Irish football fans like to think of themselves as the best in the world; it’s pretty much a self-awarded accolade but it’s also undoubtedly true that they are well regarded by those that have encountered them. The reputation was forged at a time when English football fans (or at least a sizeable minority of them) were still terrorising towns and cities across Europe, so it wasn’t too difficult to look good in comparison. But boozy good-naturedness is not the sole preserve of the Irish — the Danes had a similar reputation on their first World Cup in Mexico in 1986, and other Scandinavians and the Scots are largely known to be the same. You might even say that the majority of football fans anywhere in the world, behave just like that — whatever followers of snottier sports might say — but the bad eggs, of course, will always stand out. Regardless of whether the Irish are unique in their good behaviour, there is something remarkable about large groups of mostly young men drinking so much yet causing little or no trouble.
The video below, which I found on YouTube, sums up Ireland’s fans rather eloquently. It was filmed in Bari three years ago (on April Fools’ Day, no less) on the occasion of Ireland’s World Cup qualifier away to Italy. A sharply (or maybe tackily) dressed young man is apprehended by a group of fans, who delight in his supposed similarity to Borat. There’s an initial hint of menace in it, not intentional but the fellow might be forgiven for being worried by a group of foreigners taking such a keen interest in his appearance. After nervously declining an offer of being lifted on someone’s shoulders, he finally joins in with the fun, with another mustachioed local sharing the heat. You have to admire his perseverance and good humour as it was a situation that might so easily have been misinterpreted, given the probable language barrier. Having been in Bari myself on that trip, I can testify to the wonderful welcome the locals gave the Irish fans, despite dire warnings that local businesses were going to rip us off at every opportunity. The Irish fans’ banter in this video could have veered into mean-spiritedness but ultimately it’s generous and endearing. The very fact their poor ‘victim’ really looks nothing at all like Borat only makes it all the funnier.
The football fan’s worldview is irrevocably shaped by his or her first exposure to the game; the screen burn of those formative months or years lingers on their inward eye throughout their whole life as a supporter. For many fans, the formative years take place between the ages of eight and ten. For me it was no different. Football had always been around me when I was very young and I have some startlingly early memories of it — I retain a few oneiric flickers of the 1978 World Cup: the ticker tape and that impossibly dark winter sky, this despite being still a few months shy of my third birthday. And in case you might think my memory is playing tricks on me I can also remember our family moving house three days before the final, an experience I was not too pleased with but which is still clear in the mind (though its proximity to the World Cup final was something I only learned about many years later).
I remember the 1982 World Cup too — Northern Ireland beating Spain and Maradona getting sent off against Brazil. The following year there were cup final wins for Sligo Rovers and Manchester United. All of this was absorbed but I was little more than a curious bystander, pretty much like many of the people I know as an adult — just about interested enough to make small talk about football but no further than that.
In summer 1984 that all changed. I can’t really remember why but it was possibly the discovery of penalty shoot-outs that tipped it. There were quite a few thrilling ones that year, first of all Tottenham beating Anderlecht to win the UEFA Cup, then Liverpool’s famous defeat of Roma in the Italians’ own stadium and the epic Spain v Denmark clash in the semi-finals of the European Championships. From now on football would be one of those yardsticks of life — my memories of every year between then and my late teens are primarily informed by what was happening on the field at the time. I took to the new-found sport with a zeal that had its precedents hundreds of thousands of times over in the history of the game. While the Irish national team was far from my main pre-occupation at the time it was still something to get excited about and that all started for me in September 1984.
My only previous encounter with the boys in green was a European Championship qualifier a year earlier when Ireland, in yet another torridly difficult group, threw away a two-goal lead at Dalymount to lose 3-2 to a Ruud Gullit-inspired Netherlands. All that detail I learned later but I remember bits of the match, mainly because my mother told me that in Holland the locals spoke, not Hollandish but Dutch, a linguistic eccentricity that would stump me for many years. Other than that my knowledge of Ireland as a footballing nation was fairly non-existent. I came to Ireland v the USSR at Lansdowne Road on the 12th of September 1984 pretty much as Cortez might have approached the Pacific, staring out from that peak in Darien. It was a stirring performance against a strong Soviet side, who, even if they hadn’t qualified for the European Championships, had quite frighteningly filleted England 2-0 at Wembley four months earlier.
Late on in the match Michael Robinson, a winger who looked perpetually dogged and sweaty and who is now Spain’s number one sports broadcaster, turned his man on the right hand side and cut it back for Mick Walsh, another Irish cosmopolitan — at the time a crowd favourite at Porto — to slice the ball past Rinat Dasaev into the Soviet net — not the last time the mighty Tatar would be beaten by an Irish player. I still remember the leap of delight I made as the goal went in, mainly because it’s the same one I perform every time Ireland score. I didn’t think too much of it at the time but I was probably primed for great expectations of this Irish team. How wrong I was.
It all began to come undone a month later when Ireland travelled to Norway. The Scandinavians were still part-timers back then (something the British and Irish media used to never tire of pointing out). People with better knowledge than my nine-year-old self would have known of Norway’s legendary 2-1 win over England three years before but that was all pre-history for me (in those days you relied on back issues of Shoot! and Match picked up at sales of work to piece together past narratives). I was expecting a win. It had to be a win. What we got instead was an abject disaster. Ireland started brightly but, spurred on by the mercurial PSV Eindhoven captain Hallvar Thoresen, Norway were soon cutting them to pieces.
Three minutes before half-time Pål Jacobsen played a long one-two with Arne Larsen Økland, stole past a ball-watching Mark Lawrenson and sneaked the ball in under Jim McDonagh’s body to put Norway 1-0 up. I remember the goal well, the ball seemingly taking an eternity to nestle in the net. It was my first exposure to a now familiar sense of dread — the Irish goal under siege. It’s an ominous sense I get with none of the club sides I support, one that is part-horror, part-fatalistic resignation. The goal deflated Ireland, with their efforts in the second half barely troubling the Norwegians, who could have won by more. “Luxembourg 1954, Denmark ’57 and Cyprus in the last World Cup are the only away matches in this tournament Ireland have ever won,” says Jimmy Magee in his commentary. I’m not sure if I consciously absorbed that plain fact as I sat glumly on the couch but it soon became apparent to me that Ireland’s track record was not one of world-beaters.
Whatever about 1957, there was going to be no victory in Denmark in November 1984, not against what was probably Europe’s finest side at the time (had they not stumbled on penalties against Spain that summer they may well have beaten France to take the European Championship). Ireland never had a hope, holding out for 26 minutes until Tony Grealish made the very unwise move of playing a perfect pass to Preben Elkjaer, who easily outstripped Mick McCarthy to put Denmark ahead. The rest of the match was all Denmark — Elkjaer adding a second just after half-time before putting Søren Lerby through for the third. It was hot knife-through-butter stuff. After 55 minutes it was 3-0 and I feared the worst. Somehow Ireland managed to keep the scoreline like that till the end. It was a thorough drubbing, of the sort that Ireland wouldn’t really experience for another 11 years when Portugal tore them apart in Lisbon (I won’t count the return game against the Danes in Dublin a year later, which was largely academic from Ireland’s point of view).
Ireland didn’t have another World Cup match till the following May (played during the regular season run-in — unthinkable today) and that gave them the opportunity for a few friendlies. First up was the visit of world champions Italy to Dalymount Park, where an avaricious FAI allowed 40,000 people to crowd dangerously into the crumbling Phibsboro stadium. Kick-off was delayed half an hour and it was a miracle there were no serious injuries. When Heysel happened three months later, there was really no sense of shock — football stadiums were seriously dangerous places back in those days, with or without hooligans. Ireland lost 2-1, a creditable result, with Gary Waddock scoring a fine consolation goal. There was also a scoreless draw away to Israel and a visit to Wembley, where England beat us 2-1, with Gary Lineker scoring his first goal for his country, a result which remains their last win over Ireland.
The match in May was against Norway, a 0-0 draw at Lansdowne Road. For some reason it was not televised so I had to follow it on crackly medium-wave radio. By all accounts it was a dire match and also curious for being the only outing for an O’Neill’s strip that would never be seen again. Apparently it was green with an orange band across the chest. I recall it only from black-and-white press photos of the match and I don’t know why it was cast aside straight away. A plain green and white number was worn for the visit of Switzerland a month later, when Ireland began to make up lost ground with a comfortable 3-0 win at a sunny Lansdowne Road, a game in which a young striker from Millwall named Tony Cascarino made his debut. The Swiss had started the group brightly with two wins and a draw but a 4-0 drubbing in Moscow the previous month had unhinged them and they were very much in disarray at Lansdowne. The goals came from Frank Stapleton, Tony Grealish, with a looping header he hardly knew about, and Kevin Sheedy. The mini-heatwave continued till the following weekend when Ireland met Spain at Flower Lodge, only the second time a full international was played in Cork. The match was part of the Cork 800 celebrations and was a keenly fought scoreless draw.
In a tightly contested group, with a lot of teams taking points off each other, Ireland went into the summer second on five points, one point behind Denmark and ahead of the Swiss on goal difference. Denmark looked likely to win it but Ireland might have been forgiven for thinking second place was within their reach. The problem was they still had to play the Soviets — in Moscow — and the Danes in Dublin, as well as an away trip to Switzerland. Another problem was the USSR’s three remaining matches were all at home. Denmark, on the other hand, had to travel for three of their remaining four, giving us some faint hope they might slip up.
After a frustrating 0-0 draw in Berne, Ireland went to Moscow in October, where the Soviets were nigh invincible. Having pummelled Switzerland in May, they beat Denmark 1-0 in September. In front of 100,000 fans at the Lenin Stadium, Ireland held out remarkably well without ever looking like scoring. The inevitable came on the hour when Spartak Moscow’s Fyodor Cherenkov rattled a far-post volley past McDonagh. In the dying seconds, Oleh Protasov, who, three years later, would break our hearts with a late equaliser in Hanover, finished it off with a header from close range. Interestingly, both matches against the USSR are available in full on YouTube. They make for contrasting viewing, the first a rousing performance with Ireland running rings around a disoriented Soviet side; the second a magisterial passing display by Valeriy Lobanovskiy’s men that Ireland had nothing to counteract.
Ireland were out, with — as the cliché would have it — only pride to play for in the final match in Dublin against Denmark. There wasn’t much pride to be taken in that performance though. Needing a win to be sure of qualifying ahead of Switzerland, the Danes ran riot, even more impressively than twelve months earlier in Copenhagen. Elkjaer cancelled out Stapleton’s opener within seconds and a brilliant individual goal by Michael Laudrup put Denmark 2-1 up just after the break. A stupendous chip for the third by right-back John Sivebaek — now a big league agent — would earn him a move to Ron Atkinson’s Manchester United and Elkjaer finished it off fourteen minutes from the end. Denmark were going to their first ever World Cup; Ireland, after two near misses in the previous two tournaments were left licking their wounds, in fourth place, one point ahead of Norway.
The Denmark match was also, curiously, the subject of a Desmond Morris-narrated documentary, a TV adaptation of his 1981 book The Soccer Tribe. It was broadcast on ITV just before the World Cup finals the following June and Morris was wheeled on to chat shows and news bulletins for his opinions on things ranging from hooliganism to penalty shoot-outs. The film itself was an overly fussy analysis of body language and so called tribal codes, which sounded risible to my ten-year-old ears but an interview with Frank Stapleton struck a chord. He said that winning 1-0 was an unsatisfactory result because ‘you want to win with a bit of style’. The arrival of a certain Geordie as Ireland manager a few months later would prompt Stapleton to reconsider those words. Given he continued to be vital part of Jack Charlton’s set-up for the next five years — unlike others from that campaign, such as Grealish, Robinson and, for a long time, David O’Leary — Stapleton surely did reconsider them.
The Mexico 86 campaign was deflating in the extreme for an Irish football fan and spelled the end for Eoin Hand’s five years in charge. There were cruel jibes in the media — one joke was ‘how did the Irish soccer team commit suicide?’ ‘They died by their Eoin Hand’ — but Hand had done a fine job with a team the draw was never kind to. Goal difference and awful refereeing decisions cost us a place at Spain 82, behind Belgium and France but ahead of the Netherlands. Our path to France 84 was blocked by Spain and the Dutch, and we finished third despite a record 8-0 win over Malta. Group 6 of Mexico 86 qualifying was equally onerous, being pitted against two of Europe’s form teams. The Danes and the Soviets would both light up the finals in the opening round before faltering at the knock-out stages. Both would make it to Euro 88 with the Dynamo Kiev-bolstered USSR reaching the final, which might have gone differently had Igor Belanov not had a penalty saved by Hans van Breukelen when they trailed the Dutch 1-0. The two sides also played a match in Copenhagen in June 1985 that many people agree is one of the greatest World Cup qualifiers ever. That both teams so nonchalantly swatted away the challenge of an Ireland containing players we can only dream of having in the side today underlines how strong they were.
The Charlton era began in Spring 1986 with uninspiring displays at home to Wales and Uruguay. The triangular tournament win in Iceland in June was a novelty but nobody was taking too seriously wins over the hosts and Czechoslovakia. It was in September that year, when we came from behind twice to draw 2-2 with World Cup semi-finalists Belgium in Brussels in our first Euro 88 qualifier, that fans began to suddenly imagine that change was on the way. That was the sort of match we usually lost in agonising circumstances. We all know what happened next, even if it took a miraculous Scottish win in Bulgaria to actually send us to Germany. Still, the fatalism of the Irish football fan, forged in the dark days of the late seventies and early eighties, has never gone away and will accompany us all the way through the Euros. It’ll be a familiar sense of dread I feel when the likes of Iniesta, Jelavic and Balotelli are bearing down on the Irish goal.
Back in the so-called dark days of Irish football (i.e. the pre-Charlton era), Ireland played so many friendlies in Poland that the fans used to say one of the FAI top brass had a mistress over there and that he would devise any pretext whatsoever to get over there. Whatever the truth of that, we never played Poland too often in competitive matches. One of the few occasions was the qualifiers for Euro 92; Ireland and the Poles were placed in a four-team group with England and Turkey. It was arguably the period where Jack’s team were at their peak, and that made the results all the more frustrating. Profligate finishing cost us home points against both the Poles and the Sassenachs, and even more so at Wembley in March 1991, where, after going one-down to an early Steve Staunton own-goal, Ireland thoroughly outplayed the English, equalising through a perfectly weighted Niall Quinn pass into the net and Ray Houghton failing by inches to reprise his goal in Stuttgart three years earlier. Houghton was clear through on David Seaman’s goal but his shot sailed just wide of the post. We had to be content with a heroic 1-1 draw.
Ireland were unbeaten in the group but their only wins came against Turkey, home and away — a sparkling 5-0 thumping at Lansdowne and a rousing performance in the intimidating atmosphere of Istanbul to win 3-1 on the final day of the qualifiers. It was a pyrrhic victory as, one month previously in Poznan, where Ireland play two of their European Championship matches this month, Ireland squandered a 3-1 lead to concede two late goals against the Poles. And shocking goals they were too, Jan Furtok left free to tap in a parried shot from six yards and Jan Urban sneaking in amid a forest of green shirts to head home the equaliser four minutes from time. It was a match in which Ireland played very much against type — normally goal-shy, they chalked up three away goals (this was possibly the only time ever when Ireland scored more goals away from home in a qualifying group than back in Dublin) but their usual tightness at the back deserted them as the Poles clawed their way back into the game. Packie Bonner, who had just hit a patch of poor form that would ultimately lose him his first-team place at Celtic, had an absolute shocker, at fault for at least two of the three goals.
Big Jack tried to draw the strangest conclusions from the result, saying that at least it left Poland with a mathematical chance of qualification, thereby giving them an incentive to defeat England the following month, a result which would send Ireland through if they beat Turkey. Eamon Dunphy, by now a very public enemy of the big man, scorned the Ireland manager with renewed vigour and Ireland went to Turkey more in hope than expectation. For some reason, the two matches didn’t start exactly at the same time — at full time in Izmir an unlikely storming performance from the bulky John Byrne, who scored two, gave Ireland a fine 3-1 win, while, with half an hour left to play in Poznan, England trailed to a 34-minute Roman Szewczyk goal and it looked like Ireland might have that reprieve and be heading to Sweden for their third consecutive tournament.
That all crumbled in the 77th minute when Gary Lineker was left free in the box and had time to control the ball on his chest and volley it into the roof of the net. By now Poland’s incentive to attack had evaporated and England — the team that would become legendarily hopeless under Graham Taylor — were off to Sweden — by virtue of their 2-0 win against the Poles at Wembley, the only result by which they bettered the Irish. Ireland were better than the other three teams in the group by some stretch but too many lapses in concentration at vital moments of the campaign cost them. For a team that did superbly over the course of eight years, this was probably the most damning exposure of their lack of killer instinct. The Miejski Stadium in the western Polish city has changed a lot since then and is considerably less gloomy-looking than it was on that October night. One hopes Trap’s men will not be so generous at the back this time.
It’s only a faint recollection but I remember my first Community Games. I was about five or six and my parents brought me down to Corran Park in Ballymote one Spring Sunday where I was instructed to run like the clappers upon hearing a gun. Out of a field of eight others, some of whom were manifestly better prepared and more motivated than I was, I came fourth or fifth, which pretty much set the tone for where I would come in most things throughout my life. Not destined for glory but neither would I haplessly bring up the rear. The die was cast, I would develop into a Sunderland or an Aston Villa of the competitions of life. An also-ran, as they call them. Because I also ran.
Like most things you encounter when you’re a child, you assume the Community Games has been around since the beginning of time and being blooded in its local competition every May is as integral a part of your development as spending a night on a mountainside was for Spartan babies. Like many other Irish children, I tried my hand in multiple events, first the individual track and field sports, at parish level (it all begins with the parish), later even more haplessly with ‘art’ (doomed to failure there — there was a young heavy metaller in town who was actually able to draw who had the local and county titles locked down every year), and finally the team sports, where I finally tasted success at county level and, were it not for the organisation’s absurd rules, might have gone on to greater things).
The competition though, dating only from 1968, started to keep youngsters off the streets in Dublin — something that seems a bit odd to me as I think of it as a quintessentially culchie event — meaning it wasn’t of so old a vintage by the time I was thrust into competition some time after the Moscow Olympics. It seemed like everyone in Ireland took part (or so it looked from our parish, where nobody was absent when it kicked off in May every year). The games’ structure was more or less based on the GAA’s with parishes holding their own ‘games’ in spring, with the winners progressing to the county finals a month later. That in turn would produce the All-Ireland finalists, who would compete over two weekends just as the school year was starting in late August and early September in the Mosney holiday camp in Meath (still colloquially known as ‘Butlin’s’ in my childhood). Ireland’s geometrically perfect number of counties — 32 — was easily whittled down to a final eight in a series of heats and semi-finals. The team games would be held throughout the spring with the county finals decided in June and in July the provincial finals would take place. The four winners of those would face off in Mosney later in the summer.
Like their grown-up prototype, the Olympics, the Community Games were best known for the track and field events and dozens of Ireland’s finest athletes from Frank O’Mara to John Treacy and Sonia O’Sullivan cut their teeth there. But there were odd appendages too, such as the ‘choir’; our local parish’s representatives were a crack outfit at that, with my sister and her frightfully well-marshalled schoolmates regularly cleaning up at Mosney with orchestrated accapello worthy of Brian Wilson. There was the aforementioned ‘art’, which is more Olympian than you think — in the early days of the Olympics it was a regular event and Jack B. Yeats won a silver medal at the Paris games in 1924 for ‘The Liffey Swim’ no less. Draughts was another competition our parish conquered the rest of the country at on a few occasions. ‘Model making’, on the other hand, for some reason not considered ‘art’, was something nobody did where I grew up, though presumably someone did it somewhere, like those people that did Dutch for the Leaving Cert. According to Wikipedia there are several other non-athletic events, none of which I can remember being there when I was young, the variety show, ‘project’, comedy sketch/drama and the quiz (I’d have remembered that one all right), the intriguingly named ‘culture corner’ and disco dancing (though, given the ubiquity of disco-dancing events throughout the country when I was a child, I’m surprised it was never there to begin with).
The medals got progressively better the further you got. The local ones were the usual cheap-looking plated monstrance-shaped sunbursts with a sticker in the centre bearing the Community Games logo, a circle with the four provincial crests enclosed in smaller ones. The county medals were a bit bulkier still and the national medals — at least in the late 1980s, when I got to see them on a regular basis — were relatively impressive slabs of plated medal. My sister and brother both brought them home but my only ones came in soccer and hurling (it was quite difficult to win a soccer medal in Sligo, less so a hurling one, given there were only four teams in the county and probably only two of them could hit the sliotar). The Games’ arcane rules prevented us from winning a possible national title one year; players were not allowed compete beyond county level in more than one team game. Having won the soccer, Gaelic and hurling titles with effectively the same players — despite the age groups being under-12, under-13 and under-14 respectively — it was decided to send only one forward to provincial level. A coin was tossed and the Gaelic team won, depriving of glory the soccer team, which probably had a better chance of winning. The following year, faced with a similar scenario but fewer player overlap, the players were instead divided among the various sides and all competed at provincial level, and lost, with depleted panels.
There’s surprisingly little Community Games-related stuff on YouTube and the XBox filching of the name has made searching for it all the more difficult. Here is Kilcormac boys’ volleyball team from Offaly, victorious in 1985. One of the YouTube comments says they didn’t get to stay in Mosney, travelling up and down on the same day. Doesn’t sound very sporting to me.
I only visited Mosney for the national finals once or twice. If you weren’t taking part it wasn’t really all that fun and even in the 1980s, the sheen of glamour on the ageing holiday camp had been well and truly dulled. For those competing, it must have been a laugh though — staying in the chalets with your teammates, in a mini-Olympic village, with often a fair stab at the shenanigans that take place in the real village. For the past few years the games have taken place in Athlone instead, as Mosney is now home to asylum applicants — a reminder that the word ‘camp’ can be as readily connotative of misery as it can be of leisure.
The authoritative work on the Community Games is, of course, Aidan Walsh’s single ‘Community Games’, from 1987 or thereabouts, in which the self-styled Master of the Universe meditates on the games, refraining ‘what will I do at the Community Games?’ and pointing out, quite rightly, that draughts was a ‘child’s game’. I got to know Aidan a bit years later when he was a familiar face around Temple Bar. He would always give you the thumbs up and exhort you to not work too hard. It was a bit at odds with the Community Games’ Victorian-style motto, ‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano’ but, then again, they used to always tell us as kids it was the taking part that counts…
The 1980s were not the most exciting for Arsenal fans. A 1-0 defeat in the FA Cup final to 2nd division West Ham was a glimpse of the relentless mediocrity to come. The football was terrible, Liam Brady buggered off to Italy, and crowds at Highbury dwindled.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now clear that Arsenal’s big problem in 80s was a grubbiness not conducive to winning trophies. It wasn’t poor management and a poor playing squad, it was soiled kit. The low temperature wash stopped the red winning into the white, but the whites weren’t really white.
Can you be expected to top Division 1 with grass stains on your sleeves? Isn’t it too much to ask players to play to their full potential when they’re pulling on half-clean jerseys? Winning cups with muddy bits on your arms from those no-man’s land pitches back then was simply an impossibility.
Then along came Ariel Automatic and with that an up-turn in Arsenal’s fortunes. The ad aired in 1987, the very same year that Charlie Nicholas scored twice at Wembley to win the Littlewoods Cup against Liverpool. Coincidence? I think not.
Within 2 years, with sleeves whiter than Erik Estrada’s teeth, Arsenal won the league for the first time in 18 years when Michael Thomas scored that late goal at Anfield.
Many point to the impact of George Graham, the arch-disciplinarian who moulded together a team far greater than the sum of its parts, but we all know who the real mastermind was.
God bless you, Ethel Donnelly, Arsenal’s unsung hero.
