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.
As Matthew Norman argued in the London Evening Standard, the Irish had been “offered a lavish gift by the gods of football, and they spurned it”. For all the “apparent randomness” of That Incident and the final result, says Norman, we all knew from at least the start of the second half “how it must end”: with Ireland’s defeat. They had lost their early flair. Their stamina flagged. Henry’s hand did not alter the course of history – it simply brought to its logical conclusion a match which, for Irish fans, had become increasingly depressing. Blaming it all on Le Hand of God suggests that some all-powerful, supernatural being forced Ireland to its knees; Ireland’s own failures are neatly and fully projected on to Henry’s extraordinary hand, which is now depicted as supersized in various doctored photographs doing the rounds on the internet. In this sense, L’Affaire Henry echoes the ‘Hand of God’ of 1986 – not in the sense that Henry and Maradona are both evil foreign bastards, as we have been led to believe, but in the sense that just as the England team papered over their own weaknesses by investing Maradona’s hand with magic powers, so Ireland now does the same with Henry.
But there’s an important difference. If the ‘Hand of God’ is seen as having ruined England’s footballing chances in 1986, today ‘Le Hand of God’ is seen as doing Ireland over in economic and political terms too. An expert at London’s Centre for Economics and Business Research reckons “the Irish economy will lose out to the tune of £100million” as a result of being kicked out of the World Cup running. Others claim that Henry and FIFA (by refusing to hold a rematch) have denied Ireland the opportunity to go through the same kind of economic rising it experienced during the 1990 and 1994 World Cups, as if the Celtic Tiger years were entirely football-related.
Ruth Lea, former governor of the London School of Economics, says recession-hit Ireland needed the World Cup far more than France. “The French don’t need this boost like the Irish do.” She also says Ireland might be psychologically damaged by this experience: “Psychologically and economically, qualifying would have been far more important to Ireland.” Here she echoes the football-cum-political commentators who have written about the Henry-induced “wound that will never heal” in Ireland’s ‘psyche’.
This all sounds completely crazy (and of course it is), but it is also the natural end result of Ireland’s use of football since the early 1990s to reinvent itself and its national destiny. It is difficult to overstate how important the national team has become for national politics in Ireland. In 1990 in particular, when Ireland got to the World Cup Quarter Finals, and in 1994, when they got to the final 16, all manner of national and economic hopes were projected on to the team. Mary Robinson’s redefinition of Ireland as a state of mind rather than a state became bound up with football, with one academic arguing that the fact that the Irish team had so many British-born players “reflected the postmodern condition of Ireland… whereby Irishness cannot be conveniently restricted to a single island”. Others argued that the shift from Gaelic sports (traditional, country-based) to soccer (modern, internationally focused) showed that Ireland had ‘matured’ and ‘become European’. Football allowed Irish people to “celebrate their identity without being encumbered by the
dark complications of the North”, declared Fintan O’Toole in 1994. In short, football provided a safe, post-conflict form of cuddly nationalism (this theory was cruelly exposed during the Loughinisland massacre of June 1994, when six Catholics watching the World Cup in a bar were murdered by loyalist gunmen). The continuing importance of football to the ‘national psyche’ can be seen in the fact that, when Ireland got knocked out in the final 16 in the 2002 World Cup, they were welcomed back to Dublin by 100,000 people, including Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and President Mary McAleese, as if they had conquered the world.
From the early 1990s onwards, post-nationalist, post-Catholic, post-traditional Ireland has struggled to define itself. And football – non-violent, mostly non-political, cross-cultural, international, and most importantly popular – seemed to provide the perfect focus for redefining Irish identity and explaining Ireland’s strange and shortlived economic upturn. It all became about Ireland rediscovering its “confidence” and “self-esteem”, as if feeling good about a game of footie really might transform a nation’s fortunes and give it a new purpose in life. It is this transformation of football into, er, a political football which explains the mad, bad and dangerous overreaction to L’Affaire Henry. The Frenchman has not only knocked a football team out of a competition, you see; he has also rained on Ireland’s only remaining sense of national mission.
More than anything, the idea of ‘Le Hand of God’ crushing Ireland speaks to Ireland’s own sense of flimsiness, of vulnerability, of post-nationalist discombobulation, of emptiness, and fundamentally of its fear of being held back by strange, unknowable, massive-handed forces beyond its control.
Brendan O’Neill is a journalist based in Britain. He is the editor of spiked and has contributed to the Guardian, the Irish Post, the Australian, BBC News, the New Statesman and other publications.
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