Ireland’s political fantasy football

Every fan of the Irish football team will have felt well and truly sucker-punched on Wednesday night. Thierry Henry’s ‘blatant handball’ (it is now the law that every mention of his handling of the ball is preceded by the word ‘blatant’) killed off Ireland’s dreams of dribbling their way to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Fans were angry. They expressed their anger on Facebook and Twitter. Some even sent text messages to each other using a four-letter f-word to describe Henry. (No, not the swear word; the other one, which comes before ‘legs’ to describe a French delicacy and which once featured prominently in a Paul McCartney song.)

Fair enough. All is fair in love and football, even, in the heat of the handballing moment, the use of that f-word. But am I the only person now tiring of the obsession with ‘Le Hand of God’? Somehow, L’Affaire Henry has morphed from a moment of pure and implacable anger for Irish football fans into a full-blown diplomatic incident, in which Henry is being held responsible, not only for dashing Ireland’s hopes of once again possibly reaching the dizzy heights of the World Cup Quarter Finals, but also for slowing Ireland’s economic recovery and damaging its national psyche. You could be forgiven for thinking that his really is ‘Le Hand of God’, passing harsh judgement against the Irish and consigning them to the cesspit of economic sluggishness and psychological disorder.

In this sense, L’Affaire Henry has exposed two things: first, that the smooth-talking, Gillette-advertising Frenchman is a bit of a cheating bastard and we all now officially hate him; and second, that Irish politicians and commentators invest way, way too much meaning and hope into the national football team, to the extent that they believe Ireland’s very identity and economic future are dependent on it, and to the extent that one man, with two taps of a ball, can be said to have hit Ireland (the country) where it hurts. I am far more worried about this second revelation than I am about the first: after all, cheating in football is fairly normal, whereas looking to football to revive an entire people’s fortunes is not.

L’Affaire Henry has been turned into super-simplistic morality tale, in which the Irish take a starring role, once again, as the victims of the piece, while the French play the villains. And as with all morality tales, it has involved a severe warping of the truth in order to squeeze it into the straitjacket of moral outrage.

Sports writers have employed the kind of terminology usually reserved for the political pages to describe what ‘was done’ to the Irish team. The Irish were “denied justice” in a “titanic struggle”, said a writer for the Irish News, as if the events in that stadium in Paris had been a replay of Bloody Sunday (the 1920 version). The Irish played with “remarkable freedom”, shaking off their “repressive midfield chains” and “bolting forward at every opportunity”. The poor Irish News: unable to use words like justice, struggle, freedom and chains in relation to any of the petty political events in Northern Ireland in recent years, it instead keeps them in the reserve squad. For football.

The Irish players have also been described in borderline sexual language: Liam Lawrence is a “blonde bombshell”, says one paper; the Irish team “teased and taunted”; they “danced”, too, apparently. On the other side, the French were “sneering” and “narcissistic”. The beginning of many a morality tale – think Red Riding Hood; think Twilight – is the idea of virginal innocence threatened by evil outsiders, and so it is with L’Affaire Henry. Quite why the Irish are so willing to have themselves labelled as dancing blondes manhandled by evil Frenchmen – and also as ‘warm’, ‘plucky’, ‘brave’ and a “breath of fresh air in football”, to pick some of the other patronising language that has been used to describe these 11 fully-grown men – is beyond me.

The entire basis of the Irish-French morality tale is false. The idea that Henry’s hand alone cost Ireland its rightful place in the World Cup is pure fantasy. For all the talk of what was ‘done’ to Ireland in Paris, the ;chains’ in which it was bonded by the wicked French, in truth the decisive factor on Wednesday night is that Ireland lost rather than France won. Yes Ireland had a pretty good first half and Robbie Keane’s goal in the 33rd minute was a paragon of footballing precision and simplicity. But it was downhill from there. The blonde bombshell (Lawrence) had already missed an open goal in the first half, and in the second half both Keane and Damien Duff duffed Ireland’s chances of scoring again.