DUBLIN, Ireland - Paddy Cullan's pub advertised on its window, "Come watch the World Cup!" but come game time Saturday morning, its door was locked and the surrounding streets deserted. Then three young men stealing furtive glances and wearing floppy Irish tricolor hats darted in a side entrance.
A knock on the door produced a nervous-looking man in an apron. Standing outside, you could hear the cheering inside.
"No pub in Dublin will be open or showing the game this morning," the man says in a fiction worthy of native sons Joyce, Beckett and Yeats. But in a city with a pub on virtually every block, only a few were licensed to sell alcohol during the biggest televised sporting event in years. Ireland's opener in the World Cup tournament in Japan began at 7:30 a.m. here, three hours before the legal drinking hour in pubs.
"An Irish Joke!" roared a newspaper headline. Barkeepers responded in a show of resourcefulness.
A sports bar won government approval just hours before the match for an early hours license normally reserved for the dockside pubs. Other establishments appeared shuttered but whisked in regulars through back doors. A dinner theater found that it could use its entertainment license as long as it held a "show." It projected the match on a large screen in an auditorium where a band had wrapped up its set hours before and charged soccer fans $25 a head.
"It's unprecedented having it so early, but really this is bigger than the national elections," says Colm O'Rourke, 28, the promoter who arranged the dinner-theater production, where Irish stout and Japanese sake flowed like the nearby River Liffey by 7:30 a.m.
In Ireland, the biggest soccer news involves the squad's star player, fiery midfielder Roy Keane: He was sent home before the tournament for cursing out coach Mick McCarthy over the conditions of the practice field. The row between player and coach attracted more people to The Irish Times' Web site than did the events of Sept. 11.
Prime Minister Bertie Ahern offered to help mediate. Business executives put at least a half-dozen corporate jets at Keane's disposal to whisk him back to Japan if the dispute could be settled, to no avail.
"You can't send home your best player," grouses Keith O'Neill, 16, of Dublin, wearing a felt top hat in the national colors of green, white and orange, and an Irish flag around his shoulders.
Opinions appear to be split as to who was at fault: the petulant player or the headstrong coach, but reminders of the argument are everywhere, including billboards with Keane's image throughout Dublin. Marketing had unintentionally morphed into mockery: "There is no substitute," proclaims a soft-drink ad with Keane's picture.
Soccer - or football, as it is known nearly everywhere except the United States - wasn't always religion in Ireland. The country's native games are hurling, akin to field hockey; camogie, a women's version; and Gaelic football, a brutish mix of soccer and rugby. About 20,000 teams, often tied to neighborhood taverns, play Gaelic football, whose championship drew 73,000 fans to Dublin's Croke Park last fall.
Soccer gained popularity 15 years ago when an Irish team qualified for the European championship. When Ireland earned its first berth in a World Cup in 1990 and advanced to the quarterfinals, the game became central to the national psyche.
Paul McDermott, a spokesman for the Irish Sports Council, compares Ireland's achievement in the 1990 World Cup to the U.S. victory over the Soviet Union in Olympic hockey in 1980. Ireland's ascent in soccer coincided with a more outward political vision, an economic boom and a wave of immigrants coming from Europe, Asia and Africa to new jobs.
"It gave the country a real boost," McDermott says. "Everybody from grannies to children got behind the team."
"The Irish are one of the most sports-mad nations on earth," says Eric Dunning, a sociologist at the University of Leicester in England. Dunning, who teaches part of the year at University College Dublin and has written on spectator hooliganism, says soccer violence is rare in Ireland because of a "nationalistic sentiment" that elevates the sport.
Any prospect of rowdiness last weekend was done in by fatigue at the Sugar Club, the Dublin dinner-theater. About 60 tickets were sold for the telecast of the Ireland-Cameroon match, club officials said, but only half that many fans showed - perhaps discouraged by the absence of the star player Keane or by having to rise early on a holiday weekend.
"The idea was to stay out all last night, but I'm sure some guys fell asleep at 4 a.m. and woke at 10 a.m.," says Elke Pascoe, a club spokeswoman. Those who made it to the Sugar Club had painted their faces in team colors and did not lack for enthusiasm.
Cameroon scored first, but the Irish fans sang beery chants, blew noisemakers and danced when Ireland tied the match at 1. The draw will help Ireland's chance of progressing to the next round if it defeats Germany tomorrow or Saudi Arabia on June 11.
Although only a small first step toward the World Cup trophy, the draw was celebrated all weekend in pubs and in banner headlines.
Even a spokesman for the Gaelic Athletic Association - a group founded in the 1880s to revive the native games that the English once banished from Ireland - acknowledges the import's passion.
"We might all be at each other's throats, but with soccer there is only one team," Fergal McGill says. "It can mobilize the nation."