Down in the Europa League Fan Zone on Wednesday, everyone had a ball. Each time you turned a corner in Dublin Castle, somebody was doing keepy-uppies or head tennis in the gloom. We headed for the temporary pitch set up at the back, on the hunt for footballers.
Ali* plays left wing. He is medium in height, thin and angular, with the kind of bushy top hairdo sported by Neymar towards the end of his time at PSG. Okay, that doesn’t exactly narrow it down – think Fellaini on top but neater round the sides. He is Somalian and he’s been in Ireland for just over two years.
Ekele is a centre-back. He is a bigger unit altogether, tall and blocky and imposing. He’s good in the air and needs watching at corners. He’s a Manchester United fan and can’t see them being beaten in the cup final. We’re sceptical but we bless him for his optimism. He is Nigerian and arrived in Ireland last month.
Ali and Ekele, along with eight other young lads, were at the Fan Zone as guests of the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. Uefa had set up a five-a-side pitch surrounded by inflatable walls and various teams played away on it in one-hour slots throughout the day, ahead of the Europa League final that night. There had been an amputee game in the morning. Michael Owen was on just before us.
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The UNHCR had been given one of the slots on the pitch and Ali and Ekele and the rest of them were coming to play for an hour alongside an under-17 team from Cambridge FC in Ringsend. David James and Robert Pires were here too, suited up and ready to go. An official ref arrived and blew his whistle and they played away.
We got talking to Jonathan Tormey. Based in Ringsend, middle-aged, long since free of any concerns about hairdos, Neymar-style or otherwise. The sort of cat that sees a thing and does a thing while the rest of us are standing around wondering how a thing might work in theory.
Tormey was a football in the community officer with the FAI up until recently and it was his under-17 team that came to play with the UNHCR players on Wednesday. The people who work in this area have no simple answers to the world’s problems. But they get in and they do a bit, trying to make small things better where they can.
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Football is an incredibly useful tool. When refugees and asylum seekers arrive in Ireland, they know next to nothing about the dot on the map they’re in. They might know a bit of English and they might not. They don’t know the lie of the place, they don’t know the people. All they know for certain is that they’re elsewhere, away from the place that, for whatever reason, they left.
But they know football. They know that much.
We get so caught up in the lying and the cheating and the money and the corruption and all the greaseball scum around football that we forget the power of the world’s biggest sport. Worse, we only ever hear it spoken about in those terms when the spiv armies at Uefa and Fifa invoke it. And even then, all we want to do when we hear a Blatter or an Infantino wax lyrical is get a little sick in our mouths.
But when you’re rootless and drifting, trying to start a new life for yourself in a strange land, football is a godsend. Everybody understands the language of it, the inherent connection, the instant level playing field (literal and otherwise). Pick two teams and start passing and moving. Give them a ball and a yard of grass.
We hear managers and coaches in all sports talk about wanting their players to go and express themselves. When we asked a few of the lads if they wanted to talk to a journalist, they were, entirely understandably, slow to go for it. Those who did spoke softly and in short answers, hesitant and unsure about what to make of the questions.
But once the game started, that all fell away. Ali threw himself into a couple of tackles and picked up a flailing arm to the lip for his troubles. On the ball, he jinked and feinted and did damage. Ekele was smooth and unhurried in the pell-mell of the tight pitch. And yes, good in the air when he had to be. Full expression, no hesitation.
“The bottom line is to try and get them into football clubs ultimately,” Tormey said. “Get them contacts in football in the area where they are. We run three or four camps a year, mostly in Dublin, and you could have anything up to 40 or 50 at them. They make connections, find clubs to play in, help them integrate that way. It might only be a phone call, it might be a football camp.”
On Wednesday, they played for close to an hour. Four teams, 10 minute games, switch on, switch off. A crowd gathered, honey to the celebrity bees in Pires and James, oohs and aahs for any trick pulled on the pitch by the lads from Ringsend or the ones from further afield.
Football won’t save anybody. Not really. Within a couple of hours, the Europa final was done, Dublin Castle went back to normal, life ground on for everyone. Ali went back to his schoolwork – he goes to a youthreach school off Parnell Square three times a week. Ekele hopes to start school in September but for now he’s staying out in Clontarf and taking each day as it happens. The future is uncertain for everyone.
But for an hour on Wednesday, they weren’t refugees or asylum seekers or any of the septic, exhausting names they’d be called in the swamps online. They were young lads playing a game of football, speaking fluently in the closest thing sport has to a universal language.
* Names have been changed.
