That’s Ireland

Some hilarious on-board commentary from driver Niall O’Connell and and co-driver John Liston as they try to overtake a slow car on a narrow straight road in the Irish National Rally Championship. It’s on YouTube via MotorSportMad.com.

From the Ireland.com homepage of the Irish Times today:

Actually, McDowell won $333,000 of a $2.9m prize fund.

Following yesterday’s post about the Ireland U-18 team that conquered Europe a decade ago, On the Ditch was wondering where they are now. Well, a few broke into the senior Ireland international team, and most are still playing football for clubs ranging from the English Premiership down to non-league level, and from League of Ireland to North America. One of them nearly became Time magazine’s Person of the Century, and another has played for Harchester in Dream Team.

Here’s what they all did next: >>> (more…)

Ten years ago, in 1998, Brian Kerr led two Ireland youth teams to win the U-16 and U-18 European Championship titles, and Ireland became the first ever country to hold both titles in the same year. The above picture shows Kerr celebrating with Liam George, who scored the winning goal in the final, and assistant manager Noel O’Reilly.

In the U-18 tournament in Cyprus, we were in a group with Croatia, England and Cyprus. Going in to the last games of the group, England manager Howard Wilkinson was so confident that he complained that his players were expected to attend a three-hour reception before playing in the final.

As it happened, Ireland beat Cyprus 3-0 to top the group on goal difference, so Wilkinson’s players were spared the trouble of attending the reception. Instead it was Ireland who proceeded to the final, to face the might of Germany. Here’s a review of that final against Germany, and a look at the members of the U-18 Irish squad who conquered Europe a decade ago. >>> (more…)

So Ireland lost to Brazil, despite (as this photograph suggests) playing the game not in Croke Park, but in the middle of Drumcondra Road itself.

As one small measure of the FAI’s comic mismanagement of Irish international football, I was much more emotionally involved watching Bohemians play Monaghan United on Saturday than I was with a visit of Brazil, the iconic international team of anybody who was a child in 1970, to a world-class stadium around the corner from my house.

Admittedly I am biased, as I have applied for the job of Ireland manager and I have yet to hear back from the interview panel of Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman and Paddy Scotsman. But there is a disturbing side effect of the marathon selection leakathon - and that is the massive amount of money that is being won and lost by people betting on the ever-changing favourites for the job. >>> (more…)

I was channel-hopping on the telly last night and came across a celebrity poker game with former footballers Tony Cascarino of Ireland, Norman Whiteside of Northern Ireland, Alan Ball of England, Ray Stewart of Scotland, a very thin Uli Stein of Germany and a very chubby Tomas Brolin of Sweden.

It was obviously filmed some time ago, as Alan Ball died last year. Which reminded me of the rumour that did the rounds when he died - that David Beckham had been asked to give the oration at Ball’s funeral, because… >>> (more…)

• What was unusual about John Pius Boland’s gold medal in tennis in Athens in 1896, apart from him becoming the first Irishman to win Olympic gold?
• What excuse did Irish footballer Ernie Crawford give when customs officials found a gun in his luggage on the way to Paris in 1924?
• What was unusual about Bob Tisdall, who was born in Ceylon and raised in Tipperary, winning gold for Ireland in the 400 metres hurdles in Los Angeles in 1932?

Answers just a click away: >>> (more…)

I’d like to thank the Irish Independent, the Star on Sunday and FM104’s Strawberry Alarm Clock for their support in my attempt to become Ireland’s next football manager. Still no word back from the three wise men, though.

Here’s the full article from the Star on Sunday, in which Ken Sweeney does that newspapery thing of putting my age in brackets after my name, and kindly knocks a couple of years off it: >>> (more…)

Today I have applied for a third time to manage the Ireland football team, citing on my CV my three games with Willow Park Wanderers U-11 side. I am by far the most experienced applicant, having previously been beaten to the job by Jack Charlton in 1986 and Mick McCarthy in 1996 (see above). So I have written to the FAI selection committee, enclosing a CD of the I, Keano show to demonstrate my approach to becoming The Gaffer. Here is the application letter and CV that I have sent to my future employers in Abbotstown: >>> (more…)

I recently designed a 2008 calendar for Bohemian FC. It’s a pictorial record of the history of the club, spanning twelve decades from the 1890s to the 2000s.

When Bohs was founded in 1890, Frank Whitaker, who later became Brother Francis de Sales Whitaker of the Order of Saint John of Gods, proposed the name Bohemians. The vote was tied and the chairman, Dudley Hussey, who later became a senior civil servant, used his casting vote - the club would be called Bohemians instead of Rovers. Here’s the earliest report that I have found of a Bohs match, from the Irish Times on November 4, 1890: >>> (more…)

Can you recognise who this are? It’s a half-way image of a morph between an Irish entertainer and a Scottish sportsman (who kind of look like each other anyway).

Here’s the answer, and an animated version of the morph. >>> (more…)

If football is to thrive in Ireland, we need an all-island football league. To debate this properly, we first have to dispel a stubborn myth - that the split between the two Irish Football Associations came about because of the political partition of the island. This myth has no real basis in fact. At the time, Gaelic and rugby remained organised on an all-island basis, and cricket and athletics actually unified their organisations for the first time after partition. Soccer alone was divided, the political timing was largely co-incidental, and the reasons were mostly internal to the Irish FA. Here is a quick summary. >>> (more…)

Here are some videos from YouTube of Ireland football fans enjoying themselves, starting with one of my favourite Irish football fan moments - Ireland fans in the Stade de France singing the French national anthem without knowing any of the words to it.


There are seven more clips just a click away:

• Ireland fans singing Stand Up (and Sit Down) for the Boys in Green.
• Ireland fans joining a Hare Krishna parade singing Ole Ole Ole.
• Northern Ireland fans singing Hare, Hare, Give Us a Song.

• Northern Ireland fans singing We’re Not Brazil, We’re Northern Ireland.
• Northern Ireland fans singing a hymn to David Healy, Healy, Healy.
• Donegal Celtic fans dancing to One Step Beyond by Madness.
• Two Sligo Rovers fans dancing to Dancing Queen by Abba.

And here they are: >>> (more…)

If you are interested in Irish football in the 1970s and before that, I’ve just put up a few more new entries on my Bionic Bohs blog.

If you’re interested in cultural nostalgia, this entry on the Bionic Bohs blog lists some peculiar Irish news events from one weekend in September 1977.

As I’m sure they’re busy today counting out Steve Staunton’s compensation money, I thought I’d help the FAI with this recruitment advert:

And what was John Delaney thinking when he made the bizarre claim that the FAI hired Steve Staunton because they were following a ‘European model’ at the time of hiring former players with no coaching experience because international coaches cannot buy players? If he believes this, which of course he doesn’t, he is madder than any of us ever thought possible. When the FAI appointed Staunton in January 2006, the European countries who had qualified for that year’s World Cup had done so with coaches who had an average of fifteen years experience each before they were appointed. >>> (more…)

As the FAI stumble comically into their constantly exploding clowns’ car to start the search for yet another new manager, let me tell you about how I applied to manage Ireland the year Jack Charlton accidentally got the job. Four years earlier, Eoin Hand had replaced John Giles. Hand got the job by one swing vote because one FAI board member thought that rival candidate Paddy Mulligan had thrown a bun at him on an away trip. After Hand had resigned in 1985, the Merrion Square circus swung into inaction. Two senior FAI men - President Des Casey and Tony O’Neill - drove around England in a hired car looking for people to interview, while I sat at home and honed my CV. >>> (more…)

Two weeks ago thugs from Dublin attacked the Tavern Bar in Derry, before the League Cup Final. Last Friday, I and other genuine Bohemians fans presented €1,000 to the owner of the bar as a gesture of solidarity. We collected the money at our last home game, against Galway United, and we presented it to him last Friday in his bar, mixing together with locals and Derry City fans, in sporting rivalry and personal friendship. Here we are making the donation:

The event was a great success, and was a very emotional occasion with Mr Curry and his customers saying they would never have believed that there would be such a mix of people in their bar. There were fans and directors of both Bohemians and Derry City, most visiting the bar for the first time ever, mixing with the usual customers, plus the Mayor of Derry Drew Thompson of the DUP, Councillor Sean Carr of the SDLP, and Dean William Morton. >>> (more…)

Today I am going to Derry, where Bohemians play Derry City in a league game. Before the game, we will be visiting the Tavern bar, which was attacked by thugs from Dublin when Bohemians last visited Derry. We will be presenting the bar owner, Mr Kingsley Curry, with €1,000 that we collected for him as a gesture of solidarity. And we will be conveying the following messages, which represent the views of decent football supporters throughout the island: >>> (more…)

I was in Derry on Tuesday night watching Bohs lose the League Cup Final. Before the match, a gang of thugs from Dublin attacked a pub in a Protestant part of Derry, shouting ‘Up the Ra’, smashing windows and injuring a customer. By yesterday afternoon, four of these thugs had been sentenced to three months in jail. I have written before about these parasites who latch onto football clubs, and we must not allow them to destroy the enjoyment of sports events. Here are some practical things that I believe should be done to tackle this problem: >>> (more…)

The ever-comical FAI has just announced that this year’s FAI Cup Final will take place on Sunday, December 2, a week later than scheduled. That’s a full three weeks after the League of Ireland season ends, which seems unusually bizarre, even for the FAI. That is, until you realize that the original Cup Final date clashed with an FAI junket to South Africa’s ‘Surf City’ of Durban. Here’s how I suspect that the clowns in Merrion Square took this decision: >>> (more…)