When did your history begin?

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Originally Posted by pineapple stu

The Everton-Liverpool comparison doesn't work in this case though. Everton and Liverpool are clubs, and any one club is clearly different to another and was created as such, so one can't claim the other's history (unless you're MK Dons).

Ireland and the North, however, are states (replace with whatever phrase you deem most appropriate), with the national football teams arising out of them. So if you view the 32 counties as one state (which obviously many RoI people would), you can definitely claim a stake in the history of the "united" Irish team pre-1921.

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Actually, Evertonians claim that Liverpool was formed as a breakaway from their club, although it was they (Everton) who moved out of Anfield (originally their home), thereby leaving it vacant for the newly-formed Liverpool FC.
I know it's from Wikipedia, but I think the following is reliable:

"Liverpool F.C. were founded by John Houlding in 1892 to play in his vacant Anfield stadium. For the previous seven years the stadium had been used by Everton F.C.. However, in 1891 Houlding, the leaseholder of Anfield, purchased the ground outright and proposed increasing the rent from £100 to £250 per year.[8] The Everton members objected, left Anfield and moved to Goodison Park.
With an empty ground and just three players remaining, Houlding decided to form his own football club and on 15 March 1892, Liverpool Football Club was formed. The original name was to be Everton F.C. and Athletic Grounds, Ltd., or Everton Athletic for short, but was changed to Liverpool F.C. when The Football Association refused to recognise the team as Everton. John McKenna was appointed director and signed thirteen Scottish professionals for the new club"

Anyway, I accept that that doesn't really matter for the purposes of this thread; your second paragraph is much more pertinent (and interesting).

It's beginning to look as though ROI fans have mixed, even contradictory, opinions on the issue of the Ireland team, pre-partition.

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Originally Posted by dcfcsteve

Even the Dirty Dons Franchise FC can no longer claim the Wimbledon history - they have officially relinguished any right over the FA Cup and previous honours to AFC Wimbledon, the true heirs of Wimbledon FC.

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As Pineapple Stu indicated, though, club football is not the same as international football i.e. you can't "choose" your country, whereas you can choose your club. Although the ROI's eligibility and Passport criteria sometimes make it seem as if any bugger can choose them.
















Having lit the blue touchpaper, Ealing Green retreats to a safe distance...

(And I am really only joking, btw :D )

How's Maik Taylor doing for yez these days? ;)

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Originally Posted by stojkovic

My biggest regret of the political division that happened in the early 90's is the break-up of that great Red Star Belgrade team.

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I'm sure the victims of Serbian nationalism share your regret.

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Originally Posted by Jamjar

I'm sure the victims of Serbian nationalism share your regret.

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Funny, I thought that this was a football forum.

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Originally Posted by stojkovic

This did not happen with the break-up of the USSR, Yugoslavia or Czechoslavakia where the dominant state took the credit for past histories and achievements.

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I can't speak for the USSR or Czechoslovakia but I know in Slovenia they take credit for the achievements of those athletes who hailed from their country and represented Yugoslavia. Throughout every part of the disintegration of Yugoslavia the rump that contained Serbia right down to the recent dissolution of Serbia and Montenegro claims to be the successor state of al Yugoslavia's achievements. Serbia probably claims its won X amount of medals in Olympics etc. but Slovenia and the others would feel that's their achievement.

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Originally Posted by Poor Student

I can't speak for the USSR or Czechoslovakia but I know in Slovenia they take credit for the achievements of those athletes who hailed from their country and represented Yugoslavia. Throughout every part of the disintegration of Yugoslavia the rump that contained Serbia right down to the recent dissolution of Serbia and Montenegro claims to be the successor state of al Yugoslavia's achievements. Serbia probably claims its won X amount of medals in Olympics etc. but Slovenia and the others would feel that's their achievement.

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It's easy to lay claim on gongs in individual sports like athletics, boxing etc, as it's clear where those individuals hail from.

It's much trickier in football where the participants come from a number of areas - and particularly for somewhere like Yugoslavia that split into so many individual parts, with none of those individual parts being so geographically large or dominanty as to lay any sort of credible claim on past unitary achievements (unlike Russia vis-a-vis the USSR).

Olympic medals and athletes are far easier to sort though, as there's only one person who can usually be attributed to one country. Team sports are a far more complicated issue though, and are what this one is about.

Someone was saying that 8 of the 1976 European Championship winning Czechoslovakian team were actuall from Slovakia, although most people will say Slovakia have never qualified for the Euros, but the Czechs have won it. How do you allocate that victory then? 8/11th to Slovakia, maybe with an allowance for subs? In reality, they'd pretty much have to share the win. Same situation here really.

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Originally Posted by CollegeTillIDie

A number of developments in the world game can be traced to here. One of the most famous being the invention of the goal net by a Belfast man in 1890/91 I think his name was Dunlop.

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Unlikely. According to http://www.goalkeepersaredifferent.c...r/netframe.htm

Goal nets were the invention of J. A. Brodie, who took out a patent for his invention in 1890. The first official use of nets date from 1891 when they were used at the Old Etonian's ground Liverpool and at Nottingham Forest's Town Ground. They were first used in an FA Cup Final in 1892 but it was some time before they were used regularly in International matches, which led to the odd disputed goal.

When Jack Barton scored the ninth goal for England against Ireland in Belfast in 1890, the Irish players claimed the ball had gone over the bar and when Willie Gibson scored a very late equaliser for Ireland in 1894, England's goalkeeper Joe Reader claimed the ball went past the post. It was the first time Ireland avoided defeat against England.

When you Google "J.A.Brodie", the results invariably list him either as "Liverpudlian JA Brodie" or "JA Brodie of Liverpool". And although it is possible he was a Belfastman resident in Liverpool at some stage, if a Belfast man patented nets in 1890, you'd have imagined he'd have had them introduced for an international in his home city by 1894?

Of much greater significance in the development of the game is the contribution of "Master" Willie McCrum, of Armagh. His (English) great-grandson Robert, the Literary Editor of the Observer, wrote this piece soon after England went out of Euro2004 on a penalty shoot-out:

Sunday July 4, 2004
The Observer

The penalty shoot-out is a cruel way to settle a great championship. I always watch these nail-biting minutes with especially mixed feelings. What, I wonder, would my great-grandfather have made of it? After all, penalties were his idea....
Just outside Armagh, near the border with the Republic of Ireland, among pleasant hills and apple orchards, lies the former cotton-spinning community of Milford. This red-brick, late-Victorian model village was built by my great-great-grandfather, Robert Garmany McCrum, an imposing, far-sighted cotton millionaire whose only son William ('Master Willie') was mad about football.


My great-grandfather is still remembered in Milford as 'Master Willie', as though he somehow never quite grew up. His was a classic and strangely fascinating failure. Master Willie was quite different from his father. Where Robert Garmany McCrum ('RG') was authoritarian and remote, his son was sporty and accessible. Where RG was serious, thrifty and God-fearing; Master Willie told funny stories, sang songs and loved to play games.
Shut out of the family business as a lightweight, eventually deserted by a faithless wife and coldly ignored by his father, Master Willie travelled the world, lived high on the hog and was well-known as a gambler. But if he found lasting fulfilment anywhere, it was in the athletic pursuits of his village, especially football.

Throughout his sporting life he played enthusiastically in goal for the Milford Football Club. A failure in business who would eventually have to sell the Milford cotton mill to pay for his injudicious speculations at the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, Master Willie took a keen amateur's interest in the conduct of the great game.

In the nineteenth century, amateur football was largely a free-for-all, with almost no coherence or organisation, in which local scores were settled and old vendettas sustained. A well-known defensive action involved the defenders jumping up and kneeing their opponents in the stomach. Overenthusiastic tackling sometimes resulted in death. Charges of manslaughter arising from matches were not unusual.

As a goalkeeper, Master Willie had every opportunity to witness the way in which the purity of the sport was being corrupted by such foul play. Then he had his big idea. Offenders should be punished with a penalty. And not just any old penalty. A 'penalty kick'. From his goalmouth vantage-point on the muddy, low-lying Milford village football pitch, during the 1880s, William McCrum slowly developed the idea of the penalty kick as a way of curbing excesses on the field.

The penalty kick , of course, is the kind of penalty that only a goalkeeper could have invented, a supreme moment of drama and self-sacrifice that places the goalkeeper, generally a bystander, at the centre of the stage. Yes, it stacks the odds against the goalie, but it does make him, heroically, even tragically, the star of the show. Master Willie was not just a sporting show-off. He also devoted hours of recreation to amateur theatricals in the Milford village hall, the McCrum Institute.

In 1890, having developed the idea of the penalty kick in local Milford games, Master Willie persuaded the Irish Football Association (IFA) to submit his idea to the next meeting of the International Football Board (IFB).

Scornfully described by the English press as 'the Irishman's Motion', the suggestion was condemned as likely to reduce play to gridlock and as a restriction that would curb the players' freedom of expression. The notion of the penalty kick was ethically abhorrent, too. It was unthinkable to the amateur section of the IFB that a player should deliberately kick an opponent and, worse, that the rules of the game should acknowledge such foul play.

The legendary CB Fry, captain of the Corinthians - gentlemen amateur players who collectively disdained the penalty kick by using such moments to have a quiet smoke - pronounced that it was 'a standing insult to sportsmen to have to play under a rule which assumes that players intend to trip, hack and push opponents and to behave like cads of the most unscrupulous kidney'.

In June 1890, at a meeting in London, the IFB resolved, after fierce debate, that the contentious 'Irishman's Motion' should be adjourned for a year. This time all went smoothly and the penalty kick rule - number 13 in the Laws of the Game - was unanimously adopted and, with progressive refinements, soon became an integral, but not controversial, part of the game. Master Willie's contribution faded into oblivion.

I first came across this story on a visit to Milford in 1987. Some of the older villagers, proud of their connection to this sporting footnote, took me to see the actual pitch on which the great rule had been developed, told stories of Master Willie driving his Rolls-Royce down Milford's main street and teased me about the family's lost millions.

Coincidentally, as penalties began to play a larger role in the modern game, I found that the story of Master Willie's invention was becoming better known. After England were knocked out of the 1998 World Cup in a penalty shoot-out against Argentina, Gary Lineker filmed a short historical documentary about William McCrum. My credibility with The Observer sports desk rose, momentarily. My colleague Andrew Anthony even wrote a book, On Penalties , about the subject, exploring its existential dimensions in fascinating detail.

Today, economic progress in newly peaceful Northern Ireland has finally reached Milford. Having seemed frozen in time for generations, the village is changing. Developers are moving in. Plans to build on the Milford Football Club pitch have become the subject of a fierce local controversy. Occasionally a friendly reporter from The Belfast Telegraph rings up for my opinion on the whole business.

What do I think ? I am, initially, a bit embarrassed to be claiming ancestry with Master Willie after forty-something years of sheer ignorance, not to say profound indifference. When I was growing up in Cambridge, the old family home in Milford was not mentioned - hardly known about, indeed - and Master Willie was not referred to. I regret to say that in my family we were more likely to discuss the source of a Shakespeare quotation, or the derivation of an obscure English noun than to analyse the history of Association Football.

But now that the penalty kick has become part of the national conversation, I am happy to be an expert and to brag about the family connection to Master Willie. I'd rather watch cricket or racing, but European Championship football with England in the last eight is unquestionably thrilling and a penalty shoot-out (which our match against Portugal was reduced to) made it a moment of poignant high drama for spectators, especially non-football loving ones. I willingly concede that the IFB were probably right: penalties do diminish the game. But there is no getting round the theatre of the penalty kick. My great-grandfather's penalty kick.

What Master Willie would think of all this I have no idea. Apart from his peculiar niche in the forgotten annals of the beautiful game, he is almost forgotten. He died, alcoholic, penniless and alone, in a boarding house in Armagh, just before Christmas in 1932.

Btw, that article was reproduced in the History & Heritage section of OWC - http://ourweecountry.ipbhost.com/ind...?showforum=183 - which those of you interested in the game's origins might find interesting.
There is evidence that the defensive wall might be one of ours as well - Danny Blanchflower claims so - though it is somewhat dubious.
And Belfast man Billy McCracken (Newcastle United) is generally credited with having used the offside trap to such great effect that in 1925 the number of defenders required to play an opponent offside was reduced from three to two.



P.S. The Dunlop you are thinking of may be this one, a Scot who invented the pneumatic tyre in Belfast and gave his name to the giant Tyre company:

http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/johndunlop.htm

I was wrong, I had thought the only football fans remotely interested in history were Shamrock Rovers fans with their resurrection of post famine archives to find evidence of greatness.

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deserted by a faithless wife

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The only remotely interesting character in that story.

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Originally Posted by EalingGreen

Unlikely. According to http://www.goalkeepersaredifferent.c...r/netframe.htm

P.S. The Dunlop you are thinking of may be this one, a Scot who invented the pneumatic tyre in Belfast and gave his name to the giant Tyre company:

http://www.ulsterhistory.co.uk/johndunlop.htm

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A Revolutionary idea if ever there was one......;)

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Originally Posted by youngirish

Sweden away, Spain away, even Latvia away? Sanchez taking the Fulham job full time (it'll happen). The fall is coming EalingGreen, not that you have any great heights to fall form.

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Hmm, I suppose if you keep making enough predictions, one of them might come true sometime.

At least you've a better chance with that effort than with your last try in February:
"You're so biased you no longer inhabit reality as far as football is concerned. Sweden the end of March will give you a reality check if Liechenstein don't manage to do it beforehand"

For the record:
24/03/07 - Liechtenstein 1 v 4 NI
28/03/07 - NI 2 v 1 Sweden

Anyhow, enough of the future, have you managed to decide about when your history began, 1921 or 1880? Just asking...

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Originally Posted by pineapple stu

Someone was saying that 8 of the 1976 European Championship winning Czechoslovakian team were actuall from Slovakia, although most people will say Slovakia have never qualified for the Euros, but the Czechs have won it. How do you allocate that victory then? 8/11th to Slovakia, maybe with an allowance for subs? In reality, they'd pretty much have to share the win. Same situation here really.

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I've heard that the USSR team was often made up mainly of Ukranians and Georgians, particularly in the early 1980's.

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Originally Posted by EalingGreen

Anyhow, enough of the future, have you managed to decide about when your history began, 1921 or 1880? Just asking...

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I answered earlier. You must have been busy looking for that post you quoted above.

What about our victories over the Welsh and the Slovaks? You had us dead and buried after the San Marino game. I'd say you cheered every goal.

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Originally Posted by Poor Student

I've heard that the USSR team was often made up mainly of Ukranians and Georgians, particularly in the early 1980's.

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Yeah at the 86 World Cup the entire first team bar a single player were Ukranian (I believe thay were all Dinamo Kiev players).

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Originally Posted by Poor Student

I've heard that the USSR team was often made up mainly of Ukranians and Georgians, particularly in the early 1980's.

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It was. We basically drew with Ukraine - Dinamo Kiev, in fact - in Euro 88.

Probably had something to do with Lobanovsky did it?

Basically. Though he would have analysed and selected the best players for Kiev with the intention that they would have been the national team, by and large (some big name players like Dasayev were let join foreign clubs).

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Originally Posted by youngirish

I answered earlier. You must have been busy looking for that post you quoted above.

What about our victories over the Welsh and the Slovaks? You had us dead and buried after the San Marino game. I'd say you cheered every goal.

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My mistake; I had read your post (#33), but for some reason didn't take in that it was yours (:confused: )

As for my opinion prior to the Wales game, this is what I posted:

"Consequently, I think the two teams are evenly matched. I think you'll do well to get a draw in Cardiff, though should hope (just) to beat them in Dublin.
I think a great deal rests on how motivated the teams are on the day.
As such, now that Toshack looks to be setting his own "stamp" on the team by getting rid of players he doesn't like, such as Savage, the Welsh players may have more belief in their manager's selection and tactics than the Irish do in Staunton.
That said, I think the Croker Factor will give you a huge boost.
A close call all round, I'd say."

From what I gather, ROI did just enough to beat what turned out on the day to be a very poor Wales team, so other than overestimating Toshack's influence, I wasn't too far off with my prediction.

I don't think I ever said much (if anything) about Slovakia, since I know much less about them than Wales.

As for my reaction as the goals went in, I was in Vaduz during the Wales match and in a huge London pub full of Swedes and NI fans watching our match whilst the ROI v Slovakia game was on, so I couldn't/wasn't paying any attention to the ROI's progress.

But seeing as you ask, it looks to me as if those two results were a short-term gain (points/seeding etc), but a long-term loss, since it reinforces Stan's position. And as I see it, notwithstanding (narrow) wins over S.Marino, Wales and Slovakia, he will never make an international manager.

But I'm allowing myself to get dragged off topic :(

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Originally Posted by galwayhoop

i am happy to support Ireland with good conscience and feel that I am a decent Irishman.

Who represents you? Bohs??

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God no. Not "represent". Sort of — for the ninety minutes if I'm at the match; I'm far too crap a fan, though, to expect much representation at club level. I barstool/armchair quite effectively for Liverpool and probably receive a modicum of representation from them.

The way I see it there's no way either of the two teams can represent me on the international stage. No big deal! Certainly not the most tragic personal circumstances arising out of the two-state state of affairs.

I totally withdraw my 5-in-the-morning "decent Irishman" terminology, btw.