play a match that REALLY didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

He let out a big sigh. I’m just a narky old Scotsman who likes tae drink whisky & gamble, just like me da. What a fucking cliché.

***** find out how Sandy’s Army got on next week *****

follow this link for a list of the “F.T.B.” short stories published to date

Technorati Tags: f.t.b.,paganonovel

breaking bad

2010-04-26T13:58:00.001+01:00

The premise may be between Dexter and Weeds, but Vince Gilligan’s superb black comedy stands on its own. Bryan Cranston is unrecognisable from “Dad in Malcolm In The Middle” and a tight cast supports him well. Now I know why Bugs Bunny would always make a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Technorati Tags: my fifty word review,Breaking Bad

grocers and retailers take note

2010-04-22T13:10:00.003+01:00

It's archive-delving time here at jlpagano.net; this time I'm harking back to 2005 when I had a rant about an experience I had in a particular shop. Sadly, things haven't changed as something similar happened only this morning.

You don’t have change to hand? And that’s my problem…HOW exactly?

I just want to stop by my local shop and pick up a loaf of bread, a litre of milk and, just for a treat, a tub of Pringles to munch on while I’m watching telly.

I go into my wallet and all I see is a picture of my kids and the ticket to the Tom Cruise movie I wish I hadnt seen last night. Luckily, in keeping with the place’s tag as a “convenience store”, there’s an ATM right there by the baked beans.

Marvellous.

I’ll just whip out a twenty and get my stuff.

PLEASE REQUEST MULTIPLES OF FIFTY

No problem, sure I’ll take €50, stop for petrol on my way home, sorted.

I gather my items and hand them over for the girl to scan.

“That’s €5.46 please.”

Out comes the fifty. I’m normally ready for it, but with a lot on my mind, like, er – MY LIFE OUTSIDE THIS FECKIN SHOP, I’m caught off guard by the following reaction.

She looks at my legal tender as if it’s a piece of dogshite I scraped off my shoe.

“Um, haven’t you got anything smaller?”

“YEAH, I GOT SOMETHIN SMALLER DARLIN, HOW ABOUT I GIVE YOU NOTHIN! YOUR GODDAM MACHINE ONLY HAD FIFTIES SO IT’S UP TO YOU TO HAVE THE CHANGE FOR IT!”

…is what I’m sure I will reply one day.

I was a shop manager myself for years, but I still must ask – WHO IS SERVING WHO HERE?

So you have to go into the safe and break up a bundle of bleedin twenties, BOO FRICKIN HOO.

Take the extra thirty seconds, get me my change, and look after your customer.

Call me old fashioned, but I think we should be treated like the good guys, especially when we’re not being unreasonable.

twivial pursuit

2010-04-19T08:11:00.004+01:00

Things were getting pretty ugly over this ash cloud last night, I can tell you.

What? You think I mean amongst people whose flights had been cancelled? Nah….this is far more serious than THAT, folks! I’m talking a serious cl-ASH amongst hard-core twitterers here!!!

There I was, last Thursday morning, quietly stirring my coffee, listening to the 7 o’clock news (Claire & Ivan on the Newstalk Breakfast Show to be precise). I was hearing for the first time about all the hassle that Icelandic volcano was causing Irish travellers. As befits my current twitter obsession, my first thought was “I wonder what the hashtag will be for this one.”

Then I thought “hang on…ash, hashtag…. #ashtag!” So as I am wont to do, I stopped what I was doing, ran to the pc and posted the above tweet.

Pretty obvious pun I know, in fact it was SO obvious I was sure someone must have thought of it already.

Then the tweets started rolling in.

scarie Lol @jl_pagano #ashtag - brilliant :)

curlydena hope the ash clears by tomorrow. I want to see my parents, dammit! #ashtag (kudos to @JL_Pagano for the #tag too)

paddaniels What tag genius thought of the cockney 'ashtag #ashtag ? according to Google it was @JL_Pagano congrats!http://ow.ly/1yL0C

abracarioca @JL_Pagano are you the one who created #ashtag? I'd like to know if the new Google search tool is working fine. Thanks!

broddo #ashtag now trending worldwide! Was it truly @JL_Pagano who started it? Hat's off!

junepurr @JL_Pagano were you the first #ashtag user? :)

So seemingly this was a ‘big’ deal in twitter terms. The term was “trending” worldwide (though at the risk of starting another row, why don’t they call it “twending”?).

Hurrah for me and my online ego. Let’s say I wasn’t going to go shouting it from the rooftops though, in fact at that stage I wouldn’t even have been thinking about it enough this morning for a blog post.

THEN I get home last night an learn that another tweeter was claiming he had thought of it first. A web journalist had tweeted a request for the tag’s creator, and @AngryBritain jumped in saying he coined it at “7:31am UK time” on the Thursday morning.

Well that’s when the competitive gene in my DNA kicked in. A quick check showed my original tweet was at 7:02am, and actually other tweeters had responded to the journalist saying that according to a site called hashtags.org, it was me.

Now I had a choice. Do I leave it, or do I speak up? I spoke up.

A few minutes later said journalist tweets and tells me he credited us both, and sent me his article where in fact he gives it to AngryBritain, adding “though JL Pagano may also lay claim”.

Well I wasn’t having THAT! Sadly I couldn’t let go knowing 7:02 beats 7:31. Yeah, I know, I should’ve taken the high ground, but as far as I was concerned someone was trying to take credit for something I’d done, and there was something of a principle involved.

So I put forward my case to both @AngryBritain and his sidekick @dweezil1968 (seemingly it was now a joint effort between them) and I get a reply offering to “share” it.

Again, I could’ve left it, but I was sitting there with my iPhone in my hand on a Sunday evening winding down with nothing else to do so I sent another tweet saying that if someone could show me a tweet that was timestamped before mine I’d be MORE THAN HAPPY to stand down.

Then the duo took the stance I was afraid they would… “Oh ALL RIGHT THEN. TAKE IT. IF IT MEANS THAT MUCH TO YOU” (paraphrase).

*sigh*

But I’ll still take it, not because I’m petty, not because I thought it was a life-threatening issue, but because the evidence clearly pointed to me and when THAT happens, I believe you should most certainly speak up.

Hopefully the title of this post shows my tongue-in-cheek approach to the whole matter! I KNOW I DO have a life, even if the 678-word length of the post suggests otherwise!!!! ;-)

the night i ate the worm

2010-04-02T07:12:00.002+01:00

Here's another ditty of mine I keep re-publishing...this one is a drinking song in honour of the people of Limerick who were granted the special privilege of being able to drink in an Irish pub on Good Friday. For their sake I hope they don't feel the next morning the way I did having eaten the worm...

(For the tune, think of something similar to Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue")

The night that I turned twenty-one
My friends set out to have some fun
By wreaking awful havoc on my pride
At first it didn’t bother me at all
When I saw they’d bought me alcohol
But little did I know what lay inside

To rousing cheers and hands a-clappin
I started to remove the wrappin
And what I said brought smiles to everyone
“Hey, I’m not one to pick n choose
but ain’t somethin floatin in that booze?”
and so my night of hell it had begun

For I’ve been legless, I’ve been pissed
I’ve been known to raise my wrist
And there’s one thing I know I can confirm
All night sessions, I’ve had plenty
You could say I’ve had one too many
But I’ve never been that drunk before the night I ate the worm

Now down there in ol’ Mexico
They got funny customs don’t ya know
Like eatin chilli peppers when they’re raw
But I can’t think of nothin sicker
Than dead inverterbrates in liquor
It’s gotta be against some kinda law

But I couldn’t stall for any longer
My will sure wouldn’t get any stronger
It was nothin like I’d ever tried before
So I knocked him back and then just for fun
I stuck that sucker out on my tongue
At least I wasn’t first to hit the floor

Though I’ve been legless, I’ve been pissed
I’ve been known to raise my wrist
One memory will always make me squirm
All night sessions, I’ve had plenty
You could say I’ve had one too many
But I’ve never been that drunk before the night I ate the worm

It was four a.m., or was it three
I was face down on someone’s settee
With aches all over I could not ignore
And the only answer to my pain
Was to find the nearest porcelain
And work out which way round would help me more

And my one wish it was to throttle
Whoever thought to buy that bottle
For the consequences could not be believed
And it was only then I realized
The throbbin right behind my eyes
Was the real birthday present I’d received

For I’ve been legless, I’ve been pissed
I’ve been known to raise my wrist
And there’s one thing I know I can confirm
All night sessions, I’ve had plenty
You could say I’ve had one too many
But I’ve never been that drunk before the night I ate the worm

© JL Pagano 1995

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

6.09 Ab Aeterno

2010-03-30T07:54:00.002+01:00

Bless me, father, for I have a compulsion to wear eye-liner…

HATS OFF TO…

Tucker Gates for directing not only the best episode of the series so far, but easily one of the top ten overall.

WTF? MOMENT OF THE WEEK

How did the police arrive so soon after Richard when he got home to Isabella? Did they have helicopters in 19th century Tenerife?

BLATANT EXTERNAL REFERENCE OF THE WEEK

When the dodgy priest looks at Richard’s bible, he is reading Luke Chapter 4 Verse 24 which reads… “And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country.”

3 THINGS THAT MADE ME GO “HUH???”

1. Jacob was quite the bad-ass when he first encountered Richard, wasn’t he? I guess you would be with someone who came to your house to kill you, but still…

2. Will we ever find out what had Ilana in bandages?

3. The scanning done by the Smoke Monster was done before to Juliet and Kate (3.16 One Of Us) but I’m not sure how the info was then used on the two ladies?

3 THINGS THAT MADE ME GO “AHA!!!”

1. So THAT’S how the statue broke!

2. The entire Richard backstory is whole big “AHA!” in itself.

3. Though there’s still an air of mystery about it, Jacob’s “bottle of wine” metaphor is probably the biggest reveal of the overall saga to date.

I HAVE A FUNNY FEELING…

…that Sun is the Kwon candidate. Mrs Hawking said it was important to recreate the conditions of the 815 flight as much as possible, so I have to assume the same applies to the Black Rock. Sun has learned English prior to first visiting the Island much as Richard had.

AND FINALLY, WHERE ON THE JL SCALE* AS AN EPISODE?

I wanted this to be a 42 and it very nearly was, but I wasn’t QUITE blown away like I was with “Walkabout” and “The Constant” so it will have to be a 23. If the JL scale had a mark in between I’d have definitely gone for it.

* = The JL (judging lost) Scale…

4 = woulda rather watched Fair City

8 = I kept at it, but the eyes were starting to roll back in my head

15 = Only Hurley’s “dudes” and/or Sawyer’s nicknames made it watchable

16 = better than most TV out there yet disappointing for Lost

23 = excellent episode, the standard I expect

42 = right up there with “walkabout” and “ the constant”

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ní thosaímid an tine

2010-03-26T16:58:00.002Z

It's about the twentieth time I've re-published this, but I always do when the Irish Blog Awards come along since it represents the one time I was nominated for best post! Penned this in 2005...maybe another BIFFO-inspired verse is called for...

Anywho, best wishes to everyone headed for Galway...tis a good event, so tis!

[sing to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire”]

Druid Law, high kings, Cúchulainn, bronze things,
Newgrange, Celts invade, Romans stay away

O’Neill dynasty, St Patrick, snakes flee ,
Monasteries, Book of Kells, Vikings from Norway

Waterford settlements, Dubh Linn battlements,
Clontarf, Brian Boru, everywhere another war

Many kingdoms come and go, tuatha rule, Strongbow,
King Henry, Papal Bull, English army come ashore

Ní thosaímid an tine
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
Ní thosaímid an tine
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

Rule of Anglo Norman Lords, rise of Gaelic folklore,
Kilkenny Statutes, fortify the Pale

Reformation taking hold, Silken Thomas getting bold,
Poynings and Penal Laws, All rebellions fail

Catholicism stands its ground, will not to the king be bound,
Cromwell, Will of Orange, Boyne battle, nation torn

Food exported, landlord greed, tenants they have mouths to feed,
Wolfe Tone, not alone, Act of Union from the throne

Ní thosaímid an tine
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
Ní thosaímid an tine
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

Dan O’Connell wants repeal, not without the royal seal,
Spud blight, Great Famine, population fell

Irish language in decline, Georgian buldings to design,
IRB, Robert Emmet, Charles Stuart Parnell

Home Rule, Dublin slums, Ulster fears a day will come,
GAA, Land League, Fair, Free, Fixity

Great War, Inspiration, GPO proclamation,
Long Fella, Big Fella, War over a Treaty

Ní thosaímid an tine
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
Ní thosaímid an tine
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

Free State, Fianna Fáil, Elections for the first Dáil,
Resolution, Constitution, Neutrality

Pull out of the Commonwealth, Economy in poor health,
Belfast, Sean Lemass, Behan-Joyce-O'Casey

James Craig, RUC, Gerrymander policy,
Bloody Sunday, IRA, what else do I have to say

Ní thosaímid an tine
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
Ní thosaímid an tine
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

John Hume, EEC, Dr Garrett, RTE,
CJ Haughey, H-block, Celtic Tiger, Geldof

U2, Boys In Green, D4-Culchie-Jackeen,
X case, church and state, Good Friday mandate

Teflon Bertie, Eddie Hobbs, Immigrants do low-paid jobs,
Millions wasted everywhere, Young and old in need of care

Can the Troubles be ignored, with Adams-Paisley to the fore,
Does it mean an end to war? Cos I can’t take it anymore!

Ní thosaímid an tine
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
Ní thosaímid an tine
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on and on and on…

© B Joel 1989, JL Pagano 2005

click here for a full index of my poetry and song lyrics

6.08 Recon

2010-03-22T12:43:00.002Z

“When I said I wanted to see your six-pack, those tins aren’t what I had in mind…”

HATS OFF TO…

…whoever came up with the Sawyer & Miles cop-partners idea, inspired! Possible spin-off?

WTF? MOMENT OF THE WEEK

On the one hand, ManInBlack has mommy issues while on the other he’s Smokey? WTF?

BLATANT EXTERNAL REFERENCE OF THE WEEK

I’ll mention the Indian Jones one this time round because, well, the thoughts of Charlotte brandishing a whip were, shall we say, INTERESTING…

3 THINGS THAT MADE ME GO “HUH???”

1. Said it already but the Sawyer-as-cop reveal was well disguised and got a major “Huh?” from me!

2. I guess the darkness must have reached Sayid’s heart cos the guy we know would’ve surely helped Kate?

3. The JJ Abrams “mystery box” technique rears its head again as we wonder what’s behind the locked door on the submarine!

3 THINGS THAT MADE ME GO “AHA!!!”

1. The doubts we all had over whether the flash-sideways Oceanic flight was actually number 815 were dispelled by Miles.

2. I went AHA! when I was corrected in that the Michael Landon clip wasn’t from Highway to Heaven, rather Little House on the Prairie. Should’ve known that!

3. Sawyer was always working for himself. Hardly surprising, but we had been left with a little doubt for a while there…

I HAVE A FUNNY FEELING…

…that Widmore and ManInBlack are between them conning Sawyer because they’re actually on the same side and the recon mission was merely a test of loyalty which the hillbilly failed. I know the sonic fences don’t back this up, but it is Lost so you never know…

AND FINALLY, WHERE ON THE JL SCALE* AS AN EPISODE?

They’re still setting up the “Second Act” confrontation, and this wasn’t as good as last week’s Ben episode so I’ll knock this back to a 16.

* = The JL (judging lost) Scale…

4 = woulda rather watched Fair City

8 = I kept at it, but the eyes were starting to roll back in my head

15 = Only Hurley’s “dudes” and/or Sawyer’s nicknames made it watchable

16 = better than most TV out there yet disappointing for Lost

23 = excellent episode, the standard I expect

42 = right up there with “walkabout” and “ the constant”

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