THE TOUR GUIDE brought us to the street corner where Franz Ferdinand was shot and breathlessly told us how the world changed.
But you don’t recall what was said as much as what you saw, the glares of three stone-faced old men from across the street, all the horrors of the world stored in those weary eyes.
We saw the effects of horror through our own eyes on the foothills south of Sarajevo, where thousands of white crosses mark the victims of a civil war which tore the old Yugoslavia apart and did the same to so many families.
Edin Dzeko’s was one of those, our bus driver told us. As a child, playing street football, a friend of Dzeko’s, standing just yards away, was killed by an explosion, his family home destroyed. “I lived with my grandparents in a basement, the whole family – maybe 15 people – crammed into an apartment of 35 square metres,” Dzeko, the former Manchester City forward, said. “I was only young and I cried often. Every day you could hear the guns firing.”
The shooting had long since stopped by the time we boarded the minibus that took us out of Sarajevo and down to Zenica for the Euro 2016 play-off, the night Robbie Brady and Dzeko’s goals led to a 1-1 draw.
Five years on, however, all those crosses on field after field after field is what the mind drifts back to.
One of the gifts this profession gives you, if life is kind, is time. In our youth, often it was difficult to separate what was important from what was not. But even amid the smog of an industrial town and the fog of a November night, middle-aged eyes offered you a clarity you once lacked.
All around us was a gentler form of nationalism, Bosnian and Ireland fans mixing happily, drinking heavily and expressing a passion for their country through a love of sport.
You couldn’t fail to note how this supposedly pointless plaything was bringing out the best in us whereas those fields filled with white crosses highlighted mankind at its worst.
You also remember different coloured crosses, greyer memorials from your own youth, the black and white picture of a friend’s father who’d been murdered in the name of Irish freedom. You remember another bus journey, with the same friend and a few others who politicians would have categorised as belonging to ‘the other side’.
It wasn’t just a physical border those guys crossed between Newry and Dundalk but a metaphorical one. A game of rugby, between Ireland and France in the old Five Nations, brought us to Dublin, our friend easily able to distinguish between the violent and the sporting side of Irish nationalism.
Now let’s be clear. The reason we went to Lansdowne Road wasn’t part of some sociological study. Some of us were Catholic, some Protestant, but none of us cared about labels or politics, not when the important issues of drinking, cavorting and figuring out which pubs would accept our fake ID had to be discussed. Rugby was the reason we boarded that bus and travelled that road.
Yesterday evening a different group of people boarded a different kind of bus and made their way to the same address. Lansdowne Road is the Aviva now. November internationals have been rebranded the Autumn Nations Cup. And something else has also changed.
To play rugby for Ireland, you can be born and bred in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia or even Hawaii and accept an invitation to try your luck in one of the Irish provinces knowing that a serious perk may be available if the ball hops your way.
Well, it has bounced kindly for James Lowe, Bundee Aki, Quinn Roux, CJ Stander and Jamison Gibson-Park. All are termed project players, each the benefactors of a residency rule that many reasonable judges consider a stupid one.
And it is. International competition, in its purest form, was initially created to give us the chance to revel in the deeds of some of our own doing their bit against the best athletes in the planet.
Understandably then when rules change, when dust dirties a once clear concept, when home-born players don’t get the chance to pull the green shirt over their heads, you can see why people get miffed.
But again your mind drifts back, to your friend and his ability to navigate his thoughts through the complex issue of identity and nationalism. If a teenager was able to see two sides of an argument then surely it is not beyond us adults?
Stander has spoken in the past about the criticism he has received on social media, his South African heritage a trigger for the dissent. Roux, too, has been the recipient of online abuse but last night he had his best game yet in an Ireland shirt, he and Lowe the try scorers in Ireland’s 32-9 win.
Neither of them dreamed up this residency rule, and even if they are benefiting from it financially, then so be it. They are much more than tourists. The sight of Lowe holding back the tears last night as he talked about being separated from his family on such ‘a proud and personal night’ made you realise something else. The ultimate compliment a person can pay a nation is choosing to live in it.
These players have made Ireland their home. They aren’t alone, either. Nearly a fifth of this country’s population were born outside Ireland, so words of welcome or hate to a quintet of rugby players will be heard far beyond the tiny pockets of New Zealand and South African communities who live here.
And while we’re not naïve enough to think for a second that sport, especially rugby, is some magical force that can unite the political left and right, we do know it has sent out powerful messages in the past and has the chance to do so again.
As people, Roux, Lowe, Gibson-Park are symbols of what Ireland has become, a more diverse place, open to do business with anyone from anywhere in the world.
So if they’re told often enough the rule is ridiculous and that Paddy from down the road deserves his place more than you, then effectively we’re saying ‘you’re not welcome here, pal’.
We’re editing our own tourist pitch, content to be the land of a hundred thousand welcomes so long as you sign up to the terms and conditions.
Is that what we stand for? You hope not because we’re not just a better team for having Stander, Lowe, Roux, Aki and Gibson-Park. We’re a better place.
