Singing when you’re winning – even when it ends in defeat

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If you can ignore for a moment that semi-final humiliation at the hands of the rampant Germans, the abiding memory of Brazil’s recent World Cup will undoubtedly be that impassioned singing of their national anthem before every match.

And of course even as you write that you know it’s up there with asking Abraham Lincoln’s wife if – apart from the assassination of her husband at Ford’s Theatre – how did she enjoy the play.

But Brazil’s singing was an unforgettable piece of theatre too, to the point that you’d love to know what they were singing about because it just looked like they were high as kites and roaring into the camera.

Every time the music stopped, players, staff and supporters continued belting out the song as though their lives depended on it – and it was all the more impressive given how up in arms the country was over the cost of this extravaganza before it began.

Without understanding a word of it, the sheer outpouring of emotion made the hairs stand on the back of your neck, and you possibly remembered the closest we got to it here – when John ‘Bull’ Hayes cried for Ireland as Amhrán na bFhiann was belted out before we beat England in the Six Nations at Croke Park.

There are moments like that in sport that defy you not to feel the emotion of the moment – rugby has a few of them with Flower of Scotland at Murrayfield or Bread of Heaven at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, but what is more powerful that Liverpool’s Kop singing You’ll Never Walk Alone?

You don’t even question why a song from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel, should inspire such passion among football fans who would never have known that it first came to light in the second act of the musical, when Nettie Fowler, the cousin of the female protagonist Julie Jordan, sings it to comfort and encourage Julie when her husband, Billy Bigelow, the male lead, kills himself to avoid capture during a failed robbery.

But then again why would Munster rugby make an anthem from a song about prisoners being transported to Australia for stealing corn from fields around Athenry?

Or who would Leinster latch on to a ditty about a street seller – perhaps a euphemism for prostitute – called Molly Malone and her wheel barrow overflowing with cockles and mussels?

West Ham fans bellow out the fact that they are forever blowing bubbles; Chelsea believe that blue is the colour, as do Man City fans when it refers to the moon – and for reasons best known to themselves, Stoke City fans have lain claim to Tom Jones’ Delilah.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.