11 June 1988
Finally, after years of underachievement and dubious refereeing, and thanks to Jack Charlton’s gruff Geordie long-ball game plus a late Gary Mackay goal to give Scotland an unexpected away win that nobbled nearest challengers Bulgaria, Ireland qualified for a major tournament. All this was new to us; what now? Well, one tradition of England and Scotland heading to World Cups was to make an official team record, and as befitting our qualification by means of traditional English tactics and neighbourly Scottish intervention, we followed their example for Euro ’88.
Official team records are curious football artefacts. Fans rarely sing them, preferring to showcase their native wit by adapting well-known pop songs to fit the names of players. Yet in 1988 they were still being written as if they were terrace chants rather than pop songs. (This would change dramatically in the 1990s.) ‘The Boys In Green’ is typical of this slightly self-conscious approach: team barking out lyrics about itself, looking totally mortified on TV in the process. Despite going to number one, it’s lumpen and charmless, never really caught on, and you had probably forgotten about it before reading this. Still, it was better than England’s Euro ’88 song, ‘All The Way’, written and produced by those 1988 trendsetters Stock, Aitken and Waterman. As omens go, that’s impeccable.
Who wrote ‘The Boys In Green’? A Dublin journalist called Michael Carwood, who in the ’70s was the piano-keyboardist for an Irish showband called The Others, which featured future radio DJ Ronan Collins on drums. The Others’ biggest hit was a 1974 cover of ABBA’s ‘Ring Ring’ that reached number 12 in the Irish singles charts – a bigger Irish hit than the original, a post-‘Waterloo’ re-release which doesn’t appear to have charted here. You’ll never beat the Irish!
