No more close shaves for Irish fans still bristling with anger

Date Published: {J}

YOU know that the world has gone completely barking mad when grown men threaten to stop shaving by way of protest, so that the cheating footballer who endorses that product might lose out on his £5 million a year fee.

If only this had happened earlier in the month they could have tied it in with the Movember fundraiser for prostate cancer awareness, which is the only excuse for some of the thoroughly woeful whiskers sported by so many over the last few weeks.

It’s equally bizarre when the Taoiseach - a man who encountered a few off the ball tackles on and off the field of play and who really should be up to his armpits in flood water this week - raises the possibility of a replay with France’s Little General when they’re supposed to be picking the new head of the European Commission.

Or indeed when the Tánaiste Mary Coughlan can afford time out from trying to stem the flow of jobs out of Ireland to join with Fine Gael's Alan Shatter - neither previously outed as card-carrying members of the Green Army - to call on FIFA to 'vigorously pursue the use of video referees', but all of this is what happens when the fighting Oirish are robbed of a place in South Africa by Handball Henry who couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d picked up the bloody thing and fisted it into the net.

The collective sense of national outrage hasn’t been articulated as loudly since Michael Collins came back from Downing Street without six of our 32 counties – and by the sounds of it, this injustice could still be bothering us in a century’s time as well.

God help the poor French ex-pats who have made their homes among us because they are now experiencing the sort of vitriol we saved in the past for the English soccer team – and they never handled the ball against us at all.

Justice Minister Dermot Ahern led the cries for a replay, saying that FIFA should be called to account in the interests of fair play.

“They probably won't grant it as we are minnows in world football but let's put them on the spot,” the minister said. “It's the least we owe the thousands of devastated young fans around the country.”

Now if that isn’t playing to the gallery, nothing is – particularly when you know there’s as much chance of a replay as there is of a heatwave for Christmas.

All of this glosses over the fact that we should have been three goals up by the stage that Handball Henry belatedly sprung to life – and that’s not to make little of what was without doubt the most spirited and uplifting Irish performance in years.

The only consolation is that we now have a new chip (should that be frite?) on our shoulder because the big boys kept the little lads out of Africa and the French are our new bogeymen.

The downside is that it can take several years to work this sense of injustice through the system; but sometimes when the catharsis happens, it’s like a tsunami as Norwegian commentator Bjørge Lillelien – Scandinavia’s Micheal Ó Muircheartaigh up to his death in 1987 – proved on a famous night in 1981.

He was wrapping up his commentary on Norway's 2-1 victory against England in a World Cup qualifier in Oslo – and to mark one of his country’s greatest ever triumphs, alternating between English and Norwegian, he proclaimed: "We are the best in the world! We are the best in the world! We have beaten England 2-1 in football!! It is completely unbelievable! We have beaten England! “Not that he was finished then – not by a longshot – because there were centuries of pain to get off his chest on this night of nights:

“England, birthplace of giants; Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana--we have beaten them all. We have beaten them all. Maggie Thatcher can you hear me?"

Maggie Thatcher, I have a message for you in the middle of the election campaign. I have a message for you: We have knocked England out of the football World Cup. Maggie Thatcher, as they say in your language in the boxing bars around Madison Square Garden in New York: Your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!"

Now we shouldn’t lose our sense of perspective on all this either, because we cannot forget that it was the French who took in our Wild Geese when they had nowhere else to flee to, and Galway is twinned with the Breton city of Lorient for a start. So if we must keep this up, let’s be more specific in our targets, and perhaps in hindsight the razor boycott isn’t the worst idea after all.

After all we went out, but it was a close shave – and that should be the last close shave we experience for quite some time to come.