“Toto Schillaci! Paolo Maldini! Roberto Baggio and the other Baggio! His brother!”
I was off, naming players before my friend could stop me.
We were having a lovely drink in Leonard’s Corner in Dublin 8 and chatting about the Irish football team’s recent great defeat of Hungary, sending them through to another qualification round for the 2026 World Cup. My friend had got accidentally swept up in match fever, meeting another pal and her toddler in a northside pub for some food. They didn’t even realise the match was on. Before long they were swept up in Parrottmania. People were crying – including the toddler, who couldn’t comprehend what all the screaming was about. Post match, the group at the table next to them began challenging each other to name the Italia ’90 players.
“Can you name them?” my friend had asked me in Leonard’s Corner, and I misunderstood, thinking she meant the Italian men who had been the sports nemeses of my childhood.
“No,” she laughed, “the Irish team”.
Well, that one was easy. I rattled them off. Cascarino. Houghton. Aldridge. Townsend. Sheedy. Moran. I think the only ones I missed were the ones on the bench.
I was nine years old during that glorious summer of Italia ’90. I suspect my memories of the tournament are tangled up with Stuttgart ’88 and USA ’94 – in fact, Roberto Baggio’s “brother” Dino Baggio didn’t even play for Italy in 1990, and the two men were not related despite sharing a surname. I remember inflatable hammers and bananas, my soccer-mad older brothers losing their minds, my mother putting crisps in bowls for the special match days, waving Ireland flags out on the rural back road we lived on in the hope someone would drive by and give me a beep. I had an Italia ’90 T-shirt from Penneys and the Put ‘Em Under Pressure single on cassette. We had a Jack’s Heroes VHS that I watched over and over again. I don’t know if I remember watching the Give It a Lash Jack performance on The Late Late Show or if I’ve just seen the clips so many times the Goal sweatshirts are burned into my memory. I’ve watched the iconic Reeling in the Years Italia ’90 montage so often I know where Nessun Dorma stops and There She Goes begins.
The top comment on that Reeling in the Years clip on YouTube is from one week ago and reads: “We are so back.” Ireland still has to win two games – one against Czech Republic next March and another against either Denmark or North Macedonia – to even quality for the World Cup, but the hope is there. I’ve already been privy to conversations about how to afford the trip to North America if Ireland makes it through. It’s reminiscent of 1990 and 1994 when houses were being remortgaged, and tricky calls were being made to Ireland from payphones in Genoa to explain that they just couldn’t come home before the quarter-final against Italy in Rome.
My friend and I chatted in the pub about what it could be like if Ireland do get through. The hope and unity it could bring. My friend would love her children to experience it. People who weren’t even born when Italia ’90 fever swept the nation can understand the impact it had. When Jack Charlton died in 2020, Saoirse McHugh, a general election candidate that year for the Green Party who was born in June 1990 in the midst of football fever, tweeted that she was a teenager before she realised that Ireland hadn’t actually won the World Cup in 1990.
You can see how she might have been mistaken given the welcome home Jack and the lads got, albeit empty-handed. There were tens of thousands at Dublin Airport, the same numbers at the Swords roundabout and lining the streets of Whitehall, and three quarters of a million in and around O’Connell Street to welcome the open-top bus.
[ Does Troy Parrott’s goal make your top five Irish sporting moments?Opens in new window ]
I’ll admit I’m a bit of a fairweather sports fan, but I think my ability to name multiple members of an Italian team who knocked Ireland out of the World Cup over 35 years ago demonstrates my commitment to jumping on a bandwagon and clinging on with all my might. I, along with the rest of the country, am fervently hoping that Ireland can do the business and get us through those playoffs and off to the US, Canada and Mexico. I don’t know if my mother’s heart would be able for it. After all, Toto Schillaci’s name is still spat out in our house. I’m sure we’re not the only ones.
