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I haven’t been to an Irish soccer match since May 1997 when an Ireland select played Celtic at Lansdowne Road. It was Packie Bonner’s testimonial, a match that players like him are considered to deserve, to go along with the everlasting life he’d realised at the World Cup in 1990. I was a toddler watching from Ballymakenny outside Drogheda when he saved that penalty, telling Mum, I’m turning this off Mammy, pushing the button, such was her hysteria watching the shootout.

The Irish national team has occasionally moved me since – Robbie Keane and Shane Long’s unexpected goals against Germany, 13 years apart; Troy Parrott’s hat-trick against Hungary – but never enough to draw me to the Aviva, to join that collective.

We talked about that communion last week on an episode of The Ditch: The Party Line with Harry Browne and Rebecca O’Keeffe, former Irish basketball international and Stop the Game organiser, the campaign calling for a boycott of the Ireland-Israel match. She spoke about what refusing to play would mean.

“If you’re talking about sporting moments, I genuinely think if they refuse to play that would be a sporting moment that we celebrate in this country. It would constitute one of the great sporting moments of this country,” she said, recognising, “Sporting moments bring the country together collectively. It captures the nation. And that would do it.”

Late Saturday morning and early afternoon, during the few hours of hope when it looked like the team could pull out of the match, I was on Ticketmaster. Plenty of tickets available for the Austria match. Maybe. Gavin Bazunu was reported to be the player responsible for the uncertainty. So I was on the FAI’s site, seeing if they’d print me a keeper’s jersey with Bazunu on the back.

I won’t be in the Aviva for that match. I won’t be wearing an Ireland jersey.

The 3.30pm press conference confirming the match would go ahead was a shame, both the disgrace of the capitulation, but also the pity of what it could’ve been. Whether to protect or erase Gavin Bazunu, neither FAI CEO David Courell, in his team crew neck, nor manager Heimir Hallgrímsson, forced into disavowing his comments about Israeli genocide, spoke his name. He was simply a player.

Gavin Bazunu published a statement later that day. “I have reached a decision that I have not taken lightly,” he wrote. That decision was his to take. It meant that when Troy Parrott and Jack Moylan were celebrating their goals with meaningless gestures, Gavin Bazunu was alone in the team hotel, in a power immeasurable in comparison to two hands joined in a love heart.

Who tries to be of character and principle

When someone like Gavin Bazunu does something like this – when he has people like Cynthia Nixon thanking him – meanings multiply and intentions are lost. What he said: “I am a man of strong faith and try my best to be a person of character and principle therefore I feel it would be wrong to participate in the upcoming fixtures against Israel. My decision is based purely upon my personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong. There are few times where you get a chance in life to stand up for something bigger and I strongly believe that this is one of them.”

What an impressive man. How is it that saving a penalty from Cristiano Ronaldo at the age of 19 is only the second best thing you’ve done in sport.

The stand for something bigger he decided to take required him to confront the structures and systems that dictate life around us. These structures erect obstacles to expression and consciousness. They encourage us towards self-interest. Rejecting that path is hard.

Gavin Bazunu’s Irish teammates were in the hotel calling their agents, asking them if refusing to play would affect their careers. One abused him. Even international soccer players, some of them able to intuit they shouldn’t play against Israel, were made to understand that, no, they should go ahead with the game. At least one embraced this coercion enthusiastically enough to attack a teammate.

Gavin Bazunu said: no.

How fortunate for us there will always be people like him. How annoying for others, like Packie Bonner, now an FAI board member "particularly passionate” about the match proceeding, that the likes of Gavin Bazunu persist, seeking some level of rupture from the way things are.

In Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume II a woman wakes repeatedly to the same day. How can she explain it, this 18 November, over and over again, what can she do, how can she break (or fix) time, bring a new (or old) world into being? She becomes aware, conscious of the people around her, her place in the group.

She compares the feeling to going for a swim in the sea, standing on the shore in your swimming togs, knowing the water is cold, reluctant to get in. “But then someone else comes running past and jumps straight in and you follow them, caught in the other person’s slipstream, you push off and all at once you are in the water.”

Gavin Bazunu, the man of strong faith, who tries to be of character and principle, was able to maintain his connection to all of us opposed to this match. He was also able to act, facing implicit and explicit threats, the abuse from that teammate. He turned his character to action, in a decision that was deeply personal but also collective.

“All hesitancy is gone,” wrote Balle, “you were not swept along, you ran into the water all by yourself, you ducked under all by yourself, you have shouldered responsibility for your own running, diving and swimming, you no longer need to be led in any direction, you are in motion and can carry on as if you had never faltered at all.”

I’ll not be at Ireland-Austria on Thursday with an Irish keeper’s jersey on, but I do have a Southampton #31 BAZUNU jersey on the way. Over the weekend I couldn’t access the club shop for Gavin’s current club, Bolton Wanderers, for some reason but I came across a jersey for his old club on Depop. After checking with the seller if he’d ship to Ireland, he told me I’d got a good deal. “I put it up before Bazunu got very popular over the last few days.”

To Gavin Bazunu and the seller on Depop: thank you.

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