Amazing moments, for sure, but let’s not go reaching for that old commentary chestnut, “You couldn’t script it!” Because, let’s be honest, you certainly could. A tight game of football settled by a last-gasp goal deep in time-added-on? I’m not sure you need to get Hollywood’s best screenwriters round a table or assemble a crack team of Disney imagineers to come up with that particular narrative arc. It happens.
But, if you’re in the right place, and on the right side, how great it feels when it does – a burst of transcendent emotion made possible by football, as by nothing else. And surely for this very reason: no script involved.
It just happened twice – two classic examples of the phenomenon in, of all places, the traditional snoozing-zone of an international week. First there was Troy Parrott using the 96th minute of Republic of Ireland v Hungary to put his country into the World Cup qualifiers. In the nationally ecstatic wake of that moment, Dublin Airport briefly re-styled itself Troy Parrott Airport and Parrott’s shirtless torso disappearing to the bottom of a mile-high pile of delirious team-mates and assorted squad members became one of the week’s most irresistibly viral clips.
Then there was Scotland’s Kieran Tierney mugging Denmark three minutes into added time – the odd goal in five again. Yet a couple of minutes later, presented with the ball in the centre circle and an opportunity to smack it to safety, Kenny McLean chose the safest spot he could think of – Denmark’s goal. Now, purists will maybe argue that McLean diluted the last-gasp narrative somewhat with that inessential fourth. But it didn’t look like many Scots in the ground were sitting down to have the debate. He appeared to have compounded the effect, actually.
The effect being extreme. A last-gasp goal is where your soul abruptly departs your corporeal body which is, in any case, suddenly in the embrace of someone from three rows back whom you’ve never previously met. Always good, of course, when there are things at stake – World Cup places, trophies. But the late goal will work its magic anywhere, even (I can attest) in a run-of-the-mill midweek game against Aston Villa.
Only football, surely, among the forms of entertainment available to us in the 21st century, offers release at this level. Only football can defy science and redeem time itself, as it did this week for those Scotland fans – an hour and a half of abject plodding expunged at a stroke, leaving only ecstasy. Look, I’m sure opera’s great. But it can’t ever be that great, can it? Fact: there are no last-gasp goals in opera. Also, no matter how good an opera is at the end, I bet you’ll still be remembering in painful detail what you sat through to get there.
There’s nothing to match this in entertainment generally, when you think about it. Ever jumped around in utter forgetfulness at the end of a play? Ever dropped to your knees in a sobbing wreck as you exited the last room of a gallery? I was once at a Stevie Wonder show at Madison Square Garden where he brought on Prince near the end and they played ‘Superstition’. Where I come from, that pretty much nails it in terms of the musical planets aligning in front of a live audience, and I still think about that experience quite frequently. But did that moment have the potential implications at a life-expectancy level of the 88th-minute Didier Drogba header in Munich that kept Chelsea in the 2012 Champions League final? I can’t truthfully say that it did.
It makes you worry a little for people who only have art within their reach, and not football, and therefore perhaps never know what it is to be fully alive; people for whom there is only a constant access to the finest products of the human imagination, and no 93rd-minute winners. Shouldn’t we be helping these people? A week like this makes you think we probably should be.
In his superbly sanguine post-match interview following that Republic of Ireland triumph, Parrott said it had been “the first time I’ve cried in years.” He’s possibly not watching enough football, then. Are you?
Photograph by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images