Give it a lash: The History-of-Irish-Football

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Football in Ireland finds itself in a strange position. Although media coverage would give the impression that the country´s sport-mad public share their passion equally among the ¨big four¨ (the ancient Irish sports of Gaelic football and hurling, collectively referred to as GAA, due to them being administered by the name sake organization the Gaelic Athletic Association, football and rugby) statistics would suggest that football has done the impossible, and usurped the GAA´s unassailable position as the Ireland´s most popular sport. Over 400,000 people are now involved in football in Ireland every weekend, more than any other sport in the country and in the 2017/18 TV season, although the All-Ireland Football final was the number #1 most watched sporting event, the second and third most were Ireland´s home play-off defeat to Denmark and England´s World Cup semi-final defeat to Croatia! The figure of 400,000 plus people involved regularly with football is actually slightly bigger than that in Croatia, a country with a similar population to Ireland who shocked the world by reaching the World Cup final in 2018. Despite it's massive popularity here Ireland is not, nor has it ever been, a footballing superpower. In fact since the Republic of Ireland national team's heyday in the 1990s, it's likely that majority of football enthusiasts further a field than the British Isles and the Irish diaspora have seldom spared a thought for Emerald Isle and it's two national teams, save for the rare occasions, at least in the case of other European nations, when their own national teams are drawn in qualification against one or other of them. The history of football in Ireland is, unsurprisingly, long and complex but part of the reason for its complexity are a series of factors unique to the island of Ireland. Had a number of factors developed differently its not hard to believe that Ireland could have produced a national team that, at very least, enjoyed much more consistent qualification for major tournaments or, at best, saw its self from time to time as being near to the summit of the European game. In reality, both of the island's national teams occupy a weird middle ground, somewhere between being either mongst the worst performing big teams in world football or the most over-achieving minnows.

Ireland was still the first countries in the world where the beautiful game became popular, obviously due to its proximity and cultural connections to Britain. Ireland´s first football club, Cliftonville from Belfast, was founded in 1879 by John McAlery. McAlery been introduced to football while travelling in Scotland and had organized the first game of football ever played in the country, a friendly between Scottish teams Queen's Park and Caledonians just a year earlier in 1878. The Irish Football Association (IFA) was founded a year after Cliftonville´s formation in 1880. It was only the fourth national football association to be founded in the world, after England, Scotland and Wales. They organized Ireland´s first football competition, the Irish Cup, in 1881. The first edition saw Moyola Park, who surprisingly came from Castledawson a small farming village about 60 miles from Belfast, which is better known today as the birthplace of Nobel prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, beat Cliftonville in the final.

In 1884, Ireland began participating in the world’s first international football competition, the annual Home Nations Championship, along with England, Scotland and Wales.
This tournament was contested for exactly 100 years before being cancelled in 1984 due to fixture congestion. It was played in a league format, where each of the four teams played each other once, very similar to the Six Nations, Europe´s premier rugby competition, which began around the same time but is still being contested today. Due to its small playing population, Ireland seldom managed to win any games during the early years of the competition´s existence, only winning the competition for the first time in 1914. The Irish Football League began in 1890. As it was founded a week before the Scottish League it is only the second national league in the world after the English Football League.
In the initial decades of its existence, the Irish League was dominated by teams from Belfast.

Unlike the other major sporting organizations in Ireland, the IFA was based in Belfast. In the early days of the sport in Ireland, football was really only played by clubs in Belfast and Dublin, the country’s two biggest cities. Similar to Wales, where rugby became the most popular sport, football struggled to catch the imagination of the Irish public due to competition from rugby and the GAA. The GAA had been founded in 1884 to preserve and protect Ireland’s indigenous games in the face of the growing popularity of football and rugby.

Initially, sport in Ireland was sharply divided along social and religious lines.
Rugby was the game of middle class Protestants and Gaelic games were for rural Catholics. Football was played by both Catholics and Protestants, but only in urban areas (the game gradually began to spread outside of its traditional bases of Dublin and Belfast over the following decades into other large cities and towns such as Cork, Derry and Athlone.) The success of the GAA and the instigation of their annual All-Ireland Championships in both hurling and Gaelic football did much to assure that Gaelic games remained the dominant sports in the Irish countryside until well into the
20th century, with some areas only fully embracing football as late as the 1990s.

Many people in Ireland were suspicious of football, considering it a Protestant or “British” game and for it to be unpatriotic for Irish people to play it. Until the 70s, people had to choose whether they wanted to play Gaelic Games or football as the GAA imposed a ban on its members from participating in, or even watching, football or rugby. The penalty for breaking the band was no longer being allowed to be a member of a GAA club. Even though the ban was abolished in the 70s, even today some members of the GAA are still suspicious of football. In 2018, the County Cork GAA board refused permission for their home stadium to be used for a charity football match in memory of Liam Miller, a former Republic of Ireland international who had died at a young age from cancer. They only finally changed their mind following an angry outcry from the media and public. Consequently, during the entire 20th century, Ireland was probably the only country in Western Europe where football was not the most popular sport.

With Ireland failing to be much of a force on the field in its early days, its most important contribution to football during this period, and ultimately, its most important in history, was the invention of the penalty kick. The penalty for a foul committed in the box was the brainchild of William McCrum, a goalkeeper for Milford FC in County Armagh, in what today is part of Northern Ireland. McCrum brought his proposal to the IFA in 1890, who in turn submitted it to the International Football Association Board a year later who then ratified it as a permanent feature of the laws of the game.
 

In 1921 after eight hundred years of occupation, Ireland won partial independence from Britain, becoming a ¨self-governing dominion¨ of the British Empire. Over the next thirty years, through gradual negotiation, the Irish government removed all of Britain´s remaining political influence in the country and Ireland became the completely independent “Republic of Ireland” in 1948. The one aspect that they never managed to change was the status of the north of Ireland. In 1921, the majority of people in a the northern province of Ulster announced that they did not want to become part of the newly independent Ireland. Instead, a new border was drawn up and the area contained within it became a new,
semi-self governing, region of the United Kingdom known as “Northern Ireland.”
Ulster had been the only area of the country where Protestants (mostly the descendants of Scottish and English settlers who had started migrating to the province in the 17th century) were in a majority and the province had the highest incomes and standards of living of anywhere on the island. Fearing they would lose their privileges as part of a newly independent, and overwhelmingly Catholic, Irish republic, the Ulster Protestants threatened the British Government with a campaign of terrorist violence if they were forced to be part of the new ¨Free State.¨ As a result, they were permitted to remain as part of the UK.
The new “statelet” consisted of six of the nine counties within the province of Ulster (Ulster “Unionist” politicians wisely chose to exclude the three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities) and Northern Ireland is still a part of the UK today, exactly 100 years later as of 2021, despite decades of violence over the region´s destiny.
 

During the partition of the country, the Irish Rugby Football Union did everything they could to ensure that the organization did not split apart and that there would be just one national team that would represent the whole island, north and south. In rugby, Ireland is still represented by a 32 county
¨All-Ireland¨ team that is comprised of players from both Northern Ireland and the Republic to this day. The reason this continued cooperation amongst the rugby community was possible was largely due to the fact that at the time rugby was a game almost exclusively played by Protestants and that the majority of those involved in organizing the sport came from similar cultural backgrounds, regardless of which side of the now divided island they came from. As football was played by both Catholics and Protestants, cooperation between the two different factions became increasingly difficult.

For years even before partition, Dublin based clubs had accused the IFA of showing favour towards Belfast clubs and of selecting mostly northern players for the national team. Indeed, the bias was so blatant that between the Ireland national teams first game in 1892 and partition 39 years later only six Ireland home games had been held in Dublin with all the rest being played in Belfast.
In September 1921, years of frustration spilled over after Dublin club Shelbourne were ordered to play their replay of an Irish Cup game against Belfast team Glenavon in Belfast, even though the first leg had also been played there. In the middle of what were understandably tense times, this was the straw that broke the camels back. The Dublin clubs formed a new association based in the new capital of the ¨Irish Free State¨, known as the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). The same year, it founded a new league (named the League of Ireland, in contrast to the Belfast IFA’s Irish League) and selected players for its own national team, who made their debut in a game against Bulgaria in the football tournament of the 1924 Olympics in Paris. The FAI´s ¨Irish Free State¨ team were the first team from the island of Ireland to attempt to qualify for the World Cup, entering the qualifiers for the second tournament in 1934, while the IFA´s ¨Ireland¨ team declined to enter all three of the tournaments that took place before the Second World War, in keeping with England, Scotland and Wales, who also declined to enter the competitions.

During the first ten years after partition, both the IFA and the FAI met and negotiated on many occasions to try to attempt to re-establish a team that represented both associations, but were never able to agree on terms. For three decades, the two associations both selected national teams that they claimed represented the whole of Ireland, north and south, and called up players from both sides of the border (in the days when footballers wages were less than spectacular, many players played for both teams, being financially unable to say no to an extra pay day.) This situation continued until FIFA intervened in 1949 when the Belfast IFA entered its team in the World Cup qualifiers for the first time. Since then, the IFA has selected a team only consisting of players that represent the six counties of Northern Ireland and the FAI has selected a team that represents the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland. The majority of members of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland generally do not support the Northern Ireland national team (they regard the existence of Northern Ireland as an illegal occupation by British forces of a part of what should be an independent country) and support the Republic of Ireland team instead. The Northern Ireland national team has gone on to become one of the defining symbols of the Northern Protestant identity, with British Union Jack flags and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish songs frequently being displayed by their supporters at matches. This is a very confusing situation as the Northern Ireland team still plays in green shirts that have a Celtic cross and shamrock as part of their symbol.

Only once since 1949 has a national team played together comprised of players from both northern and southern Ireland, at a special match played for charity in July 1973. The event was organized as a show of solidarity amongst members of the Irish football community in opposition to the violence that was tearing Northern Ireland apart during the decade. A team that played under the uninspiring moniker of ¨Shamrock Rovers XI¨ (as it had gone ahead without the support of the IFA, who objected to the team using the name ¨Ireland¨) faced off against the world champions Brazil in Landsdowne Road in Dublin, narrowly losing 4-3. The player that organized the game, Northern Ireland and Wolverhampton Wanderers´ great Derek Dougan, was never selected for Northern Ireland again, indicating to many the level of resistance the football establishment in Northern Ireland has towards the idea of an All-Ireland national team. The Republic and Northern Ireland didn´t even play against each other until a European Championship qualifier in 1979, due to tensions between the two associations and fears of sectarian violence between the fans.

Sectarianism has long been a major problem for the game in Northern Ireland, from the early favouritism of the IFA towards Belfast clubs with mostly Protestant players, up to the present day.
In 1949, Belfast Celtic, a team with a principally Catholic fan base, who had been the Northern Irish league champions the previous season, voluntarily dissolved after their players were attacked on the field by angry fans of their opposition, the principally Protestant supported Linfield, during a local derby game. In 1972, Derry City, a successful club from Northern Ireland´s second largest city, the mostly Catholic city of Derry, were forced to withdraw from the Northern Irish League system over fears of terrorist attack on their home stadium. Derry spent thirteen years as an amateur team, playing in local Saturday morning leagues, until, in 1985, FIFA gave them special dispensation to join the League of Ireland in the Republic. The worst incident in recent times came in 2002 when the Northern Ireland national team´s captain, the Catholic and (even worse) Glasgow Celtic player Neil Lennon, permanently retired from international football at the age of only 31, after receiving a bullet in the post as a form of threat. The treatment of Lennon and other incidents like this perhaps inspired the decision of
Darron Gibson, a young and, at least, at the time, up and coming, Manchester United player, to declare in 2007 that he wanted to represent the Republic of Ireland instead of Northern Ireland. Although Gibson is from Derry, he is a Catholic, and like most Catholics in Northern Ireland identifies as Irish and carries an Irish passport. Although Gibson´s decision was controversial and caused the IFA to seek the intervention of FIFA, it was quickly decided that, as a holder of an Irish passport, Gibson was perfectly entitled to play for the Republic. Gibson´s career failed to live up to his early promise but his decision to represent the country of his citizenship rather than that of his birth has had a huge impact on football on the island. A number of high-profile Northern Ireland born players, most notably Shane Duffy and James McClean, have transferred their allegiances to the Republic in the past decade. Although this did not precipitate the avalanche of allegiance switching the IFA feared, the practice is still continuing and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.

 

At the time of partition in 1921, the population of the Republic of Ireland was 3.5 million. The population of Northern Ireland was 1.5 million. Given how small the populations of both territories were (and how much smaller the playing populations would have been due to competition for players from the GAA and rugby) both Ireland teams should have been among the weakest national teams in Europe and provided guaranteed victories for any of the bigger European nations that played against them. While Northern Ireland had little opportunity to show their skills to the wider footballing world, as they seldom played games against opponents outside of the UK until the 1950s, the Republic frequently punched above their weight, pulling off many famous victories against the elite teams of Europe during the middle decades of the 20th century. Famous results from this period included beating Germany 5-2 in 1936 (in a game where both German and Irish players gave Nazi salutes while the German anthem was being played), beating Spain 3-2 in 1947 and, most famously, a 2-0 against England at Goodison Park in Liverpool in 1949. Although it was only a friendly, the game against England was a historic result for the Republic of Ireland as they became the first team from outside the UK to beat England at home. This became a result that is often forgotten about, with most people incorrectly thinking Hungary´s famous 6-3 demolition of England in Wembley in 1954 was their first home defeat to a foreign nation, likely due to most from outside the British Isles forgetting the southern part of Ireland is not part of the UK, as is frequently forgotten. Indeed, in the decades that followed immediately after partition, Irish victories against Europe's heavyweights were far more frequent than they are nowadays. The biggest problem both the Republic and Northern Ireland suffered from during this period was a lack of consistency; a 3-0 win against France could often be followed a month later by a 5-1 defeat to Yugoslavia or a 3-2 defeat to the then underwhelming Turkey. This inconsistency proved to be both Irish teams downfall time and time again, preventing them from qualifying for all but one major tournament until the 1980s.

The one glorious exception to this rule was Northern Ireland's surprise qualification for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. After finally breaking their decades of splendid isolation in the Home Nations Championship, Northern Ireland eliminated both Italy and Portugal in their qualifying group before impressively making it all the way to the Quarter Finals of the tournament. In the tournament itself, they drew with the defending world champions West Germany and beat Czechoslovakia twice (due to the complicated rules of the tournament at the time) to progress from their group to the quarter-finals where they were eliminated by France. At that time, conservative Protestants controlled Northern Ireland’s local government and the team had to get special dispensation from back home to allow them to play on a Sunday, as was required for them to compete in the World Cup. Northern Ireland´s goalkeeper Harry Gregg (who had survived Manchester United´s infamous Munich air disaster earlier that year) was named as the best goalkeeper of the tournament and the team's right-winger Billy Bingham would later go on to become N.I. national team manager, with great distinction.

1958 was a complete one-off in Irish football history until the 1980s; the Republic of Ireland tried repeatedly to qualify for a World Cup or European Championship but despite battling heroically, failed every time. Perhaps their best effort before the 80s was their qualification campaign for the 1976 European Championships where they again fell victim to traditional Irish inconsistency. Despite beating the Soviet Union 3-0 and Turkey 4-0 in Dublin, they failed to qualify after losing away to Switzerland in their penultimate game. The victory over the Soviets was probably the best result in their history up to that point, an amazing result when taking account the fact that a team from a country with a population of 3.5 million beat a team from a country of almost 300 million.
 

As well as the small playing population, the Republic´s cause was not helped by the famously disorganized and often corrupt administration of the Football Association of Ireland. In a country which has a reputation for haphazard planning, short-term thinking and nepotism, perhaps no organization better embodies these values than the FAI. The FAI have always been famous for under investing in facilities and for treating its players very poorly. This can be demonstrated by the fact that between 1958 and 1988 Ireland played Poland in international friendlies seventeen times, despite the destination being generally despised but both Irish fans and players alike.
The reason for the frequency of the fixture was due to the good relationships that members of the FAI board had with their Polish counterparts, and the good hospitality, food, drink and accommodation that they enjoyed when visiting the other's country. The most famous example of this small-minded thinking came in 1965 when Ireland and Spain were drawn in playoff in order to qualify for the following year´s World Cup in England. Following both teams winning their home game, in the time before away goals or even aggregate, the tie was to be decided by a single stand alone game played at a neutral venue, with the FAI (initially) favouring London, which had a very large Irish population, and the Spanish FA favouring Paris, which had an equally large Spanish population. After some negotiations, the FAI agreed to allow the game be played in Paris, even though it would put their team at a disadvantage, in exchange for being allowed to receive the entirety of the money earned in ticket sales. The game was indeed like a home fixture for the Spanish and Ireland lost the game 1-0. As well as putting the well being of the sport as a distant second to their own interests, the football administrators contempt for their own players also appeared to be limitless. The former Ireland international Eamon Dunphy, who later went on to become one of Ireland's best known journalists, once recalled being asked to sit on the floor on cross-continent train trip as the officials sat in first class despite the fact that they hadn't bothered to book enough seats for all the players!

With the football authorities doing little to help the cause, perhaps the reason for the relative strength of both Irish national teams despite the small playing population was Irish football's relationship to England. Before the 1990's, it was rare for professional footballers to play in leagues outside of their own country, but due to Ireland's cultural, historical and economic links to Britain, the best Irish players from both north and south of the border had always gone to ply their trade in England, just like Welsh and Scottish players. It is likely that the opportunity to play at a higher level of football helped to raise the standards of Ireland's top players and benefited the national team. Football fans in Ireland also began to develop affection for English clubs that had strong Irish connections and often had Irish players. Manchester United and Liverpool became hugely popular, as did Scottish clubs Glasgow Celtic (themselves founded by an Irish priest who was living in Glasgow as an outlet for the local immigrant community), who became very popular with Irish Catholics, and Glasgow Rangers, who became very popular with Protestants in Northern Ireland.
Among the hundreds of Irish players who played in Britain during the middle of the 20th century, some of the most notable names included:

• Peter Doherty, from Magharafelt in County Derry in Ireland Ireland, who scored over 200 goals for various Football League clubs from the 30s through to the 50s.

• Jackie Carey from Dublin, captain of Manchester United during the 40s and 50s and the first non-English player to be named Footballer of the Year in England.

• Danny Blanchflower from Belfast, captain of Tottenham Hotspur during their double winning season of 1961, who also captained Northern Ireland at the 1958 World Cup.

• Johnny Giles, also from Dublin, considered by many to be the Republic´s greatest ever player, who was the star of the great all-conquering Leeds United team of the 60s and 70s.

Undoubtedly, the greatest and most famous Irish player in Britain during these decades was George Best. Best was a Protestant from Belfast who became famous with Manchester United in the 1960s after graduating from their youth academy. He won two league titles and an FA Cup with United in the 60s before the peak year of his career came in 1968. In that year, he won the European Cup with United and the Ballon D'Or award for best player in Europe, unsurprisingly, the only Irish player ever to do so. When Best first came to the public´s attention, it is probably fair to say that English football had never seen a player like him before. Best was an unbelievable natural talent with an ability to dribble and beat players that can only be compared to the likes Maradona and Messi. He also became the first footballer in England to become a celebrity outside of football, helped not just by his unique talent but also by his good looks and fashion sense. In Spain, he was nicknamed "El Beatle" for his long hair. Famously, outside of football, Best´s other great interests in life were drinking and partying.

Even though he was only 23 at the time, the European Cup of 1968 proved to be the last trophy Best ever won. He chose to stay with United for a number of years after ´68 even though at that point they were a team in decline. At the age of 29, he left Manchester for good, deciding he was no longer willing to make the sacrifices to his social life that elite level football demanded. He spent the rest of his career traveling the world, playing in leagues as far afield as South Africa or the USA, anywhere that would pay him to play football while also tolerating his drinking. He played for Northern Ireland through the 60s and 70s, but his time playing for them came in between 1958 in Sweden and Northern Ireland's next qualification and he is often included on lists of the best players never to play in a World Cup. Not interested in politics, Best was always publicly in favour of a united Ireland team as he knew it would increase his chances of getting to play in a major tournament. He died in 2005 at the early age of 59 after years of alcohol abuse. His funeral brought Belfast to a standstill; he is probably the only celebrity in Northern Ireland who was equally loved by the Catholic and Protestant communities and certainly the only Northern Irish footballer who is also a hero in the Republic of Ireland.

If Irish football's relationship with England benefited the national teams, it most certainly did not benefit the two domestic football leagues on the island. From the beginning, Ireland´s domestic football was at a disadvantage, having to face competition for the attention of the country´s small population from the twin threats of rugby and (especially) GAA. The typically small attendances led to lower revenues, meaning that, even today, only the very best clubs on either side of the border could afford to be full time, professional teams. With the ease with which Irish players could find transfers to English clubs, this created a permanent drain, where all the best players would leave the country, further diminishing the quality of domestic football. This created a further cycle, where the presence of the best Irish players at English clubs only cemented their appeal even more with fans in Ireland, making these fans even less inclined to go and spend their money on tickets for local games. Football was not only losing the battle in Ireland against GAA and rugby, it was also losing the battle with a more glamorous version of itself across the Irish Sea, with many of the more devoted fans spending their weekend on buses and ferries across the water to actually attend the games of their chosen teams. The growth of domestic football was so stunted that, in the Republic, the League of Ireland only expanded to having a second division in the 80s, with the Irish Football League in the north only doing the same in the 90s.

A brief period known as the League of Ireland´s ¨golden age¨ took place in the 50s and 60s, with attendances at domestic games in the Republic far higher than ever before or since. This era was permanently ended with the growing availability of English football on TV, beginning with the initiation of the BBCs flagship football show, Match of the Day, in 1964. The GAA´s ban on its members attending foreign games was still in existence at this time, meaning any GAA fan seen in the crowd at a football match faced being excluded from their local GAA club. This made the possibility of watching higher quality football in the privacy of their own homes an irresistible prospect for people who enjoyed both sports. League of Ireland attendances began to diminish and have never recovered since. Surprisingly, even in these years, the greater revenue did little to improve the League of Ireland´s quality.
South Dublin team Shamrock Rovers, the league´s most successful team in terms of trophies won, set a never to be broken record of six consecutive appearances in the now defunct UEFA Cup Winner´s Cup competition for winning the FAI Cup (the Republic´s national football competition) for six years in a row. Despite this, they never progressed beyond the first round of the competition. Before the break-up of the Soviet Union and the expansion of the number of nations participating in UEFA competitions, Irish teams would automatically qualify for the first round of the European Cup, Cup Winners Cup and UEFA Cup ever year, but, in decades of trying, none ever progressed any further.

Despite the great improvement of the Republic of Ireland national team into the 80s and 90s, the performances of Irish clubs in Europe did not enjoy a similar improvement. For most of the past 30 years, the Ireland national team has been at an equivalent level (or, occasionally, a higher one) to the likes of mid-range European teams like Denmark, Norway, Austria, Turkey or Greece, but a League of Ireland team playing a club from one of those countries national leagues would be expected to lose the game 9 times out of 10, with the League of Ireland and Northern Irish Football Leagues habitually being placed on UEFA´s ranking of national leagues nearer to the likes of Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and Liechtenstein. In fact, the improvement of the Republic's national team has actually proved to be bad for the League, with the FAI now making almost all of its money from the senior team´s success and prioritizing short-term profit over the long-term future of Irish football that would come through the cultivation of the league and the under-age national teams.

Although many of the teams in the League of Ireland did well financially during the early 2000s, as was reflected in the enormous wages that some of the league´s top players were receiving at that time, this was mostly due to the fact that the country was awash with money rather than due to a noticeable increase in the numbers of people attending League of Ireland games. Since the beginning of the Irish recession of 2008, most of the league´s clubs are in huge debt, only just barely surviving financially, with players sometimes going unpaid for months on end at some of the poorer clubs, all of these problems also being experienced by clubs in the Northern Irish league. This situation (now having been made considerably worse due to the coronavirus pandemic) is very unlikely to change any time soon, due to the preference of most Irish fans for clubs in England. The strange nature of Ireland´s relationship with English football was well demonstrated in 2014 when Liverpool came to Dublin to play a friendly with Shamrock Rovers. The game was played in a sold-out Aviva Stadium, with the overwhelming majority of the 60,000 fans supporting the visitors over the local team.

The 1980s was the decade in which the status of football began to change all over the island, although at this point the two associations had grown so far apart that any times that they have seemed to be moving in the same direction are likely to have been coincidence. In 1982, under the management of 1958 World Cup hero Billy Bingham, Northern Ireland unexpectedly qualified for their second
World Cup. The team contained few (if any star names), being comprised almost entirely of players who played with clubs in either the lower half of the English First Division or in the Second Division. Little was expected from them, especially after they were drawn in a group with the tournament hosts Spain, Yugoslavia and Honduras, a group that seemed so easy from Spain´s perspective that many cynically assumed that the hosts had been purposefully been given an easy draw.

The fears of many for Northern Ireland´s prospects in the tournament seemed to have been confirmed after draws with Yugoslavia (the game in which Manchester United´s 17 year old Norman Whiteside took Pele´s title as the youngest player to ever play in the World Cup, a record that hasn´t been broken since) and Honduras left the Northerners needing a win against Spain to progress. Shockingly, they pulled off the finest result in their history, beating the hosts 1-0 in Seville thanks to a goal by Watford striker Gerry Armstrong, the result being made even more impressive by the fact that Northern Ireland finished the game with ten men, after defender Mal Donaghy had got himself sent off. They progressed as group winners before, again, being eliminated by an all-star France team in the new tournament format´s equivalent of a quarter final.

The tournament was probably the brightest period of celebration that Northern Ireland enjoyed all the way through the 25-year period of terrorist conflict known as ¨the Troubles.¨ Despite most members of the Catholic community generally not supporting the Northern Ireland team, many of them became caught-up in the excitement and joined in the celebrations.
The team´s successes were even celebrated by many in the Republic, delighted to finally have a team in green worth shouting for, causing a great deal of concern to the FAI.
Northern Ireland were captained at the 1982 World Cup by Martin O´Neill, a Catholic from County Derry, who later went on to have great success as a manager at Leicester, Celtic, Aston Villa and (confusingly) the Republic of Ireland national team (more on that later.)

Northern Ireland continued to stake a claim to being one of the best national teams in Europe for the next several years. In the qualifiers for the next major tournament, the 1984 European Championships, they became the only team ever to beat Germany home and away in a qualifying campaign, but failed to qualify by falling victim once again to the old Irish Achilles heel of inconsistency. Despite the amazing results against the Germans, they threw away qualification after defeats away to Turkey and Austria and a 0-0 draw against unfancied Albania. In 1984, they won the last-ever Home Nations Championship before the tournament´s discontinuation, with the IFA being allowed to keep the trophy permanently as a result, and in 1986, they qualified for their second consecutive World Cup. The 1986 World Cup in Mexico was not a success on a par with Spain ´82, as Northern Ireland failed to progress from a very difficult group in which they were beaten by Spain and Brazil. The golden era of Northern Irish football came to abrupt end as Northern Ireland´s form deteriorated rapidly and they performed very badly in the qualifiers for the next number of international tournaments. Their exploits in the three World Cups they have participated in to date have left them with two impressive records: they are the smallest country ever to qualify for the World Cup more than once and also the smallest country ever to win a game at the World Cup.

On the other side of the border, the FAI had spent the first half of the decade watching their neighbour´s successes with jealousy, and even alarm. The 1982 World Cup had also probably been the Republic´s most impressive participation in any tournament up to that point, even though they had again failed to qualify. Ireland had been drawn in possibly the hardest European qualifying group of all time, seeded behind the Netherlands (who had been runners-up in the previous two World Cups), Belgium (who had been runners-up in the 1980 European Championships and France (who would go on to reach the semi-finals of the next two World Cups and win the European Championships in 1984.) Despite the odds being massively stacked against them, Ireland had performed admirably, beating the Dutch and the French in Dublin and only failing to qualify after finishing in third place, one point behind group winners Belgium and only being separated from second placed France by goal difference. Ireland had lost a crucial point in the away game with Belgium in Brussels, when the Belgians had scored the only goal of the game from a dubious free kick in stoppage time. Many in Ireland believed, rightly or wrongly, that they had been the victims of FIFA corruption, as it was not in the organization´s interest to see an unglamorous team from a sparsely populated country qualify for their
showpiece competition. Although no performances in their recent history had suggested how well Ireland would do in the qualifiers, it shouldn't have been as surprising as many found it, given the quality of their squad at the time. The team was filled full of players from Man United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs and, in the case of star player Liam Brady, even Juventus (Brady is the only Irish player ever to have been a star in a major continental European league.) On paper, the Republic were far stronger than the North, making their neighbour´s surprise success even more galling. After the qualifiers for the `86 World Cup finished with an infamous 4-1 defeat to Denmark in Dublin and left Ireland miles off qualification, the FAI realized something drastic had to be done in order to recapture the interest of the Irish public.
 

In February 1986, the FAI fired manager Eoin Hand and announced that his successor would be former England international Jack Charlton. Charlton was the older brother of
Manchester United and England legend Bobby. Despite being a vastly inferior player to his brother, (Bobby Charlton is usually the default choice in lists of the best English footballer of all time) Jack had enjoyed almost as successful a career. He had played alongside his brother in the England team that won the 1966 World Cup and had won almost everything available to him at club level during his 20 years with Leeds United. As a manager, he had won promotion with unfashionable Middlesborough (from the Second to the First Division) and Sheffield Wednesday (from the Third to the Second Division) and managed to keep both of them in their new divisions for a number of years. He had never won any trophies as a manager but he´d also never managed at a top club; his specialty was consistently achieving decent results with mediocre teams. The greatest success of his managerial career to that point had been when he had won the English Manager of the Year Award in the 1974; he had been given the prize for getting Middlesbrough promoted while collecting a record number of points. He had been the first manager from outside the First Division to win the award into the process.

Charlton was the first full-time manager of the Republic of Ireland national team; before him, all Irish managers had had the job on a part-time basis while also managing a club side (Liam Tuohy, Ireland manager between 1971 and 1973 held down the job while also managing Shamrock Rovers and working full-time as an ice cream salesman.) More controversially, he was also the first non-Irish manager of Ireland. Charlton had been one of four nominees on the FAI shortlist in 1985 along with Ireland legend John Giles, the aforementioned Liam Touhy and former Liverpool manager Bob Paisley. Giles had had a spell as Ireland manager during the 1970s, which could best have been described as having being a mixed-bag, and had since gone on to moderate success as manager of West Bromwich Albion, with the FAI hoping that he might enjoy more success the second time round if he were allowed to concentrate on the job full-time. While Giles´s managerial career up to that point had been mediocre, the other candidate, Bob Paisley, had had an exceptional career. From the mid-70s to the mid-80s Paisley had lead Liverpool to a then record six English league championships and a STILL record three European cups. Paisley was clearly the outstanding choice for the job, but the FAI were split between him and Giles.
With Paisley's CV it still seems ludicrous to this day that he wasn't immediately offered the job as soon as he expressed interest. The reasons why he didn't eventually win the ballot remains unclear but it seems to be along the lines that a number of the FAI board were annoyed that his candidacy had only been announced at the last minute after the first three names on the short list had already been approved. With the board deadlocked, the job eventually went to Charlton, after three votes; unable to choose between an outstanding English manager and a mediocre Irish manager, the board reached a compromise that ultimately satisfied nobody and gave the job to a mediocre English manager. Despite the lack of enthusiasm that went with it, it´s no exaggeration to say that Charlton´s appointment was the single most important moment in the history of football in the Republic of Ireland.

Charlton´s tenure as Ireland boss was defined by just two major innovations; his tactic reliance on ¨long ball football¨ and his liberal use of ¨the granny rule.¨ Charlton had long had a reputation for playing extremely unattractive, but very effective, football, favoring a ¨route one¨ approach to the game. His goalkeeper would act as a playmaker, getting on with play quickly by punting the ball long into the opposition´s half from a kick-out, rather than having the team attempt to move the ball up-field by passing. Believing Ireland didn´t have enough quality midfield players to compete with top European nations, Charlton stuck to the long ball game religiously, requiring all of his forward players to run endlessly, constantly chasing the ball after the goalkeeper had put it into the opponent´s half. Decried as ugly, primitive and tedious, it was extremely effective, as continental teams, used to more sophisticated football, would quickly become exhausted by the ceaseless pressure and be forced into making mistakes (appropriately enough, the song “Put 'Em Under Pressure”, a mish-mash of samples from traditional music, existing Irish rock songs, other football songs and samples of Charlton's voice cobbled together by U2's sport loving drummer Larry Mullen in tribute to the manager, eventually went on to become the definitive anthem of Irish football.)

While many football analysts were highly critical of Charlton´s tactics on the field, they were even more incensed by his player recruitment policies off the field. In 1965, Manchester United´s Manchester born fullback Shay Brennan (a teammate of George Best on the 1968 European Cup winning team) had forsaken his country of birth and declared for Ireland, who he qualified for through his parents. Brennan was the first non-Irish born footballer to play for Ireland via the ¨granny rule.¨ FIFA has long allowed players to play for the country that their parents or grandparents had come from and Ireland, with its long history of emigration to Britain, had a large pool of foreign-born talent they could draw from across the Irish Sea. In the twenty years between Brennan´s debut and Charlton´s appointment, a number of English-born players had lined out for Ireland but Charlton became the first Irish manager to exploit the rule to the full. Using his connections throughout the Football League, he actively advertised for and pursued new recruits, many of whom only had distant links to Ireland, to populate his squad. This resulted in the phasing out many Irish-born fringe players from the English lower leagues or the League of Ireland. Before Charlton´s appointment, League of Ireland players regularly represented the Irish national team, a practice which was discontinued the moment Charlton took the job and is only gradually beginning to become common again now, more than thirty years later. The extent to which Charlton became reliant on his ¨foreign signings¨ is best demonstrated by the statistic that when Ireland finally qualified for the World Cup for the first time under his management, 14 of the 22 man squad were British players of Irish descent. Many critics castigated Charlton for this policy, as they felt that the practice of filling a squad full of players who had never even visited the country they were representing before made a mockery of international football.

Despite the criticism he earned, both at home and abroad, Charlton´s tenure as Irish boss was an immediate success. In 1987, he qualified Ireland for their first-ever major tournament, the 1988 European Championships in West Germany, at his first attempt, pulling off famous wins over Scotland and Bulgaria along the way and also guiding Ireland to their only ever win over Brazil in a friendly in the same year as an added bonus. At that time, the European Championships final tournament was only contested by eight teams, meaning to even qualify was a great achievement. As fittingly as it could possibly be, for Ireland´s first game ever in a major championship they were drawn against England, with the game being played in Stuttgart. Given little chance of getting a result before the game, Ireland famously shocked their local rivals with a 1-0 win. The only goal of the game came in the sixth minute, a header by Liverpool winger Ray Houghton; a Scot who qualified through his Donegal-born father. Despite being battered by the English attack for the next 84 minutes, Ireland managed to hold onto their lead to earn in what is still probably the most satisfying victory in their history. In the next game, against a highly respected USSR side, Ireland gave what is generally considered to be their best performance in living memory. Again, they took the lead, this time through a magnificent aerial volley from Liverpool captain Ronnie Whelan. Despite dominating the game, Ireland weren't able to add to their single goal advantage and had to settle for a draw when the Soviets equalized in the final 15 minutes. The draw left Ireland going into their final game against the Netherlands needing one more point to progress. With less than ten minutes to go, a rather uneventful game appeared to be drifting towards the 0-0 draw that would have been enough to put Ireland through. Unfortunately, the Dutch managed to sneak a goal through substitute Wim Kieft and won the game 1-0. The Netherlands went through at the expense of Ireland and went on to win the competition; the only major tournament they have won in their history to date. As the tournament only comprised of eight teams, had Ireland managed to hold on to a draw they would have been straight into the semi-finals in their first ever appearance at a major tournament. That year, Charlton finished second in World Soccer magazine´s poll for the prestigious
World Manager of the Year award.

Following their performances at the Euros, Ireland found themselves in the unprecedented position of being favourites when they began the qualifiers for the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
They started very poorly; their first three games produced two 0-0 draws away to Northern Ireland and Hungary and a 2-0 defeat away to Spain. However, from their fourth game, a famous 1-0 over the Spanish in the return game in Dublin, Ireland found their stride. From that point on they won all of their remaining games without conceding a goal (the two goals in the defeat to Spain were the only two goals they conceded in the entire qualifying campaign) and qualified for the tournament with ease, the only time Ireland have ever qualified for a tournament without desperately needing a result in their last game or to go through a play-off. Apart from the Spanish victory, the other highlight of the campaign was a 3-0 thumping of Northern Ireland in Dublin, showing that in the space of just three years, the status of the island´s two teams had now been dramatically reversed and that the Republic were now light years ahead of the North.

For the second tournament in a row, Ireland were drawn in a group with England and the Netherlands, with unfancied Egypt taking the place of the USSR. Following a satisfactory draw with England, Ireland could only manage to play out a miserable 0-0 with the Egyptians in a game they were counting on winning in order to progress from the group. The performance was so dismal that it drove Eamon Dunphy, now working as a football analyst on Irish TV, to famously throw his pen across the studio in disgust. While the whole country was basking in the team´s reflected glory, the ever-controversial Dunphy was probably the lone voice of dissent against “Saint Jack,” relentlessly criticizing him for his ¨caveman football.¨ Although it may have made Dunphy public enemy #1 at the time, long-term, it
didn´t hurt his career, as the notoriety ultimately lead to him becoming well-known outside of football circles and one of the best-known (and best-paid) journalists in the country.Despite the Egyptian fiasco, a third draw with the Netherlands was to be enough for Ireland to progress to the second round. There, they faced off against Romania in Genoa and, after yet another draw, won the game on a penalty shootout in what remains the greatest moment in Irish football history. The winning penalty was scored by a substitute; legendary Arsenal centre-back Dave O´Leary. O´Leary´s penalty proved to be a moment of international redemption for the player. Despite long being considered to be one of the best defenders in the English league, O´Leary had infamously been dropped by Charlton when he took over as manager, either due to O'Leary deciding to go on holiday instead of joining Ireland on a post-season tour in 1986 or due to the preference for passing the ball out of defense rather than hoofing it up the field (depending on who you believe.)
Ireland had reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup by drawing all of their games and only scoring two goals; still the furthest any team has gone in the competition without winning a game. Unsurprisingly, they were beaten 1-0 by the hosts Italy in the next round, the goal coming courtesy of the tournament´s surprise star player, Toto Schillachi. Ireland´s notoriously corrupt and opportunistic Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the time, Charles Haughey, famously joined the team for a lap of honour around the pitch after the game, despite a number of the team´s English-born stars reportedly not knowing who he was.

 

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