Football crazy
BY MARTIN SPAIN
As I write this, the aches and pains are slowly fading, although my ribs still hurt. And the worst of it is I did this to myself. Last weekend, Soccer Against Racism Ireland held its now annual soccer tournament in Dublin and some lunatic suggested that Sinn Féin enter two teams. What we weren't told before we signed up was that the other sides participating would be taking the football seriously. And they were fit too. It also turned out that three ten-minute-aside matches were two and a half matches too far for people whose only preparation was making sure everyone had a Celtic top. We wryly named ourselves Rebels Without a Cause, but Rebels Without a Hope would have been closer to the mark.
I won't go into the gory details of our games, although I can tell you that between us we only lost five of our six matches. Okay, so we got a walkover, but a win is a win. Of my battle scars, the geriatric legs I have been left with are the result of having to use them for more than running up and down the stairs. The sore rib was incurred, I think, when I fell into the goal while vainly trying to prevent us going 4-0 down in our final match. I still blame that ref.
Having said all that, if you could forget the football, this was a great day out. The Dublin Brewing Company brought along a full mobile bar, although we seemed to be the only team availing of its pleasures (some of us tried not drinking, but it made no discernible difference to our losing).
We played teams from Somalia, Angola, and Bosnia, among others, and were humiliated by them all, but the weekend was not really about soccer.
We were all there to have a bit of craic and show that we could get along no problem. We were there to celebrate our similarities and our diversity and to demonstrate that we did not feel threatened by people who look different. But then last weekend, the greatest threat we posed was to protesting muscles and distressed cardiovascular systems.
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