You may have tried one of those online tests in which you’re asked to watch a group of basketball players throwing the ball to each other and count the number of passes.
It’s only after you give your answer that you’re told to watch the clip again and see if there’s anything you missed. And that’s when you see the man in a bear suit moonwalking across the court.
Psychologists cite such cases as examples of inattentional blindness, the phenomenon whereby we fail to see something fully visible, but unexpected, right in front of us because we’re focused on something else.
The brain simply doesn’t register the moonwalking bear; which is not quite the same as registering it but instantly discounting it for being so unbelievable in a kicking-Bishop-Brennan-up-the-backside kind of way.
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It’s not clear whether any of these phenomena were at play when The Irish Times invited readers recently to nominate Ireland’s greatest Irish sportsperson of all time.
As soon as the call went out, nominations started flying in at such a rate that we had to go back and check we hadn’t accidentally offered a cash prize. As it happens, we wouldn’t have had to pay up anyway, because everyone overlooked the right answer. Eoin Morgan, it seems, is a moonwalking bear.
Okay, maybe we shouldn’t be too emphatic about these things, but it is remarkable that not one person nominated this Dubliner.
After all, who fits the criteria better than him? In terms of individual talent, he was not just thrilling but innovative, blasting huge scores with spectacular style, playing reverse sweeps with a variety and gusto never previously seen on this side of the world.
For all his fireworks with the cricket bat, he is celebrated even more for his impact on the collective – changing, with fabulous moxie, a country’s entire mindset about one of its national sports, inspiring a derring-do that transformed the way the one-day game was approached everywhere.
And if it’s silverware you want, how many other Irish people have led their team to the world title, prevailing in one of the most dramatic finals ever seen in any sport?
The fact that victory in the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup came on the back of ignominious elimination from the 2015 edition only adds to the appeal of Morgan’s achievement, as, of course, does his background long before that: because if against-the-odds triumphs are your thing, the story of the boy from Rush, Co Dublin, who grew up to be hailed by England (and paid fortunes by sides from India to Australia) for transforming cricket is not easily beaten.
Yet, it seems, the other sense in which Morgan is outstanding is that he doesn’t even enter people’s minds when it came to thinking of the greatest Irish sportsperson. No doubt that’s down to folks concentrating on a criterion we didn’t mention: the identity of the teams played for.
Do we deny Morgan his Irishness because he played most of his career with England, the country of his mother’s birth and a country that, given cricket’s system at the time, offered a career that Ireland couldn’t?
If asked for a list of great tennis-playing Czechs, would you omit Martina Navratilova? Should Eusébio, the star of the 1966 World Cup with Portugal, have eschewed international football until his native Mozambique gained independence (by which time he was 33)?
Whether due to political arrangements, family history or offbeat happenstance, national identities are complex and subject to evolution. Why refuse to recognise that? This is a pertinent question in today’s Ireland.
If a person is born in Borris-in-Ossory to a Cameroonian father and a French mother, what nationality should they feel? Surely that depends on many things, most of them unique to that person.
One thing’s for certain, it’s not a mathematical question. If they felt like parsing their identity into fractions, fine. But if they considered themselves 100 per cent Irish, 100 per cent Cameroonian and 100 per cent French, then that’d be fair enough too.
Or to put it another way, who is more Irish: Conor McGregor or his fellow Crumlin native Roberto ‘Pico’ Lopes, the Shamrock Rovers stalwart who plays international football for Cape Verde? The answer’s obvious unless you’re looking to cause trouble.
How about Dennis Cirkin, the 23-year-old full-back who’s been called up to the Republic of Ireland squad for Friday’s friendly with Senegal? Born in Dublin to Latvian parents, with whom he moved to London when he was aged three, he is eligible to represent three countries.
Maybe he could swap perspectives with some of Friday’s opposition; Senegal having finally been crowned African champions in 2021, with a team half consisting of players born elsewhere, including captain Kalidou Koulibaly, who had played in the Under-20 World Cup for France.
If Cirkin plays his way into a position where he has to pick who to play for in a competitive match, he’ll have to squeeze himself into one shirt forever. And that shows up a way Fifa is failing us. Yes, another one.
As the custodians of the most popular sport on the planet, Fifa has a responsibility to lead on important matters, as opposed to lag behind. We say important matters, but really Fifa has it easy when it comes to issues of nationality because the consequences of their decisions aren’t as heavy those of immigration authorities, for instance. There’s nothing noble stopping Fifa from leaning into openness.
One of the contradictions of Gianni Infantino’s Fifa is that as it expands the World Cup to include as many countries as possible, it also enforces an uncomfortably narrow understanding of national identity. Pick one country and stick with it forever. What good reason is there for saying Cirkin can never represent Latvia if he appears in one competitive international for Ireland or England?
Of course, just like VAR in football has to draw an offside line somewhere, there has to be some form of national eligibility boundary or the system would be unworkable: we probably shouldn’t have a situation where players could switch from one country to another at half-time if they felt like it.
But why must the cut be permanent? How about limiting a pledge of oneness to one tournament cycle? That way, for instance, if winger Nico Williams decided one day that, having delivered glory with Spain, he felt like playing for Ghana with his brother Iñaki, then he could do so.
It may be too late for any such change to take effect in time for the 2026 World Cup in North America. But it’s high time Fifa put its mind to seeing the moonwalking bear and recognising that people contain multitudes.
