Let's get back perspective and recall a true World Cup tragedy

This is what it's like to have your World Cup ruined.

Adrian Rogan was a big sports fan and in his pocket, when the hazy mist of gun smoke had cleared, they found a blood-soaked ticket for the following day's Ulster Championship game between Down and Armagh. He had gone, in June 1994, to the Heights Bar in the little village of Loughinisland, two miles outside Downpatrick, to watch Ireland take on Italy in their opening game of the World Cup in the Giants' Stadium in New York.

He had his back to the door, his eyes on the television watching the heroics of Ray Houghton and Paul McGrath, when two thugs from the UVF's East Belfast brigade walked in, one carrying an AK-47, the other a Czech-made rifle.

As he dived instinctively for the floor, his body fell into the path of a stream of bullets, and he was hit five times in the stomach. He was barely alive a few minutes later when his father found him. He could not speak to say goodbye.

Dan McCreanor had persuaded his 87-year-old uncle, Barney Green, to go down to the Heights Bar to watch the match on the big screen. In honour of the occasion, Barney put on his best suit. He was hit by 10 bullets and died instantly. Dan was killed by a bullet that pierced his chest.

Malcolm Jenkinson was appallingly unlucky, in that the bullet fragments that severed an artery in his abdomen would not have killed him if they had struck an inch to either side.

Eamon Byrne and his brother-in-law, Patsy O'Hare, both in their 30s, went to watch the game together and were later buried together after a joint funeral service. At the inquest, Patsy's father remembered his last moments: "I lifted his anorak and put it under his head. I asked him if he was all right. He said he wasn't too bad. I stayed with my son until someone put their hand on my shoulder. I think it was a paramedic."

I REMEMBER very late that night, walking home from a friend's house where we had watched the game, with a belly full of wine and a head full of euphoria. I remember waking up the next morning in flying form and hearing the news from Loughinisland.

After that, we went through the motions, staging the parties for the next three games, trying to enter the state of blissful ignorance of the real world that is the point of the World Cup. But the heart was gone out if it. The innocence of watching Ireland on the box had been stained with an ineradicable taint of barbarism.

So forgive me if I lose patience with people whinging that Roy Keane and/or Mick McCarthy have ruined their World Cup.

Roy Keane's departure from the Irish squad is of course, a classic drama. In fact, Sophocles wrote it all down about 2,500 years before the wonderful Tom Humphries adapted it.

In his play Philoctetes, the eponymous hero, a great archer, is left behind on an island (Lemnos/Saipan) by his team-mates who are going to the World Cup at Troy. He is marooned because the wound he received from a snake-bite is so noxious that he has become unbearable. While he nurses his wound and his hatred for his former companions, they eventually realise they can never defeat Troy without him.

There is a happy ending, by the way: the Gods order Philoctetes to forget his wounds. He goes off to Troy and scores the winning goal by killing the Trojan champion, Paris.

A decade ago, when Seamus Heaney adapted Sophocles's play as The Cure at Troy, the allegory was political, not sporting. In a mock-heroic mode, Heaney's words might fit Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy: "Admiring themselves for their own long-suffering/ Highlighting old scars/ And flashing them around like decorations." But he was talking, very seriously, about the nursing of grievances that sustained a vicious conflict.

AND, Heaney's imagery in the play did in fact provide the peace process with its motto: "Once in a lifetime/ The longed-for tidal wave/ Of justice can rise up/ And hope and history rhyme."

Sport may well be the modern equivalent of ancient heroic warfare, and Roy Keane may be a figure almost as mythically powerful as Philoctetes. It is well to remember, though, how blessed we are that the resonance of this ancient story is now essentially trivial.

At stake in Heaney's re-telling of Sophocles were human lives snuffed out by hatred. At stake in Roy Keane's re-telling of Heaney is, in reality, very little.

Football actually isn't a matter of life and death. When it comes to taking the joy out of a World Cup, there is a world of difference between the bodies piled up in Loughinisland and the petulance of men behaving badly on Saipan. A farce may be less noble than a tragedy, but bitter laughter is a lot better than real tears.

Think of Adrian Rogan and Malcolm Jenkinson, of Dan McCreanor and Barney Green, of Patsy O'Hare and Eamon Byrne, of what can really cast a shadow over Ireland at a World Cup finals. Then, in their memory, put things back in perspective, forget the surly griping, and have fun.