A man who broke our hearts but we still grew to love him

It’s a name just as famous in Ireland as it ever was in his home country of Italy and there were very few of us last week of a certain vintage who didn’t have a little nostalgic ‘ah’ when the news broke, that one Salvatore ‘Toto’ Schillaci had passed away after a battle with cancer.

A Saturday night in the searing atmosphere of Rome’s Olympic Stadium filled with 73,000 spectators on June 30, 1990, was one which won’t be forgotten by the 15,000 or so of us who had managed to get tickets for that famous quarter-final.

We were all dreamers in that mad summer of 1990 as we nurtured the wildest of fantasies about Ireland having a chance of winning the World Cup. In hindsight of course, it was never going to happen but in the relative international soccer poverty that we now find ourselves in, reaching a World Cup quarter-final was some wondrous achievement back then.

There are people who say Jack Charlton had a wonderful squad of players to pick from . . . that our style of play was a bit of an ‘up-and-under’ job . . . but 34-years on, it still has to rank as some achievement for an Irish soccer team.

Just about 38-minutes into the game as four of us ‘from the west’ were perched about 40-rows up behind Packie Bonner’s goal, enraptured by the frenzy of the night, we saw Donadoni hit a shot that Bonner could only parry into the patch of one Toto Schillaci. To make matters worse, the Irish ‘keeper had completely lost his goal-line position with the momentum of the first save and that man Schillaci finished clinically to the back of an empty net.

We all hoped in vain for an Irish equaliser that might which would extend our stay at the Olympic Stadium into extra-time or maybe penalties but even though Ireland played quite well and created a few half-chances, the chants of Schillaci were ringing in our ears as we tried to make our way back to Ciampino Airport . . . and what chaos awaited us there.

Pictured: No. 19, Toto Schillaci, strokes the ball into an empty net in 1990 to end the Irish dream.