From Euro 2016 euphoria to the IFA's new president

While I was in France, watching Northern Ireland compete at Euro 2016, I read Evan Marshall’s brilliant book, Spirit of 58, which charts the team’s first major tournament finals, almost sixty years ago.  

It’s a great story, describing how the country’s manager, Peter Doherty, transformed perennial whipping boys into a squad of formidable professionals, who then advanced to the quarter finals of the 1958 World Cup.  It’s written vividly and lucidly, on the back of freshly researched source material and a wealth of new interviews.

One of the striking themes, which clearly frustrates the author, is the consistent ineptitude of the Irish Football Association, the sport’s organising body in Northern Ireland.  The IFA refused to allow a full panel of players to travel to the tournament in Sweden, it frustrated Doherty’s attempts to scout opposition matches, it botched hotel bookings – with the result that an injury-ravaged team missed out on much needed rest – and, worst of all, it almost stopped Northern Ireland competing in the first place, because of controversy about playing games on a Sunday.  

Fifty-eight years later, much has changed and little has changed.  

The squad of 2016 certainly had all the amenities it needed to compete in France and it played matches on the Sabbath, during qualification and during the tournament itself, with few serious objections.  However, the IFA still has a formidable talent for bungling matters off the field, even while its international team is over-achieving on it.  

Last night, the association elected David Martin as its president.  This is a man who was forced out as IFA treasurer, after the sports minister made it clear that the organisation was not fit for purpose and couldn’t receive government monies while some of its officers were still in place.  Not to be discouraged, Mr Martin failed three independent suitably tests, as he attempted to find his way back into prominent posts in local football.  In 2013, the IFA changed its rules at an AGM, so that officers no longer needed to prove their suitability to an independent panel.

A lot of the problems underlying Mr Martin’s comeback would be familiar to the football community in 1958.  Tiny little clubs, many of them from church leagues, rather than Irish League teams, drove opposition to playing football on a Sunday and jeopardised Northern Ireland’s involvement in the World Cup.  Likewise, Mr Martin built up his power-base in junior football, and he was linked to the ‘Dunloy Proposals’, which almost derailed funding for the new National Stadium at Windsor Park, as small clubs made a grab for more influence.  

The IFA has changed over the years and there are professional staff amongst its ranks.  In most respects, it did a good job of promoting and organising Northern Ireland’s Euro 2016 campaign, so that it was memorable for players and supporters alike.  It would be a real shame if that hard work is undermined by the election of the association’s foremost officer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more