George Hamilton

If you look over your shoulder there, Enda, you'll see it there in the World Cup 90 folder.

Well indeed, but I thought when you asked me to come up with a few memories, the Irish memories are well rehearsed.

I suppose it's perfectly okay to go there again.

But I was thinking more in terms of they would obviously mean so much to me that there had to be others and that's why I left them out.

But, oh, of course, I mean, the greatest World Cup moment for me was clearly in Genoa that afternoon when the nation held its breath.

This kick can decide it all.

the nation holds its breath yes and just like that forever you have your different class moment yeah you can't it's there are things that you can't possibly manufacture because it's dependent upon whatever the action presents for you to comment on uh and it's it's exactly similar circumstance to what jimmy had back in 86.

Yeah, but this was of an entirely different nature because there were so many more involved.

It's a bigger, representing a bigger football association, the Irish diaspora.

And there'd never been any of this before 88, in Euro 88.

And what struck me then was, you know, so much sport in Ireland is locally based.

And the most popular sport in the GAA, it's all county based.

So you wear your county colours.

And I mean, that's so obvious nowadays that people proudly wear their county colours, even if it's not...

in the county.

You know, I often wonder what the Kerry shirts are doing knocking about Belfast, but maybe that's because Kerry are so successful.

Anyway, leaving that to one side, there had never been an opportunity to wear a green shirt and say, I'm Irish.

And Germany gave them that.

And Germany kind of came

about it kind of crept up on us I think in a way because we didn't actually qualify ourselves it took another it was another match that made the table work for us and away we went but the World Cup being well won the World Cup and we've made it for the first time but also we'd had our kind of trial run in Germany on a two-week tournament and now this was a big much bigger thing so many many more people went and