Let's face it - we know nothing

The history of the world is littered with the battered corpses of rash predictions. In 1962 an executive at Decca records dismissed a young pop combo with the immortal words “We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out”. The Beatles went on to conquer the world. And in 1876 Sir William Preece of the British post office dismissed the idea of the telephone stating, “We have plenty of messenger boys”.

In the world of football, the notion that Shamrock Rovers were going to waltz their way to the 2011 league title was extremely popular back in March. I was a keen advocate myself. There were few among us who could see any alternative as a posse of the league’s most talented players beat a path to Tallaght Stadium.

Even Pete Mahon, the manager of St Patrick’s Athletic, spoke gloomily about the situation in the aftermath of his teams defeat by the Hoops in round three of the league programme. The feeling back then was that somebody needed to beat Rovers fast or else the whole season was going to disappear into a foregone conclusion.

Two people stood against this glum vision of the future. Richard Sadlier and Michael O’Neill. Richard was witheringly impatient at the indecent haste with which his fellow MNS pundits were crowning the 2011 champions and Rovers boss Michael O’Neill actively fought the tide of such opinions from the get go.

At the time we nodded politely. O’Neill’s insistence that the coming season would be a good deal more difficult than we all imagined was dismissed as little more than predictable diplomacy. He was simply doing his job and dampening the expectations that were piling up on the shoulders of his players.

Richard Sadlier, meanwhile, was applying an admirable dose of wisdom to a situation that had no need of it. Yes, it was too early to make such claims. And yes, history tells us that rash pronouncements of invincibility are almost always proven to be hopelessly naive. But seriously Richard, have you seen their bench?

Both have been proven right, which is not to say that Shamrock Rovers won’t win the league, just that they haven’t steamrolled it into a procession of irrelevance. As we enter into the second half of the season it is Pete Mahon’s St Patrick’s Athletic who top the table and both Sligo Rovers and Derry City are well within touching distance of their hooped rivals.

It’s time for us to re-learn a lesson that most of us fail to learn year on year, that football rebels against presumption. It’s true that the best team usually prevails and it’s also true that Shamrock Rovers look to have the best team. But nowhere is it written that the best team will sail unscathed through a sea of troubles and emerge victorious without having broken sweat.

What we have now is something that we naively believed would never happen, a league race that is as tight as we could have hoped for and one which should provide an utterly compelling second half to the season. And Amen to that.

We are at that glorious point where predictions of any kind should be treated with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for politicians and ads for anti-wrinkle cream. I don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know what’s going to happen, even Richard Sadlier doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Which was kind of his point in the first place.