MALLEYMAN

Peacekeeping

I once taught a group of Italian military officers who had been involved in peacekeeping missions with the United Nations. They spoke very positively about their ability to work with their Irish counterparts. As Ireland is not part of NATO, they explained, there were things you couldn’t do, information that strictly speaking you couldn’t share. However, there were things on a local level that it made sense to work together and collaborate on. They said that the Irish soldiers were great at that, employing common sense to the situation presenting in front of you.

Irish culture tends to be relationship- rather than rule-based. It could be argued that the greatest asset of Irish on the international stage is getting on with people. And being diplomatic when necessary. That’s partly what you have to do when you’re a small country surrounded by more powerful military nations.

Arrival

The day before the Senior Touch Championships, I flew alone to Edinburgh from Dublin. The plan was to get a train and buses up from Edinburgh airport to Stirling university where I would meet up with my Swiss teammates. As I got off the plane, I had a fascinating conversation with a middle-aged (my-aged) Texan woman who worked drafting legislation for the federal government there. She spoke with weariness and insight about her country’s current woes.

As we strolled into the airport with passports unchecked, I explained to her about the Common Travel Area, which allowed freedom of travel between the UK and Ireland. When you fly the other way back to Dublin though, your passport will always be checked, I told her as we parted ways.

When I got to the luggage belt, there were a few familiar faces from the Irish M45 team already there. ‘How are you getting up to Stirling?’ was almost the first question they asked me. Strictly speaking, should they be giving a lift to a lad from another nation? ‘Jump in with us. We’ll get an upgrade on the car to get more space.’

Relationship-based cultures prioritize interpersonal connections over impersonal systems and regulations, fostering a sense of community over individualistic gain. In other words, I was quare glad to get a lift.  

Accommodation

When I got to the Stirling university campus, I was the first of the players to arrive. Our team manager was there in advance and she came and met me, and gave me the keys to the accommodation. Everything was laid out in the rooms. Our shirts and playing gear were ready to go. Dealing with Swiss Touch for this tournament, it was noticeable that everything was very well-run, prompt and lacking in hassle. It’s a cliche with a lot of truth that in Switzerland things tend to function well.

Switzerland in general tends to be a rules-based culture, characterized by established regulations and frameworks that govern interactions, promoting cooperation and upholding shared values. A small country surrounded by more powerful military nations, it could be argued that the Swiss have prospered by being reserved, discreet and organised. And diplomatic when necessary too.

Switzerland are not part of the EU and yet have a raft of trade deals with EU countries that Britain, post-Brexit, can only look at in envy. The Schengen Agreement, for example, allows free movement of citizens across EU member states, and also Switzerland.

What the video shows?

Deckhard: ‘Enhance 224 to 176. Enhance, stop. Move in, stop. Pull out, track right, stop. Center in, pull back. Stop. Track 45 right. Stop. Center and stop. Enhance 34 to 36. Pan right and pull back. Stop. Enhance 34 to 46. Pull back. Wait a minute, go right, stop. Enhance 57 to 19. Track 45 left. Stop. Enhance 15 to 23. Give me a hard copy right there.‘ Bladerunner, 1982.

For the World Cup last year, I didn’t watch back any of the footage of our one game against New Zealand that was streamed. I didn’t play well and we were hammered. For the 2022 Euros, even though we made the final, I barely watched back any footage either. I knew I wasn’t playing particularly well. I was satisfied with what I did in both tournaments considering I was somewhat constricted by injury, but I wasn’t keen to look at it.

This year I was injury free. We had some good footage to watch, and I even had some tries to view. I was curious to see finally where my game was at. A week of watching back alone in the dark with Deckhard-level obsessive attention to detail. What you’re doing right and not right.

Day 2 Game 1 vs Euro Select

What the video never tells is what you’re feeling. I was pretty scared going into this game about how I’d feel physically. My calf had tightened up the previous day and I didn’t know how it would react, I was limping on it quite a bit that evening. And I was absolutely drained, as tired as I’ve ever been, after two games on Day 1. Today, we were playing three game. Against two of the better teams. I felt tired just thinking about it.

The Euro Select team was made up of a lot of players from Wales and Scotland. They’d beaten Ireland on Day 1, who had beaten us.

Video does show the details of the sport, the little bits that even players don’t always appreciate that can have an impact. One good and one bad from me from this game.

The higher you go up through the levels, the harder touches tend to be. The rules say ‘minimal force’, my principle is ‘a bit harder than is necessary, enough to be annoying’. I’m trying to disrupt the attacker placing the ball smoothly on the ground and without giving away a penalty. If the referee says something to you like, ‘Watch your touches six’, which they sometimes were, you know you’re in the right zone. A ‘Sorry, yeah. Thanks ref’ acknowledgement can sometimes help too and then you carry on as you were until the ref’s message changes or escalates.

I’d consider this in the video a good touch. I was front on, which I need to be and I got in under his chest, so in effect he’s trying to come into the space I already own. If his technique was a little better and he’s less upright, there would nothing I can do. In effect, I won the contest on this occasion. This is a part of the game I like, there are clear rules of engagement.

This second clip is a detail where I was poor in defence and it can be a weakness in my game. I tend to hedge my bets in defence, not commit and try to force the attacker to make a decision, which works very well at lower levels where attackers often make bad decisions. I got this principle from being a defender playing football. But sometimes in Touch line defence, you need to be more proactive and take away time from the attacker, particularly good attackers. Some players are great at doing it. I need to constantly remind myself to do it.

I do the first part well, get back onside and bounce off the line and then just hold there, not putting pressure on the pass of the ball player. And they score.

I did score a quickie in international Touch for the first time I think since 2019. Or at least since 2021 and that wouldn’t have been a good one. Finally. The lack was connected to niggly injuries but still. It was actually a ‘punish’, a quickie on the link. And it felt pretty easy in the end when it came. Why wasn’t I doing that all the time?

Our team played really well in this game. I could see how motivated we were. At one stage in the game, in a part of my mind I was thinking about Euro Select, how are they not beating us? Look at the talent in their team. They had a few players with exceptional steps, which none of use did. I looked at a ‘step’ I did on video at one stage and realised I never actually went anywhere. I’m not going to show it.

This was the game that went against the trend of expected results. A win like this stands alone with a merit all to itself regardless of what it means in terms of the tournament.

Won 8-7.

DAY 2 GAME 2 vs England

I enjoyed the actual playing of this game a lot more than the thought of it beforehand. I did some good things, we did some good things as a team. I made one full-length diving touch down the wing which I was happy with. I also missed a diving touch that I should have made, out of exhaustion and was thinking as I flew through the air, I would have made that ten years ago, easy. We did some good defending and some good attacking. And some good in-between stuff. I got some good disruptive touches in midfield without getting on the wrong side of the refs. I felt ok at this level again, not scared or exposed on the line. I could recognise everything England were doing without always being able to stop it. I could see the nuts and bolts and joins of their moves. As Bob Dylan sings, ‘Lately I see her ribbons and her curls.’

World-weary detachment comforts, but doesn’t mean you get the girl.

Lost 12-3.

Just Chill

Being outside the Irish team set up, I learned a lot in this tournament. How to be, not necessarily better, but something else. The atmosphere was so different in the Swiss team from how I would tend to be and how Irish teams would tend to be. It was liberating in a way. There was less reliance on emotion. A lot of positivity, energy-building, group-bonding. As we were the Swiss Grizzlies, we were obviously waving our arms and making gorilla noises in the team circle before games. And we were also obviously touching local historical landmarks to draw power from them.

I think it helped us not feel overburdened or pressured going onto the field. We performed to our expectations in this tournament and better. It made me think that maybe it doesn’t all have to be about passion and everything on the line all the time, your soul, the meaning of existence, eight hundred years of history, ancient ballads and everything we’ve suffered…

There’s another way maybe? Not better, just different.

Just a thought, but could over-stimulation have played a part in the Irish rugby team struggling to get past a quarter finals at World Cups? It has certainly played a part in a couple of recent big losses in Irish touch that I can think of. If you look at the highlight reel of Irish rugby and compare it with that of France, for example, one is flair and beauty, the other is passion and fight.

DAY 2 GAME 3 vs Portugal

I was very nervous for this game. We needed to win it to go into a semi-final against Ireland. I’ve seen it so many times. You’re expecting to win but you start a bit off the pace. You get impatient and wound up trying to get back in the zone and you make things worse. That’s kind of what happened. We went one down, then got a player put in the sinbin.

This was the game I had the biggest influence on I think. Experience has got to count for something. The other pod was generally the principal attacking pod. In this game, five of our six tries came from our pod. A couple of quickies.

There was a bit of anger behind those scores. I hadn’t been able to do it against Portugal in the first game. My timing was off, I was too rushed. Exactly as at the World Cup last year and the Euros before that.

Then when you score from a couple of quickies, the defence tightens up and other spaces open up to score in.

Won 6-2.

Borders & Clocks

Ireland, as a member of the EU, is part of the Schengen agreement. Yet, your passport is always checked when you arrive in Dublin. Why? By approving the treaty but not implementing it, Ireland agrees with the principle of free movement but avoids exacerbating the issue of the need for a hard border between the north and south of Ireland, the official land border between the EU and Britain. A common sense solution.

On the flip side. Weaknesses of a relationship-based culture can include slow and ineffective decision-making due to complex social dynamics and the potential for corruption as personal connections override formal rules. 

I was listening to a podcast with Brian Kerr, one of the great names of Irish football coaching. He led an underage team to third place in a World Cup in 1997 and won European Championships at U16 and U18 in 1998. He went on to manage the Irish senior international team in the mid-2000s.

John Delaney was the CEO of the FAI for the latter part of this period and was and remains a national embarrassment. When you say that peoples get the leaders they deserves, that one would have to make you look hard in the mirror.

Kerr was asked on the podcast about how he got on with Delaney and recalled meeting him for the first time. Kerr had just won a big international game and was celebrating in the team hotel afterwards.

Delaney – ‘Good man, Brian.’ (Slap on the back.) Kerr – ‘Sorry, who are you?’ (He knew who he was.) ‘John Delaney. You know my father got you that job.’ Kerr – ‘No, I got that job because of the success I had with St. Pats. Who’s your father?’ (He knew who he was.) Delaney – ‘Joe Delaney.’ Kerr – ‘Oh, you mean Tickets Joe?’ (Joe Delaney had been involved in a scandal for touting tickets at the 1990 and 1994 World Cups while Treasurer of the Irish football association).

As Kerr explained on the podcast, ‘It probably wasn’t the cleverest thing to say but I wasn’t having it.’

I agree. That’s the worst of a relationship-based culture.

On the other flipside.

Harry Lime: ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ The Third Man, 1949.

(The Swiss didn’t invent the cuckoo clock by the way, that came from Germany, although they did invent Velcro, muesli, the Red Cross.)

The weakness of a rules-based society is its inherent rigidity and a lack of contextual understanding in dealing with unprecedented situations and unique circumstances.

A few months ago I needed to do a practice English lesson. I asked two colleagues in Zurich if I could come into their school at some point and teach a (free) class. One said ‘no, it would be too disruptive’. The other reluctantly agreed and got back to me after a few days with a suggested date a month-and-a-half later.

Instead, I texted a colleague back in Dublin and asked if there was any chance I could fly back and teach a class in his school later that week.

‘Yeah, no bother.’
‘Do you want me to follow on with the syllabus or should I bring in my own stuff?’
‘Ah, you know what you’re doing. Sure, bate away at whatever.’

DAY 3 GAME 1: Semi-final vs Ireland

They always used to say in Irish politics, no matter how disillusioned you were with your party, you never switched from one main party to the other, from Fianna Fail to Fine Gael or vice versa, even though they both had broadly similar centre-right policies. The two parties formed the opposing sides of the Irish Civil War in the 1920s, and if you switched sides at any point subsequently, the old party would never forgive you and the new one would never trust you.

I kind of know now what that feels like. The Irish and Swiss players’ tents were right beside each other and before this game, I was getting it from the Irish for being a turncoat and from my new teammates for my divided loyalties. I clearly enjoyed all of it.

Playing against my home country and playing well – it was obviously really important to me to show myself in a good light. Paul O’Connell used to say about the Leinster-Munster rivalry, the person you’re most competitive with in the world is your own brother in the back garden.

Some of their pods stressed me in attack and others didn’t. I could see the areas where we could hurt them and I knew there were areas where they could hurt us. If they scored, go again. Try and hit back at them.

In this game, I felt like I could compete as an international player in over 30s again. I was moving fairly well and making decent decisions. Crucially, which was definitely not the case at the world cup last year, I could actually run some decent attack.

I scored against Ireland. A quickie on the outside. My favourite type of score because I struggle with it and often step back in too early. I previously would have said a score against England in the World Cup in 2019 but now I think this ranks as my favourite ever individual score in a Touch international.

In the game on Day 1 Ireland had beaten us 10-7 but we were doing well to get that score. In this game, there were ways we could have won. I described it to myself immediately afterwards as a ‘life highlight’. Is that too much? I’ll see how I feel about it when more time has passed but I think it might be, even though we lost.

Lost 9-7.

DAY 3 GAME 2 3rd/4th Place Playoff: vs Portugal

This game I was not nervous for at all. I figured Portugal would be a bit broken down as a team and our team would be the opposite. And I was more confident in my own ability to affect a game now if needed. So it all proved. The other pod were back to their scoring ways. We ended up defending a lot which we did pretty well. Late in the second half, we had some attacks and set up a few scores.

Portugal were claiming that this one was a forward pass from me. It might have been but these ones are often given. It should actually have been a penalty to them for an incorrect roll ball by me. My body position and technique are awful here. It annoys me just looking at it.

For this next try, unfortunately the side referee steps in front of the camera at just the wrong moment.

I’ve realised that some people playing in this seniors tournament were not even born when that try was scored. A sobering thought.

Won 10-4.

William & Worzel

Here I am on my way to the afterparty, where we were all dressing as Braveheart, face paint and all.

At the afterparty. Oh, just me for the face paint? Thanks team.

One member of the Irish squad cruelly suggested I looked more like Worzel Gummidge than William Wallace. I would humbly suggest there’s a pair of us in it.

Somehow around midnight, I ended up singing a duet with a Welsh lad from the M40s while his father played the bagpipes to a packed room, ‘The Fields of Athenry’. I’m not a singer but it was the night that was in it.

Chips, Crisps & Conclusions

I was listening to Padraig Harrington talk about how amateur golfers when they chip should have 90% of their weight on their left foot. He said he only put about 70% but he’d earned the right to do that through all the work he’d put in over the years. I feel like I earned the right to have a good tournament. God knows, it’s taken a few years.

One of the really satisfying things for me from having conversations with the Irish team was how genuinely stressed they were by that semi-final. We also beat a Euro select full of Welsh and Scottish. I wouldn’t have expected either of those things coming into the tournament. That stands to the fact that Swiss teams, with various personnel, are now consistently competitive with the big Touch nations in Europe. The saying goes that ‘you should leave the shirt in a better place than you found it’. We did that.

James, Anna, Jack, Mary, Ian, Basia, Micha, Irene, Vien, Katie, Jamie, Richie, Matt, Anika.

And it was very enjoyable. My one word in the final team circle was ‘gratitude’.

I finish this blog on a train just outside Hannover, Germany. I’m off to teach Irish dancing and faery stories to German primary school children. And to introduce them to crisp sandwiches. That’s what being part of the European Union is all about. Right?

Be challenged. Be open to new experiences. Question what you’ve always known. Even if you come back to the same conclusions. We don’t want or need to be all the same. Difference is good.