IT IS probably easier to decode the White House’s security system than it is to decipher Ireland’s love/hate relationship with English football.
As another World Cup gets underway — yet another without Irish representation — our interest in the tournament is determined largely, but not completely, by England.
Of course there is an inherent contradiction in all of this. As a nation we support English teams but not the English team. We produce generations of Irishmen and women who move and settle in their country without ever being able to call it home.
And normally — when big tournaments arrive and the English side start riding the jingoistic hype — we get turned off but stay tuned. We watch England play so we can see them lose. But once they are gone — usually after a penalty shoot-out — a period of emptiness follows.
We remember, fondly, Diego Maradona’s Hand-of-God inspired win over Bobby Robson’s side in the quarter-finals of Mexico '86 but have less vivid memories of his equally impressive demolition of Belgium some four days later.
And similarly, our recollections of Sweden’s Euro '92 semi-final defeat to Germany are less clear than the Swedes 2 Turnips 1 headline which screamed from The Sun the day after Graham Taylor’s troops exited that tournament’s group stage.
It is just how it is. When England gets knocked out, a bit of us gets knocked back too because no other country generates that level of passion/hatred among us. No other country is transformed into a Land of Hype and Glory with dutiful references to 1966 — and, less tastefully, two World Wars and a Falklands conflict.
And the louder they shout, the more we retreat to our colonial past — turning into proud Italians, Costa Ricans and Uruguayans, forgiving Luis Suarez for the racial overtones that dogged his past, all the while hoping he gets his teeth stuck into England’s defence.
What’s surprising is that it wasn’t always this way. While there is no scientific proof to support what is largely anecdotal evidence, it still seems abundantly clear that Irish support for England was prevalent in the 1960s but dwindled away in the 1970s. By then, our world had changed. The football pundit was born — which brought us Jimmy Hill and tough jargon like power and fight and warrior and blitz.
Infinitely more important than Hill’s commentaries, however, were the events on the streets of Northern Ireland where a real fight was taking place and where atrocities deepened the divide between two islands separated by the Irish Sea.
And as The Troubles intensified, hooliganism worsened to the point that flag-waving, shaven-headed thugs with Three Lions tattooed on their chests became English football’s new look.
Shaking that image was never easy as new generations of thugs sacked one city centre after another, leaving Irish people firstly to open their minds and then change them. The team and country they cheered to success in 1966 had been transformed first by television and then by conflict.
Here is how Ireland’s relationship with England’s national football team has evolved.
Football quickly became The Sport of the '20s, providing an emotional escape for cities and towns still devastated by The First World War. It was all things to all men — an innocent form of tribalism, source of parochial pride, a national past-time.
And where England walked, Ireland followed. As the Football League gathered prestige, the leading Irish players of the Victorian era followed the money as well as their dream. England was the place to be and Everton were the first to make a significant move in the Irish market, signing the terrifically talented, Jack Kirwan in 1898 and soon afterwards, his Shelbourne teammates, Valentine Harris and Billy Lacey.
With the traffic continuing to flow into Goodison Park from Ireland, Everton — in the 1920s — became the first English club to have a supporters club based in Ireland with hundreds of supporters travelling to Liverpool on a bi-weekly basis to support “their” club.
If Everton were the pathfinders, then Manchester United soon eclipsed them, winning hearts and minds in the aftermath of their 1948 FA Cup win, when their Irish captain — Jackie Carey — paraded the trophy around Dublin. So by the time Billy Whelan and the Busby Babes came along, annual trips by United to Ireland were regular dates in the diary, deepening the bond between the club and their Irish supporters.
The tragedy of Munich, however, when Whelan was one of eight players who died — saw yet another dramatic rise in United’s, and by extension, English football’s popularity. The Irish Press — traditionally an anti-British paper — dedicated an editorial to mourn the passing of so many “great players”. The Meath County Board passed a motion of sympathy to the relatives of the air disaster. Galway GAA clubs followed suit.
More significantly, Oscar Traynor — Fianna Fáil’s Minister for Justice — who had not only rejected the Treaty but also fought against it as the IRA’s commander in Dublin — opined: “Many of the players who have survived [the crash] will carry on the traditions of this famous club.”
The significance of Traynor’s statement — as well as the actions of so many prominent GAA figures towards Manchester United following Munich — is not lost on Dr Brian Hanley, the pre-eminent sporting historian working in Ireland today.
“Anti-British feeling ran deep in Ireland in the 1950s,” writes Hanley. “It was less than 40 years since the War of Independence, a decade since Winston Churchill had threatened invasion of Ireland during the Second World War and a small scale IRA war was ongoing in 1958. Yet there was genuine grief over the deaths of young Englishmen at Munich.”
That grief transferred itself into support. United supporters clubs mushroomed all over Ireland and when Tottenham, Liverpool and Leeds became successful in the 1960s, they too drew from a new audience. So by 1966 — when the World Cup was staged in England — it was inevitable who Irish people would cheer for.
“There isn’t data to back this up,” says Hanley, “but anecdotally, it seems clear that Irish football fans wanted England to win that World Cup because they supported their players at club level and it made sense to support them against countries whose players they never heard of.”
By the following decade, though, that logic had been turned on its head.
Punditry arrived with the 1970 World Cup — when games were televised live for the first time and television companies realised they had to fill the gap between the first half and the second. If ITV caught the imagination with the musings of Derek Dougan and Brian Clough, the BBC plagued us all by force-feeding us a diet of Jimmy Hill.
Full of self-importance and nationalistic bombast, Hill would dominate the airwaves for the following two decades. Yet if his popularity never waned with the national broadcaster, it certainly did with an Irish audience. “There is little doubt the way Hill and other commentators talked up England before every tournament had a negative effect with Irish people,” says Hanley.
“That’s the English Press for you,” says John Giles. “It is such a large and powerful body. They need to sell papers so they need to sell the idea that England can win a World Cup. So they big the team up and then knock them down.”
And the louder the patriotism, the more off-putting it was for Irish fans who were denied the presence of an English team at a major tournament from 1970 to 1980 and who then saw an Irish side — from either side of the border — participate in five of the next six World Cups.
By the time Ireland hit a sporting recession, however, England’s “golden generation” were being talked up. And the louder the boasting, the further we retreated away. The connection Irish people felt to England’s national team in 1966 had been lost.
And back home, something more meaningful was also being lost.
As Northern Ireland descended into a bloody mess throughout the 1970s, old prejudices and young men died hard. The Bloody Sunday atrocity has never been forgotten and sport got hit in the crossfire. With two countries in a state of conflict, an inevitable erosion of affection for a country whose troops behaved aggressively occurred.
So by the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, Irish fans were separating their allegiances. They could support a club from Manchester, Liverpool, London or Birmingham but when those players stood under the Union Flag, the love affair was parked as Ireland’s football fans became selectively loyal.
English fans ahead of the Ireland v England friendly at Lansdowne Road in 1995 that saw rioting by the away supportIf the '80s was dominated by violence on the terraces and a Thatcherite government hated on Ireland’s streets, the '90s brought a new element to the rivalry. Sky Sports had arrived and football became the new showbiz.
Every showbiz set needs its heroes, though, and England’s key players were hyped up to the last. The baton would pass from Paul Gascoigne to Alan Shearer to David Beckham to Steven Gerrard to Wayne Rooney.
“They created a golden generation who did nothing,” says Giles.
“In essence, the way England’s media portrayed England’s players just became an irritation,” says Eamon Dunphy. “They sold us something that was false, saying they were this and that when in actual fact, they weren’t all that good. And it just annoyed Irish people.
“I remember 1966. That World Cup wasn’t as big a deal as the one coming up now. And because there was an absence of hype, people enjoyed the football for what it was, a competition between the best players in the world. England had some very good players then — and the key thing was that they were accessible. They didn’t drive a Ferrari. They didn’t have a pop star wife. They weren’t image conscious. An Irish person could identify with that type of player.
“But the modern type — the Cleverlys — oh come on. They aren’t particularly good but they have money the average guy on the street could never dream of. They cannot connect with that type of English player. That’s part of the reason why there isn’t the same affection. A lot of the other reasons are historical.”
Yet the hype is back again — as is another World Cup. How will England do? “They may not even get out of the group,” says Giles, before adding a twist. “But I hope they do because there is more of an interest when they are in it.”
And that pretty much sums up the way it is with us. We can’t live with them and can’t live without them.
