The Quiet Oblivion of Italia '90

It was an odd summer in many ways, not least numerically. With no World Cup or European Championships to fill the long, drizzly evenings, football's vacant throne passed to the usual procession of pretenders. From the grunting automatons of Centre Court, to the golf majors' pastel parade of sullen millionaires, each has flared and withered under the summer spotlight.

At home, Dundalk's serene progress towards a second successive title has robbed the domestic season of much of its usual drama. The Bray Wanderers ownership saga promised a classic League of Ireland omnishambles, but has since come to resemble a second-rate Netflix series, churning out countless twists and characters until you begin to forget who anyone is or why you're supposed to care.

It would seem natural, in such a barren season, for thoughts to turn to summers past. 2015 presented a perfect opportunity for nostalgia; the 25^th anniversary of Italia '90, an epoch-making event in the history of Irish football, and, arguably, of Irish society.

Yet the anniversary was barely broached in any depth, despite the sad death of Bill O'Herlihy, a figure almost as integral to the event as Jack Charlton himself. RTÉ shuffled out a radio documentary, there was the usual vapid 14 Signs Your Big Brother was Conceived After Sheedy's Goal-type clickbait, and that, essentially, was that.

A generation has passed, and it's perhaps understandable that memories have frayed and shrivelled. Memory is, in any case, a notoriously faithless witness. I remember Packie Bonner's celebrated shoot-out save precisely as it adorned billboards (and the gable wall of the Auld Triangle pub) for years afterwards - his puffed cheeks; his body suspended exactly parallel to the lush green turf; the net hanging limp and virginal as his palms rebuff the ball with righteous contempt worthy of a Caravaggio.

And yet somehow, the image feels false and contrived. I know for a fact that I watched Italia '90 on a portable black-and-white television. Years of replays and retrospectives have seeped insidiously into my brain, drenching my memories in technicolor.

I know also that the meaningless USSR 4-0 Cameroon game was the only match I saw in actual living colour, and that the sensory overload was almost too much to process. Reviewing the footage twenty-five years on, I find that the USSR took the field in blanched white kits, with Cameroon in pallid primrose; an inauspicious colour palette, but enough to quicken the blood of a kid hopelessly adrift in the sheer World Cup-ness of it all.

Such naïve, childlike fervour is often wasted on children, and Italia '90 saw it cross over into the adult population like a particularly virulent strain of chickenpox. No news story of the past twenty-five years – not 9/11, not the IRA ceasefire – has achieved the same volume of coverage (with the possible exception of the Saipan affair, which could reasonably be deemed a belated aftershock of Italia '90).

With due respect to the passage of time, this quiet oblivion deserves some scrutiny. Ireland – the concept of Ireland, not the damp lump of limestone rudely moored in the Atlantic – is essentially a patchwork of various forms of memory; real memories, folk memories, fabricated memories, suppressed memories, all hopelessly entwined together. In a culture such as this, few things are casually forgotten.

The Ireland of 1990 was a vastly different place; not better, but perhaps differently worse (and equally mired in a global depression). Euro '88 had come and gone in a furious whirl of sunshine, bodhráns and inflatable shamrocks. Drawn in a tough qualifying group, Charlton's side thumped and hustled their passage to Italy, as crowds of 50,000 swarmed Lansdowne Road to witness memorable victories over Spain and Hungary. Due to lack of floodlighting, home fixtures were played on Wednesday afternoons, the numbers in attendance reflecting both the team's enormous popularity and the country's catastrophic level of unemployment.

Ireland qualified comfortably in the end, but for a while, things looked decidedly sketchy. To this day, Charlton's side remain the only team in history to make the World Cup after failing to score in each of their first three qualifiers.

It's hard, at this remove, to convey the sense of delirium unleashed by Ireland's qualification. With the team's place in Italy already assured, thousands of Irish fans travelled to the final qualifier in Malta for a celebratory jamboree; or such, at least, was the plan. Forty-eight hours before the game, Dublin Airport was suddenly encased in a thick sarcophagus of freezing fog.

As kick-off drew ever closer and flights were repeatedly delayed, the festive move turned ugly. News footage memorably captured a frustrated fan keening, “I've spent a load of money, and I can't even get out of poxy Ireland!” A curious remark, one might think, from a man seeking to travel 1,600 miles to watch poxy Ireland play football, but one that neatly encapsulates the meaning of Italia '90 for an entire generation.

Italia '90 has long been misrepresented as a catalyst for the Celtic Tiger and the brand of Irishness (a hollow concept at the best of times) which blustered in its wake. But the Celtic Tiger worshipped an entirely different set of sporting heroes; not the sons and grandsons of destitute emigrants, nor the fortunate alumni of inner-city Dublin's youth football scene, but exemplary figures carved in its own image. Preening white-collar hardmen mixing it with the social elites of England, South Africa and Australia; sporting entrepreneurs in sponsored cashmere sweaters and designer sunglasses, bestriding the most exclusive real estate on earth.

What Italia '90 represented, to those who lived through it, was an entirely different way of relating to the world. Not the misplaced swaggering arrogance of the Celtic Tiger era, but a giddy and deeply mutual embrace of the world's diversity, and of one's own place within it. Those fans trapped at Dublin Airport in 1989 provided the perfect metaphor for the contemporary Irish experience; helpless, stranded, aggrieved, but hopeful that the smothering grey veil will somehow lift and leave this poxy Ireland behind.

If you enjoyed this article - read more from Turlough Kelly - Apocalypse Always: The many deaths of the League of Ireland