Tommy Martin: Everyone is older and wiser the morning after beautiful night

Soon Amber Barrett, hero of the hour, wandered over and spoke with poise and eloquence about what her goal meant to the people of her county, who just that day had buried two of the dead of Creeslough. “This is for those 10 beautiful souls who died,” she said, concluding a poetic, off-the-cuff requiem.

Seeing her score and then hearing her speak gave you a catch in your throat if you were from Donegal. Everyone from Donegal knows someone like Amber Barrett. While those of us from the west of the county tend to be windswept types, staring wistfully out to sea like we live in a Clannad video, the people from the north-east, like Amber, are different.

They are infused by proximity to the border with something of that Derry mouthiness, the uncomplicated spirit of Letterkenny’s townie bustle and the fizzy cross-cultural cocktail of plantation towns. They speak fast and swagger. Aye, rightly, hai, they say. Cocky but self-aware. “If she [Pauw] wants to win the World Cup she better put me on the plane!”

You knew Amber as soon as she opened her mouth.

Something about that recognition tied it all up, the tragedy and the triumph. Just as you knew the girl, so too you knew the village, the archetypal Irish place picked out by cruel fate. In her tributes to the lives lost last Friday, Amber Barrett was laying that transcendent moment of hard-earned joy at the black altar of pointless horror. They are at opposite ends of the human experience but both these things are matters of the heart.

It was that kind of night. Next were Katie McCabe of Dublin and Corkwoman Denise O’Sullivan, buzzing into the camera with the equally unmistakable energies of their home cities. “Book yor tickets!” Katie quipped. The studio voices spoke of what this meant, of those who had gone before, of the hard road to this point, of the boundless possibility, of the little girls who would never again have to wish they were born a boy
because they wanted to play football.

It was a moment of perfect fulfilment and, because of that, an ending. We use the model of how the Irish men’s team broke through under Jack Charlton to view the progress of the women’s team though it is imperfect for the terrain, like the explorers who planned to ride to the South Pole on horseback. Will this be the Italia ’90 moment for women’s football? Will plastic shamrocks be reinflated? Should the Credit Unions stand ready? Will Joxer go to Sydney?

Those who remember that time will never forget how it felt: The big, stupid, sweaty, feelgood, dancing-on-the-Walkinstown-roundabout madness of it all. The pure uncomplicated happiness, sweet and ripe like a peach for a few short years. Even by USA 1994, something had changed and gone forever. The players got richer, the press got sharper, the fans got the bill. Everyone older and wiser. Nothing around the men’s team has ever been the same since or, at best, has been a poor pastiche.

At least the men’s team had a decent run. The Irish women’s team’s age of innocence didn’t last beyond the next morning. The circulation of camera phone footage of some players singing “Up the ‘RA” in the Hampden Park dressing room drew howls of outrage before the hymns of praise had even subsided.

It was the sort of numbskull hilarity common to plenty informal Irish settings, being the deconstruction of terrorist sympathies into some sort of vaguely ironic patriotic soundbite, like an accountant getting a Che Guevara tattoo on a stag weekend.

In that moment the players were daft young lasses embarking on a celebratory bender, by the morning they were national figures burdened by responsibility.

Apologies were issued from the FAI on behalf of the team and manager. Quite rightly, they didn’t delay or equivocate or excuse. Nonetheless, the team were roundly criticised for their insensitivity, for thinking that celebrating murder and mayhem was appropriate at that moment. But, of course, at that moment, they weren’t thinking anything at all.

Chloe Mustaki was put forward to be interviewed by a representative of the team’s sponsor, Sky, on that company’s sports news channel. The need for Sky to get in front of the story, as a British company, was clear, but the optics were terrible. A middle-aged English male presenter taking a younger Irish female to task about appropriate behaviour and the need for education — it felt all kinds of uncomfortable. Mustaki bit her tongue and kept her dignity.

Soon the draw for the World Cup will be made and attention will turn to next summer. Higher-ups in the FAI will take top brass from Sky out for a reassuring dinner and things will be smoothed over.

The players will knuckle down and get ready for the experience they have dreamed about. But they may never bound over to the camera with the same enthusiasm and speak so clearly from the heart or with such uncomplicated joy as they did in that perfect carefree afterglow of Tuesday night.

It may even happen that things don’t go well and Tony will have to subject Vera Pauw to the same tense, tetchy post-match cross-examination that the men’s team managers have often endured and the two of them will lock eyes at some point in the exchange, a little sadly, both remembering that Hampden hug.

Everyone older and wiser.