TV VIEW: You wanted to see soccer players this week? You wanted to see Premiership lads, international stars, big club players? You should have seen the news.
The third item on Thursday's 9.00 p.m. bulletin on RTÉ was the death threat issued to Celtic and Northern Ireland captain Neil Lennon. After months of spiralling sectarian tensions, which have largely bored us all with their vicious relentlessness, Lennon pulls out of his country's friendly in Windsor Park, retires from international duty and we all again become interested in Northern Ireland's festering conflict.
Coming to you from the same teams who fancy gunning down anyone wearing the wrong away strip, we now get the biggest own goal Northern Ireland have scored in years. How else would you describe the driving out the state's best player and captain from the international game? Jim Boyce, the Irish Football Association's president, appeared on Channel 4's Newsnight on Thursday. A passionate, hard-working, inclusive man he launched a studs up tackle on the politicians for fiddling while north Belfast burned and by extension allowing the situation deteriorate to this international spectacle.
"It was despicable. Everyone is sickened because of a moron who lifted a telephone. Politicians should stop playing the blame game," he said.
In the studio the SDLP's Mark Durkin and Unionist Assembly member Dermot Nesbitt sat nodding in unison. A Taig and a Prod. Two nicer guys you'd never meet. Along with the angry Boyce it was all too comfy a threesome. Three reasonable people in the one studio was, well, a tiresome 0-0 draw. Sectarianism was bad. Football has suffered. We're all doing our best. Next question please.
While Boyce's rage over the whole event was simmering, Channel 4 presenter Jeremy Vine might have asked him why Northern Ireland's national stadium continues to be located in the most religiously polarised piece of real estate in Belfast, the exclusively Loyalist Village area.
The M1 motorway, which bisects the St James and Falls nationalist areas from the Loyalist Village is as effective as the Rio Grande. If efforts at conciliation and aspirations for a homogeneous support for the Northern Ireland football team are based on reality, why persist with Windsor Park and all of its sectarian baggage?
There are few pieces of turf in Europe where people go to such extremes to mark their territory, fly their flags and repeat their threats to the other tribe. Windsor Park is a cold place for one tribe. It is so exclusive and intimidating even the rain forests of leaflets urging supporters to refrain from sectarian chants will not make it a warmer place.
The 100,000 or so soccer-mad green tribe who live on the north side of the motorway and look down on the stadium from as far away as Whiterock and Ballymurphy simply don't go there just as most of the tribe on the south side don't have a mind to cross in the other direction on a Sunday summer's afternoon to watch Antrim players hurl for their county. It's because they don't want to be (a) hassled (b) beaten up or (c) killed.
Boyce might also have been asked why as many people attend Ravenhill Road on a Friday evening to watch a comparatively minor sport, rugby, as the 6,900 who brought themselves to Windsor Park on Wednesday evening. For a man like Mr Boyce, who has worked tirelessly to stamp out sectarian hatred, the building of an inclusive arena for Belfast soccer appears to have been viewed as unimportant in the last 30 years or so.
"My parents were really distraught. My 10-year-old daughter doesn't know about this. I'll try and keep her away from it. It's not the first time this has happened. I don't want to be the focus for the wrong reasons," said Lennon on RTÉ. Evidently an optimist. Suppose he's got to be.
More news. More grim reminders of real life. Sky Sports on Friday night. Glam London club Chelsea face glam Manchester club United. Both teams in black arm bands. David Beckham dedicating his goal to the two young girls murdered in Soham, England. Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, both avid Manchester United fans, were wearing the club jerseys when they disappeared. In the light of that tragedy, it's about all Beckham and football could do.
It was one of those weeks where news TV showed up football for more than a game where commentators scream, players get drunk in night clubs and analysts draw scratchy lines across the set to show offside. It was shown as a game that straddles many boundaries; it can be used as an instrument of turmoil and conflict and it can also bring a shard of light into the lives of desolate families in the face of despair.
Roy Keane?
A storm in a tea cup.
