Seasons come and seasons go – sometimes I wonder how we know. Sport never stops, with the Euros rolling into the Olympics into the domestic soccer seasons, and the GAA going on forever, the club championships following the inter-county dramas.
My former colleague Paddy Heaney used to marvel at my level of recall, not just the year that some championship game took place but also its exact scoreline. With more and more matches, that facility has waned to such an extent that often now I don’t even remember having been at a particular game.
I used to think that it was sporting occasions which helped me recollect what I was doing in my life, and when. Yet I’ve realised that many of the most memorable moments, for good or ill, involve family.
For years I never missed watching an FA Cup Final, with live football on TV a rarity in those days. However, one stands above most of the others, despite my being very young.
1979 was the first time I heard my father swear. A Manchester United fan, he’d moaned and grumbled through most of that year’s FA Cup decider, as Arsenal bossed a dull game - until his beloved Red Devils launched a remarkable comeback to level at 2-2. Cue Alan Sunderland’s dramatic late winner for the Gunners – and my dad’s explosion of emotion.
Obviously his death in 2020 will never leave my mind, but it does also make one of the many Tyrone football finals I’ve reported on stick out in my memory. Just a week after the sadness as we buried dad there was a joyous occasion as Dungannon Clarke’s ended their 64-year wait to be county kingpins again after a thrilling penalty shoot-out against Trillick.
2001 was the year that changed my attitude to sport, putting its importance into perspective, rather than copying my dad’s anger when things went against our teams. We’d almost lost my marvellous mum to a brain aneurysm that spring, but thankfully many brilliant NHS staff helped save her life.
So I genuinely wasn’t concerned that Liverpool looked to be losing the FA Cup Final to a superior Arsenal side – although I still enjoyed the beer-chucking celebrations which ensued upstairs in ‘The Bot’ when Michael Owen’s late double stole the trophy from the Gunners.
Just two years earlier I’d kicked a hole in my middle sister’s sofa (it was only fabric, to be fair to me) in an act of annoyance when Manchester United ousted Liverpool from the FA Cup, so my Zen-like calm during the 2001 decider was quite the transformation.
The year after that brought another lesson in realising how much – or how little – sport matters.
Sitting in Clones in some disappointment shortly after Tyrone lost an Ulster quarter-final replay to Armagh I received a phone call to tell me that my Granny Archer had passed away.
She wouldn’t have been annoyed at me finishing up my work that evening. I’ll never forget that wonderful woman telling me once that anyone over the age of 80 should be ‘put down’. She was well into her 80s at the time. We let her go on to 95 anyway.
Almost the opposite of that sad memory, with a birth rather than a death, and me missing a match rather than being at one, involves the memory of my daughter coming into the world.
A Sunday child like myself, that’s something I’ll never forget as I was supposed to be covering the Ulster SFC Final that day in 2016, between Tyrone and Donegal.
Instead that morning was spent taking my wife to the hospital and then arranging someone to help report on that game in my stead.
It was entirely the fault of the Tyrone GAA-mad midwife, of course, that I had to keep checking on my phone for updates of how that final was going.
2009 was the unforgettable year that I got married – but it was also the year that Liverpool really should have won the league under Rafa Benitez. I might struggle to differentiate between other, more recent, close shaves under Jurgen Klopp, but one particular match from 15 years ago remains burned into my brain.
Standing on the dock waiting to embark on our Caribbean cruise honeymoon, my mobile phone pinged with a text message from a mate, gleeful that title rivals Manchester United were losing against Aston Villa. Obviously I blame him for the Red Devils’ comeback win just as much as Federico Macheda.
Fatherhood is probably what has turned my brain to mush, but I have a clearer memory of the 2014 World Cup Final than a few others, again because of one of my children.
I don’t even have to think about who scored the winner, the game’s only goal - Germany’s Mario Gotze – even though I didn’t actually see that moment live.
I tried to. Boy, I tried to. We were watching the final on TV in a Cambridge hotel room with my wife and parents-in-law.
Just as the match-winning move developed, the baby monitor blared into life, connected to the adjoining room where my son was sleeping – or had been.
It was my turn to go see to him, so off I went, despite my protestations, missing that goal despite straining my neck as I walked slowly out, my son’s increasingly loud wails drowning out the commentary…
Sport still matters; but family matters more.
