I'm not a football expert.
I know enough to understand when Ireland has scored, obviously. I know what a penalty is. I know that shouting at the television doesn't appear to make the referee change his mind.
And I know that Irish football supporters are capable of taking football very, very seriously indeed.
But the Ireland v Israel game has left me thinking about something that goes beyond football.
Because sometimes politics doesn't stay outside the stadium.
Sometimes it walks straight in with you.
It's only football. Isn't it?
There has been an awful lot of discussion around the Ireland v Israel Nations League fixture, and understandably so.
The game was scheduled to take place in Debrecen, Hungary, on 27 September, with the return fixture due to be played in Serbia the following week. The FAI had already decided that the fixtures would go ahead, after months of discussion about the sporting, financial and wider consequences of refusing to fulfil them. An FAI motion endorsing the decision to play the fixtures was subsequently passed at an Extraordinary General Meeting in July.
So this wasn't exactly a case of everyone waking up on Saturday morning and thinking, Oh God, what do we do about this football match?
The decision had been made.
And yet, just before the game, the players themselves held a four-hour meeting to discuss whether they should play.
A significant majority voted to fulfil the fixture.
Gavin Bazunu subsequently withdrew from the squad, saying that he felt it would be wrong for him to participate. The FAI confirmed that the players had held different views and that the decision to fulfil the fixtures followed consultation with them.
And this is the bit I keep coming back to.
But here's where I struggle
I have to be honest.
I don't think the match should have happened.
That's my personal view.
I know there are people who will disagree with me. That's fine.
What I don't think is fine is that the question got to the point where the players themselves had to sit down and decide whether they should play it.
Because they're footballers.
They're there to play football.
They shouldn't have been put in the position of having to weigh up international politics, the humanitarian situation, sporting consequences, their own consciences and the potential impact on Irish football before deciding whether to walk onto a pitch.
I think that decision should have been made by the FAI.
The FAI had already spent months considering the fixture. It had considered the potential consequences of not fulfilling it, including sporting and financial penalties, and had publicly said that decisions around the fixture were the responsibility of the Association.
So my reaction was basically:
Hang on.
Isn't this your job?
Not the players' job.
The FAI's.
This isn't about blaming the players
And I don't blame them.
Not the ones who voted to play.
Not Gavin Bazunu, who decided that he couldn't.
They were put in an extraordinarily difficult position.
Whatever your own view of the fixture, I think it's possible to recognise that.
The players had different opinions. They talked about it. They voted. One player ultimately made a different decision and withdrew.
That's actually what disagreement looks like when real human beings are involved.
It isn't always tidy.
It isn't always unanimous.
And sometimes there isn't a decision that everyone feels completely comfortable with.
But I keep coming back to the same thing:
They shouldn't have had to make that decision in the first place.
We've become very bad at allowing people to disagree
And this is where I think social media makes everything about a hundred times worse.
Because social media doesn't really do nuance.
It likes a side.
It likes a position.
It likes a statement that can be put on a graphic and shared before you've had time to work out what you actually think.
You must be for something.
Or against it.
And if you say, “Well, I think this, but I'm not sure about that…”
Good luck with that.
Someone will be along in approximately fourteen seconds to tell you why you're an awful person.
I've done it myself.
Not the awful-person bit.
The jumping to an opinion bit.
You see something. You react. You share it. You comment.
And then perhaps, later, you read something else and think:
Oh.
That's a bit more complicated than I thought.
Which is terribly inconvenient.
Because by then you've already put the Facebook post up.
Does everything have to become a side?
I don't think it does.
I think you can believe the match shouldn't have gone ahead and still have enormous sympathy for the players who found themselves having to make that decision.
You can disagree with a decision without deciding that everyone involved in it is a terrible human being.
You can care deeply about what is happening in Gaza without hating Israeli people.
You can support Palestinian rights without believing that every person who disagrees with you is evil.
You can be horrified by the actions of a government without applying those actions to an entire population or a religion.
And you can change your mind.
That last one seems particularly unfashionable at the moment.
We're allowed to say:
I don't know.
I'm still thinking about it.
I hadn't considered that.
I got that wrong.
Imagine.
What about the rest of us?
I'm conscious that I'm writing this from the relative safety of my little corner of the internet.
I'm not a footballer.
I'm not an FAI official.
I'm not a politician.
I'm not making decisions that affect an international sporting organisation.
I'm a woman sitting at a computer in Wicklow, making jewellery and regularly having far too many opinions about things.
Which, if I'm honest, is quite a lot less responsibility.
But social media can make all of us feel as though we should be doing something.
Posting.
Sharing.
Signing.
Commenting.
Making sure everyone knows where we stand.
And sometimes that's important.
Sometimes speaking up matters.
But I've also started wondering whether we're confusing being visible with being useful.
Because sharing something on Instagram can feel like action.
And sometimes it is.
But sometimes it's simply sharing something on Instagram.
There's a difference.
And perhaps we're allowed to acknowledge that too.
So can you leave politics at the door?
Probably not.
Not anymore.
Or perhaps we never could.
Sport has always been tangled up with politics, identity, nationality, money and power.
We just like pretending it isn't when that's more convenient.
We put on the jersey.
We sing the anthem.
We wave the flag.
We shout at the television.
We feel ridiculously proud when somebody wearing green scores a goal.
And then we're surprised when the wider world turns up with all its complicated baggage.
The Ireland v Israel fixture has certainly made that impossible to ignore.
For me, though, the thing that has bothered me most isn't simply that the match went ahead.
It's that the responsibility for deciding what to do about it ended up, at least in the final stages, being carried by the players.
And I don't think that's fair.
I don't have a neat ending
I know what I think about this particular match.
I think it should have been cancelled.
But I also think the responsibility for making that decision should have rested with the people running Irish football, rather than with a group of footballers sitting down and trying to work out what their consciences could live with.
And perhaps that's what has bothered me most.
Not that people disagreed.
Not even that the match went ahead.
But that the decision ended up on the shoulders of the people who were supposed to be there to play it.
Leadership means making difficult decisions.
Sometimes it means saying:
This is our decision.
This is why we've made it.
And we'll take the consequences.
That's what being in charge is supposed to mean.
Because if we're going to ask footballers to carry the weight of politics onto a football pitch, perhaps we should at least be honest about what we're asking them to carry.
They were there to play football.
The difficult decisions belonged somewhere else.
And maybe that's something worth thinking about the next time we're tempted to shout at somebody on the internet for having the wrong opinion.
Although, obviously, if they're shouting at the television during an Ireland match, they're absolutely fair game.
I mean, there are limits. ☘️⚽️
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