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gave too much respect, even where it wasn’t due. But if anything, his well-known even-handedness made his book even more important and powerful and
depressing — this guy wasn’t saying this stuff for effect, he was saying it because it was true, and he could prove it.
    Little wonder that so many of us bought his book, but so few of us had the heart to read it.
    But we would hear those who had been able to read it all the way through speaking in solemn tones about the sadness of it all. About Ireland, and how we had done so many things so badly compared
with similar countries, who had somehow worked out how to govern themselves in a vaguely intelligent and responsible fashion.
    All who heard this drank deep and were silent.
    That big book felt like an epitaph for the whole doomed project that was the Republic of Ireland, one that was superbly and lovingly crafted in itself, but an epitaph all the same, for something
dead and gone. Lee stopped short of saying that we should just hand the country back to whoever we got it from and say sorry about all that. But to many, that was the only reasonable conclusion to
be drawn.
    So that’s roughly where we were, near the end of the 1980s in Ireland, without even venturing towards the badlands of international football and the men who had been forging our destinies
in that regard. Throw in the FAI , described by writer Michael Nugent as ‘a perpetually exploding clown’s car’, and various Bulgarian hookers and so forth, and you get a sense of
what we were up against here.
    Which is how, in the International Bar on 11 November 1987, even though this extraordinary thing had happened, with Scotland scoring so late in the game, we were convinced that it could only be
the precursor to some grotesque denouement. We were already steeling ourselves for it, as the Bulgarians were now playing with a wild urgency, the blackguards, startled out of their cynical torpor
by the unthinkable event which had just befallen them.
    Sportingly, if insanely, a Scot had rushed to retrieve the ball from the net after the goal, a goal that wouldn’t have happened if the ref had stopped play for a bad Bulgarian foul in the
build-up.
    Their captain, Nasko Sirakov, sent a shot from the edge of the area which seemed certain to squeeze inside the far post, but which somehow went wide. The equaliser was coming. We knew it was
coming. We cursed this savage new twist, this cruel raising of our hopes.
    Then Arthur Mathews came up with a formula, which seemed to make it bearable. ‘There’s about three minutes to go, including injury time,’ he said. ‘That’s about as
long as “Teenage Kicks” by The Undertones.’ Which wasn’t long at all really, since he put it like that. And so myself, George and Arthur, in the privacy of our own tormented
heads, ‘played’ that record by the Undertones, that three minutes of pop perfection which itself had been forged against a backdrop of pain and terror.
    ——
    When it was over, the RTÉ studio had become a place of madness.
    John Giles was there, Maurice Setters and Mick McCarthy.
    Jack couldn’t be found.
    Gone fishing.
    He couldn’t be phoned, faxed or texted, and even when these technologies became more common, Jack was not the sort of guy to be checking his messages when he had gone fishing. Avoiding any
flak that might have come his way when we didn’t qualify, he was now missing his moment of triumph, yet acquiring just a little more mystique in the process. What other manager in world
football would be incommunicado on such a day?
    Arthur and George and I went downstairs to our usual spot in the International, where the real drinking could commence. Already I could tell that I would be severely hung over for Robbie
Robertson, but then he is a great artist and a great humanitarian, who would be no stranger to men in that condition.
    I did not care.
    We were still there at closing time at 11 o’clock on the 11th of November.
    It was