On Monday, in a glittering occasion at Eurodisney, FIFA gave supporters of the Republic of Ireland a Fair Play award for their "general good humour and excellent behaviour". Never was that good humour needed more than after yesterday's draw in Ghent for Euro 2000. National self-determination is all very well, until you get drawn against Yugoslavia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Croatia (and Malta) in the qualifiers for the European Championships.
"All the glamour trips rolled in to one," sighed a gutted George Hamilton, on realising that he will spend a considerable part of his next two years commuting between Dublin and airports in the Balkans, along with thousands of Bosnia-Herzegovina-bound Medjugorje pilgrims. (At one point a hopeful George thought we might be drawn in the same group as the "Fairy" Islands, but it wasn't to be).
A decision on whether we'll send a Peace-Keeping XI or a football team to these away matches has yet to be made by the FAI, who will be ruefully reflecting on the fact that if Tito was alive today we'd be in a three-nation qualifying group, making travel arrangements a whole lot easier and less expensive.
"You'd have to say it's not a great draw," concluded George, trying to remain diplomatic as the room full of delegates dissolved into a fit of giggling on hearing Yugoslavia's name being added to the group that already contained `neighbours' Macedonia and Croatia. And us.
Regular viewers of Ole Ole on TnaG weren't laughing yesterday. That's because they get a weekly glimpse of Real Madrid's Croatian striker Davor Suker, and the prospects of Ian Harte marking this goal machine in two of our European Championship games is not a laughing matter.
Real were featured in last Monday's Ole Ole against Atletico in the Madrid derby, or the Madrid `Cogadh na gCarad' (`war between friends', according to this IrishEnglish dictionary) as the caption on the screen described it beautifully.
You can't help thinking that if Ole Ole presenter Micheal O Domhnaill and commentator Brian Tyers taught us Irish in school, instead of Peig Sayers, we'd all be fluent in our native tongue by now.
`Achrann i Salamanca' said the caption over pictures of a brawl between Barcelona and Salamanca players. So `achrann' means `kicking the living daylights out of each other'. Easy. "Rowooooool," is, according to Tyers, the Irish for Raul, the Real Madrid forward - although the number of os in his name depends on just how spectacular the goal he has just scored is.
The claim that football is an international language is well and truly proved by Ole Ole every week. "Bhi an t-atmasfear leictreach," said a subtitled Radomir Antic, Atletico's Yugoslav manager, on Monday. "Cluiche an mhor ba ea an `derby' anocht," agreed Italian Vieri in Spanish (speaking in to a TnaG microphone) with Irish subtitles on the screen, and an English translation on Teletext. You could get dizzy from it all but it's great stuff.
We were promised yet more thrilling football action by Network Two on Friday night in their first edition of Action Replay. "Right now it's time to jog the memory, back to when West Germany and Holland were giving it their all in the World Cup final of 1974," said the announcer as we waited for legends Beckenbauer, Muller, Neeskens and Cruyff to appear on our screens.
Then up popped Paidi O Se, who reminisced about the great match at Pairc Ui Chaoimh, while conceding that he was "very fortunate to stay on the field" because of a "very high tackle on Dave McCarthy". All of this came as a surprise to those of us who thought the 1974 World Cup final was held in Munich, and not Pairc Ui Chaoimh, and that Paidi and Dave played Gaelic Football for Kerry and Cork, respectively, and not soccer for West Germany and Holland.
"We apologise to viewers who were hoping to see the 1974 World Cup Final - you will be able to see it on Action Replay the same time next Friday," said the same announcer 30 minutes later, after we'd watched the highlights of the 1976 Munster Football Final replay between Kerry and Cork. She needn't have apologised, what we witnessed was Total Football up there with anything Neeskens and Cruyff could produce.
Cork, in their "absolutely beautiful new red strip with the white stripes down their sleeve", actually looked like the Czechoslovakian football team (circa 1970) and Jimmy Barry Murphy's hairdo made him look like a cross between George Best (circa 1972) and Karel Poborsky (circa 1998). The extraordinarily skinny Cork team also looked like they could do with a good meal - as evidenced by Colman O'Rourke's shoulder-charging effort on Kerry's John O'Keeffe which almost left the Cork man broken in two as the beefy Kerryman swatted him off like a fly.
Jimmy "Five Bellies" Gardner, all 22-and-a-half stones of him, would have looked well out of place on that Cork team. Paul Gascoigne's minder and lifelong friend appeared on Channel 4's TFI Friday, hosted by Chris Evans. The `interview' with Jimmy, who was given a supply of meat pies and lager to help him through the experience, was interlaced with anecdotes from Gazza (on film) about some of the hilarious times they've had together.
"There was a couple of stray cats at my villa in Rome and what I did was I took the mince out of these pies and got a hold of the cats' poo and I mixed it with the mince and put it back in the pie," explained a chuckling Gazza. "So when Jimmy came home, quite drunk, he shoved the pies in the microwave and honestly the smell was unbelievable, but he was that drunk he didn't know, so he ate his first pie and what was funny was he said it was one of the best pies he'd ever had," chuckled the man Glenn Hoddle insists has matured no end in the past year or two.
Gazza then recalled the time he put Immac hair remover in Five Bellies' gel jar. "He rubbed his hand through his hair and about six inches of it just come off his scalp and within one hour he was as bald as Kojak - it was one of the funniest things that I ever did to Jimmy," he said, almost crying with laughter. "I love him to bits," said Jimmy of his `boss' back in the studio, before exclusively revealing that he plans on writing a book with Gascoigne when he retires from football. Hope they behave themselves when they turn up at the Booker prize award ceremony.
