Walker Green Shoots

Irish Football Histories
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-909245-50-1
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

The island of Ireland sent two international teams to the European Championships finals in France in 2016. The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were both managed by a man called O'Neill - Martin and Michael - both were resplendent in emerald green and both were backed by noisy, good-natured supporters. But they were two distinct entities. Green Shoots examines why, almost a century after one Irish Association became two, this is still the case. It traces the overlapping stories and individuals in both Associations, beginning with the tale of the boy on the front cover, Johnny Brown, a Belfast Protestant who played for the Republic of Ireland in 1937, the year of the new Irish Constitution. Brown is the author's great uncle. This is only one strand of the broader story of Irish football. Green Shoots returns to figures often overlooked, who contributed so much to the growth of the game in Ireland and who made such an impact in England and Scotland too. Men such as William McCrum from Armagh, who invented the penalty-kick, and Bill McCracken from Belfast who changed the offside law in 1925 are brought back to life. A chronological thread leads from those men to Peter Doherty in the 1950s, George Best in the 1960s to Liam Brady in the 1980s and on to modern day players. Blending original archival research, travel writing, and interviews with many of the game's significant characters, Green Shoots looks at Irish football domestically and internationally. World Cups and European Championships are recalled and re-examined not just in sporting terms, but as defining moments in the country's modern history. Green Shoots is the engrossing account of the inside stories, drama and dreams of the game in Ireland, a history of a footballing nation and its many paradoxes.

Michael Walker has been a football reporter for over 25 years working for the Observer, Guardian, Irish Times, Independent and Daily Mail. Born in Belfast, Walker attended his first match in 1975 - Norther Ireland versus Yugoslavia at Windsor Park. He has reported regularly on both Irish international teams and has covered four World Cups and five European Championships.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Walker, Michael

Leseproben

ALAN MCLOUGHLIN’S POST

Wiltshire, England, 1990

THE MORNING MAIL WAS LYING ON THE DOORMAT OF THE HOUSE in Swindon’s Chandos Close. Alan McLoughlin had just moved in. He was 22 and this was his first mortgage. The décor was, he says, ‘fairly sparse. There was a second-hand sofa, a TV.’

McLoughlin had been training that morning with Swindon Town. It was February 1990 and Swindon were prospering near the top of the Second Division. Ossie Ardiles was their manager.

On returning home, McLoughlin stepped over the post, making for the kitchen to get the kettle on. Then he went back to the doormat and picked up what he thought was the usual clutch of bills and takeaway pizza flyers. Only there among the assortment, McLoughlin saw something different, a crisp white envelope. If this was strange, more so was the logo in the corner. It was the Three Lions of England’s Football Association.

‘I wasn’t quite sure what it was,’ McLoughlin says. ‘I opened it and read. To my surprise – to my great surprise – it said I’d been called up for England ‘B’ to play against Ireland ‘B’ in Cork. Completely out of the blue.’

McLoughlin was flummoxed. He then thought of his uncle John, who lived in Co. Limerick, and whether John would be able to get to the game. Then he thought of his mother Nora in Manchester. She knew professional football had been harsh as well as kind to her son. Alan reached for the phone and dialled.

‘I phoned home, Mum picked up and I blurted out the news. I remember I asked her about uncle John, that was as exciting for me as being recognised for doing something with a good Swindon team. My Mum was delighted for me, she knew that I’d moved from Manchester to Swindon to play and what moving had meant to me.’

McLoughlin grew up in south Manchester, the family lived at 126 Maine Road in the shadow of Manchester City’s old ground. He had been recruited by Manchester United, though, and came through its youth system in the mid-1980s under Eric Harrison to play for the reserves without quite breaking through to the first team. He then suffered the rejection and dejection of being released. Lou Macari offered McLoughlin Swindon Town as a new start.

The McLoughlins of Maine Road were a tight family. Nora had come over from Limerick in the 1960s to find work and got it in the Dunlop factory. Pat McLoughlin had made the same journey, only from Mayo, at the same time to work in construction. Pat and Nora met. They settled in Fallowfield with many similar Irish families and stories around them.

Alan McLoughlin put down the phone and returned to the kitchen, his mind buzzing. ‘The fact the game was against Ireland in Ireland, that made it even better,’ he says. ‘Now I was thinking: ‘Do I respond? Who to? Should I ring Ossie?’ I needed to calm down.

‘So I go back to the kitchen and the other letters. If there’s bills, I’m thinking, I better pay them. There’s this brown envelope, hand-written, no logo on it. I didn’t know what this was. I open it and it’s from the FAI. They’re saying I’ve been called up to play for the Republic of Ireland against England in Cork. It was surreal, not something I’m likely ever to forget.

‘I was frantic. I ran back to the phone, called my Mum again and said: ‘You’re not gonna believe this.’

‘’What are you going to do? she said.’

‘‘I’m going to play for Ireland,’ I said. It wasn’t a debate in my head. It just seemed the natural decision to me.

‘It wasn’t contrived. I’ve a Mancunian accent and I was born in England, but I love my parents and I love their backgrounds. We grew up in an Irish community in Manchester, my sister was Irish dancing from a young age. My Dad once took me to Old Trafford when I was very young just to see George Best. When I spoke to my Nan she’d tell me about the Black and Tans. As I said, it just felt natural.

‘The thing is, I wasn’t even thinking about international football, of any level. There’d been no Irish representative at games as far as I was aware. I’d been through a tough time, released by United. Playing international football did not cross my mind.’

But it crossed the minds of others. Tony Galvin, the Huddersfield-born winger who played 29 times for the Republic of Ireland, was at Swindon, the last stop of his playing career. He had asked McLoughlin about his roots – ‘You must have some Irish in you with that surname?’

Although McLoughlin had replied that he did come from an Irish family; he did not know that Galvin had passed this snippet on to Jack Charlton.

McLoughlin now had to inform Ardiles and Swindon Town of his choice. In the days of faxes, two were sent from the club to the respective FAs. McLoughlin spoke again to Galvin, who ‘gave me a flavour of what to expect, he cemented my decision.’

The next month, at Turner’s Cross, Cork, Alan McLoughlin lined up for the Republic of Ireland against England in a ‘B’ international attended by his mother, father and uncle John. ‘When the national anthems were played I looked at them.

‘Then I had to focus on the game. We, I, wanted to put on a good show, and we did.’

Some around the England set-up will have known of their letter to McLoughlin but it was not something he had broadcast. He is realistic about his possibilities with England, the differences in the size of the talent pool available to the two countries. ‘They had most of the Arsenal back four in that England squad, Tony Adams, Dixon, Winterburn, Seaman, they’d David Batty, David Hirst. The chances are, if I’d got on, I’d have won one England B cap. I played 42 times for Ireland.

‘Our squad for that game was thinner, I noticed that on the two letters, England’s list was longer. Sub-consciously I probably thought about that too. We’d Mike Milligan, who I knew from Oldham, I was familiar with Terry Phelan and I knew of Denis Irwin. I’d heard of David Kelly and Niall Quinn of course.’

He did not discuss the two letters on the doormat with anyone: ‘I didn’t feel it was appropriate to mention. Close family knew about them but I never really spoke publicly about it until years later.’

There was a packed crowd and an intense atmosphere on a wet afternoon in Cork. Dalian Atkinson gave England the lead. There then must have been some rueful English looks when the Irish equaliser arrived. It was scored by Alan McLoughlin. David Kelly and two goals from Niall Quinn made it 4-1.

‘I can’t remember much about the build-up but I hope Mum and Dad and uncle John had umbrellas. It was wet, noisy, the crowd were on top of you. The dressing rooms were so small. It felt significant that the game was in Cork, not Dublin. It gave me a feeling of what it is to play at a higher level. And to score, in front of Jack Charlton and Maurice Setters, I was euphoric when I saw my parents afterwards.’

McLoughlin could not know it then but less than three months later at Italia 90, he would face England again, in Sardinia, coming on as a substitute for John Aldridge in the World Cup finals. Ten minutes after McLoughlin’s introduction, Kevin Sheedy equalised Gary Lineker’s opener for England. The post in Swindon had delivered.

*

IN REPLACING ALDRIDGE, MCLOUGHLIN KEPT THE NON IRELAND-BORN quotient in the Irish team that afternoon at Cagliari at seven. This was making an impact as great as Swindon’s postmen. Irish identity and authenticity became a question, debated at length inside and outside Ireland.

‘We were called a bunch of mercenaries by the English press,’ McLoughlin recalls, ‘they never mentioned that John Barnes was born in Jamaica. Then we had people at home questioning Tony Cascarino, Andy Townsend.

‘But you could be born in Ireland and move to England when you’re two years old. You’d be Irish but growing up in England. For anyone to say they don’t understand Irish culture or what it means to be Irish because you’re not born in Ireland is bullshit. My parents moved to Manchester to make a life for themselves. But they always referred to Ireland as ‘back home’, they never forgot who they were. It wasn’t rammed down my throat at home but I knew my identity. I lived in an Irish community in Fallowfield, lots of my friends were from the same background.’

One of McLoughlin’s classmates was singer Noel Gallagher – whose mother Peggy came to England from Mayo.

And in terms of professional assimilation into the squad, McLoughlin never experienced any kind of antagonism or suspicion from the Ireland-born Irishmen. ‘Packie [Bonner], Roy [Keane], Paul [McGrath], Kevin [Moran], they never made me feel anything but comfortable. No-one ever said: ‘You don’t sound Irish.’ I never came across it.’

*

ONE OF THE SHOUTS HE REMEMBERS HEARING WAS: ‘ENGLISH BASTARD.’

It was three years on from Cork and McLoughlin had become a Portsmouth player. He was still an Ireland international too, but to some in Belfast Alan McLoughlin remained irritatingly English. That, however, was a small detail in the turmoil of an...