An Irishman's Diary

TONIGHT'S Europa League Final in Dublin may be meaningless to most locals, but I for one will feel a special connection to the event. In fact, should the need arise, I'll be able to shout insults at the players or match officials in the same language as both sets of supporters. Yes, " estúpido!", " cretino!", and " filho de puta!" are just some of the phrases I can deploy at will. And there are lots more where they came from.

The story of my proficiency in Portuguese swear words begins with a long-running weekly football match I used to play at a city-centre YMCA. It was a game that predated even my involvement: there was already an oral history, preserved by a few grizzled veterans, stretching back to the mid-1980s. But even by the time I got involved, circa 1993, it was still – like Ireland – a predominantly monocultural phenomenon.

Then the C**t*c T*g*r happened. People became too busy to play. And especially after a reorganisation of the YMCA’s aerobics and dance classes ousted football from its 6pm prime-time slot, relegating us to the outer darkness of a 9pm kick-off, we struggled for numbers. So just like the Irish economy, our game became dependent on foreign migrants, of which the adjoining gym had a regular supply, always quick to accept any invitation to play football.

Or rather, “futebol”. Because the usual recruits were a group of friends who shared a language, if not a country. They seemed to come from all corners of the Portuguese empire, including Brazil and Angola. There may have been one or two from Cape Verde. The link was that most of them were either from, or had at some time lived in, Lisbon.

It was an ironic twist. We had been ousted from our old time slot by – of all things – a samba class (curse you, Rodrigo!). Now, suddenly, we were playing samba football. Of course, I use the word “we” with poetic licence. The closest I ever got to Samba football was when trying to kick lumps out of its practitioners. And I rarely got near enough to that either.

Despite which feelings of inadequacy, for those of us who had grown up watching the beautiful Brazilian teams of the early 1970s and 1980s, just being part of a Portuguese-speaking game felt glamorous. And Portuguese-speaking is what it became. Not only were the new-comers good at playing, they were good at turning up. Soon, they became the regulars and we were the fillers-in.

By the game’s final year, native English speakers were an ethnic minority. It was just as well that the last survivors had matured then to the point where we no longer had the energy to have violent disagreements, because when arguments broke out now we couldn’t understand them. Individual swear-words were easy, but grammar and the finer points of Lisbon street-slang were beyond us.

Unfortunately, another side-effect of the move to 9pm was running tension with YMCA staff about when the game was supposed to end. The samba dancers and aerobics people would be long gone before us. We were always last out, by which time the man with the keys would be impatient to get home. Never mind the concept of playing injury-time post 10pm. Certain key-holders seemed to regard the players’ habit of having a shower after the game as unacceptable.

One night, inevitably, there was a big row. I wasn’t there at the time, so during the subsequent peace talks, I had to reassemble events from evidence. It was an entirely verbal row, I gathered, and management conceded there had been fault on both sides. Even so, rules had been infringed and the YMCA had banned two of our Portuguese friends from further use of the facilities. The rest of us were welcome to return, they said.

This was a dilemma. Our game was so old it could have qualified for protection under heritage legislation. But we were satisfied that, whatever Lisbon street slang our banned colleagues had used during the row, there was provocation. The latin honour code bound us together. So in a spirit of " um por todos e todos por um", as we say in Portugal, we took our game into exile, across the city to Ringsend, where it continues (in my absence of late; I recently joined middle age on a loan deal which looks like becoming permanent).

As luck would have it, tonight’s final is almost as meaningless to our Lisbon friends as it is to the rest of Dublin. They’re all Benfica fans. So you can imagine their excitement when the great club was one of three Portuguese teams to reach the semi-finals. Not only might they see their heroes win a European title for the first time since the days of Eusebio, it would happen in their new home city, in a stadium under whose shadow they now play.

With unrestrained enthusiasm, they bought their tickets even before the semi-final. They also booked a tour of the Aviva stadium, wearing Benfica shirts, so they could take pictures with a banner saying " reservado" (reserved) above the club colours.

These were duly published in Portugal, to the outrage of fans from Braga, their last-four opponents.

Then the unthinkable happened and Braga won. The lads have since offloaded their tickets in disgust, making a point not to sell them to Braga-ites, or to the even more hated fans of Porto. I suspect they won't so much as watch tonight's game on television now. And if they do, they won't care enough to curse the players or match officials, or anything other than fate, for being a filho de puta.