LockerRoom/TomHumphries: Funny how others see us, isn't it? UEFA, baffled no doubt by our funny little Taoiseach and his statesman-like ability to see things which never were or never will be and waste money on them, have been unfailingly polite about our Euro 2008 bid.
This week they'll be awarding the tournament to Switzerland and Austria regardless. We'll be a funny anecdote told in the corridors of footie power.
And the Observer yesterday commented that if the Scots/Irish bid fails it won't be the fault of Bertie Ahern. Very good. Sure, he's sports mad, isn't he?
It won't be Bertie's fault? Next time UEFA will insist that "timewasters need not apply" and it will be Bertie's fault. The Euro 2008 debacle is Bertie's fault more than it is the fault of all the other oul codgers put together.
Imagine this. A small island nation with no professional sports leagues. The soccer sultans, the doyens of the oul dickory docker, come up with a plan to build a stadium with a slidey roof and lots of parking in which half a dozen games per year (tops!) will be played. The rest of the year will be filled with Madonna concerts.
Now, it so happens that the Government of the small island nation has 50 million punts from a donor. These to be put towards the cost of a stadium. The Government, too, is keen on sports stadiums. The Government has access to lots of land close to the city centre in a massive docklands development scheme. The solution is obvious! Enter Bertie. More cunning, more ruthless, more brilliant than all the others.
And from the start what finesse! He sees that the FAI's proposed stadium is too big, too remote and too costly, so he sows confusion by suggesting a national stadium which is bigger, remoter, costlier. To the Stade Saint Bernard, a competitor, The BertieBowl. Two games a year and The Three Tenors for the other 363 evenings.
If you were a Swiss-based sports administrator you might look at the plans for the Bowl and opine that, c'est magnifique mais c'est n'est pas le solution, Bertie. Le solution etais bleeding obvious.
Yet Bertie is too cunning to be seduced by the obvious. Does he say, let's build something together, something accessible and befitting our modest needs, something which will enhance the city and leave some money over for a proper grassroots sports policy which I have yet to formulate or even begin thinking about? Does he ever! Too brilliant! No!
When bystanders point out that the emperor has no clothes, the Taoiseach just twirls his nipple tassles. You think I'm stark bollock naked? You think the Bertie Bowl is a white elephant? Well, I'm Lady Godiva, and squidbrain, not only is The Bowl a white elephant but it is modelled on the mother and father of all white elephants, Homebush Bay in Sydney, Australia. Yes, that's right, Homebush, the loneliest place on the planet. Homebush, through which the winds and the tumbleweeds and precious little else doth pass. So aren't you the fool! Get with the programme. Be proud of what we in our goosepimpled nakedness are trying to achieve.
AH! The Art of War. Bertie butts heads with Bernard O'Byrne, two majestic stags in the glen. Meanwhile, the FAI is disintegrating. (Has there ever been a time when that sentence didn't fit snugly into a column?) And Bertie evangelises.
Abide with me, he says, voice filled with the very fire and sincerity of Elmer Gantry, abide with me in my Bowl and I'll give you grants so big they'll make your eyes pop, baby.
That it worked is the stuff of legend. Remember? The night before GAA Congress. An outrider carrying a leather satchel arrives in the generals' tent sometime after sundown and announces that there will be good times for everyone if only the delegates don't allow soccer into Croke Park. Pass it on. Forget what you've all been told. New orders. No Soccer! Bertie says it'll be okay and Bertie is the most cunning of them all. So 32 delegates go out for a smoke in the toilets and the vote comes up still narrow, but Frank Murphy kayboshs a recount and, lo, it is a big, red-faced embarrassment but the money was on its way and hasn't the GAA endured such embarrassments before? For free! Meanwhile, the FAI is humping Bertie's leg. Beautiful.
If only the world could have ended there and then, but shiftless peasants begrudged the gold taps and marble bathrooms of the Bowl. They carped about the sweetheart deals for the people paid to propagandise for the Bowl. A new and dangerous way of thinking sprung up in the land, a creed which suggested that kids being educated in tin huts and hospitals being no more than elaborate parking lots for trolleys was somehow wrong.
So Bertie moved with the times. There would be free land, oodles of it, for any man of commerce who could plop a nice, loss-making stadium down in Abbotstown. Once he had built the stadium, the lucky gent would then be allowed to surround it with lucrative things like apartments, offices, restaurants and hotels, all of which would serve that segment of the population who like sitting in traffic and just being somewhere that is convenient to nowhere. There were "expressions of interest".
The Abbotstown Revision sounded like the plan the Government should have included in the docklands redevelopment scheme. A modest stadium. An indoor arena. Places to live, eat and work. A modern, cityscaped stadium! Why, yes!
Why, no! It's nothing like that. The Emperor's Playground is Timbuktu with traffic jams. You won't linger in Starbucks, you'll linger in gridlock. Abbotstown negates the whole Irish experience of live sport.
BUT ho! What fresh distraction is this? The emperor is just a fat boy in a sweet shop now. He would like those sticky bullseyes on the top shelf. The Euro 2008 bid! "Yummy!" he says cunningly. So he campaigns for Euro 2008 like a rat in heat. Quite a dizzy little fellow after all the U-turns, but fervent nonetheless.
Indefatigable! Showing Lansdowne Road to the Euro 2008 chaps even though the IRFU have been shafted more thoroughly and more often than anyone else in this whole affair.
Tender! We were just brought in on the gig when the Scots proved too parsimonious to finance it themselves, but that didn't dent our pride one little bit! We treated the bid as if it were our own.
Ambitious! The realisation that "expressions of interest" never built a BertieBowl couldn't deter us from bringing the inspectors down the M50 to see a big muddy field.
Brilliant! The fact that Bertie had ensured the continued exclusion of soccer from Croke Park? Sure, that never meant that the UEFA chaps couldn't be shown Croke Park or that Bertie couldn't brag about the place.
Audacious! Yes, we have only Lansdowne, but in a few years we will surprise you with more erections than a Viagra test marketing group.
Smooth! "Friends," said Bertie. "Don't worry about le GAA. Pas de problem! Les culchies are dans le sac." Then he took €38 million back.
Hats off! What better way to influence GAA policy than to renege on a grant and then boast to your Euro soccer buddies that the bogball and stickfighting fellas are in line. No worries. Yes, that low moaning noise you hear north of the river, that is the sound of contented purring from Jones's Road.
So we have all our ducks in a row now. We could have had two stadiums. Croke Park and a 45,000-seat docklands stadium. Easy access. Affordable. But that would be silly. Better indeed to have plans, expressions of interest and a fine green field.
By Thursday they'll be saying that the GAA was the problem. Blaming the GAA is the opiate of the people.
I see it all now, maestro! Brilliant!
