The cruelty of hope

In order to defend myself from the punch in the gut which football results can deliver, I ritually envelop myself in gloom before a big match. Consequently I should be fully prepared for Northern Ireland’s imminent defeat in Poland tomorrow and the subsequent extinguishing of our World Cup qualifying aspirations at Windsor Park on Wednesday night.

Except that I’m not. Really. Somewhere, buried too deep to detect in normal conversation, so deep that I am barely aware of it myself, an ember of hope still glows. Dimly.

And when disappointment does come, as it surely must, I will feel it just as deeply as any other supporter.

Follow the death of my dream, or the genesis of my bankruptcy, live, on 3000Versts Twitter feed. Tomorrow evening and, live from Windsor Park, on Wednesday night.

One more thing. COME ON NORTHERN IRELAND!

Comments

Hernandez said…
Pride, Passion and Belief my friend.
4 September 2009 at 22:48
Owen Polley said…
You angling for a job at Nationwide?
4 September 2009 at 23:14
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Guest Post: Leave our Alain alone

By itwassammymcnallywhatdoneit As we know well in Northern Ireland, predicting someone’s views on a range of issues doesn't require a crystal ball, just a clue as to their background - their name, the school they attended or their address. Once you have sniffed out those details, you can identify their tribe and you can then have a fair stab at working out what they think. Of course, tribalism is not just confined to Ulster and tribal loyalties are not always that straightforward. Take Monsieur Alain Rolland for example, born and raised in Ireland but with a French father. For many Welsh rugby fans such continental lineage was proof positive of his preference for the land of his father, Wales's opponents in the rugby world cup semi-final and of course explains his 'outrageous' decision to send off the Welsh captain Sam Warburton. When England were knocked out of the world cup, by perhaps the bitterest of their many 'old enemies' France, Wales found the...
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more