A league of their own

Daire Whelan charts the rise and fall, but mostly the fall, of the League of Ireland, while Patrick West looks at some of the spectacular Irish soccer players of the past 50 years. Reviewed by Ken Early

Beating Them at Their Own Game. By Patrick West. Published by Liberties Press, €14.99

Who stole our game? By Daire Whelan. Published by Gill & Macmillan, €14.99

Every soccer fan in Ireland has at some point wondered why it is that our domestic game is such a shambles. Now Daire Whelan, a journalist and former radio and TV producer, has spoken to virtually everyone that matters in Irish soccer to find out. In six brilliantly-researched chapters, he traces the history of the League of Ireland from the 1950s, when big matches routinely drew up to 30,000 spectators, to the present day, when clubs are struggling to draw four-figure crowds.

In the 1950s, all seemed rosy in the garden of Irish soccer. In a country where the chief forms of recreation were alcohol abuse and paedophilia, the League of Ireland was big business. Clubs made plenty of money at the gates and paid the players very little. Nobody really asked what happened to all that gate money and now nobody really knows. Little of it was ploughed back into the sport. In 1956, an Ireland team with seven League of Ireland players beat the world champions, Germany, 3-0 at Dalymount. Forty-eight hours later, the players were all back working in factories and offices, but this seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

Unfortunately the outside world intervened to mess everything up. The advent of European club competition in the late-1950s hurt our self-image. Regular drubbings by foreign sides forced us to concede that we were not as good as we had thought. Drums' striker Tommy Roe recalls, "We played Atletico Madrid... and they were laughing at our boots, they were laughing at our stockings and our jerseys..."

By the mid-1960s, television had spread through the land and Ireland was beginning to realise that it was actually a rather dismal little country compared with the rest of Europe. Whelan writes that with TV arose "a kind of Irishness that wasn't willing to be a slave to Irish 'gaeldom', an Irishness that was looking beyond this shore". This effect was particularly acute in the sphere of soccer. It didn't help the League of Ireland that the Celtic and Man United teams of the time were so damn sexy. Another problem was that by the mid-1960s the Irish international team was completely dominated by English-based professionals: "No longer was the League of Ireland a point to aim for: players had to go higher... the nails were hammered into the coffin of the league."

But the collapse of the League of Ireland might not have been so total had it not been for the incompetence of those running it. Few soccer administrators had the skills needed to steer the game through a changing social landscape. Brian Kerr tells Whelan, "Soccer was a working-class game. It was not for the middle-class Fianna Fáil types... Sport was controlled by the religious and the powerful, whereas those running football had little business acumen... [They] didn't have the knowledge or the foresight to look ahead. I remember being told once the problem with the FAI was that there were too many bicycles chained to their gates."

Eamon Dunphy adds: "The GAA had a vision of Irishness... you wouldn't have to agree with the vision, but at least it was a vision. Soccer people never had that. They couldn't have had a vision because they didn't have that class of person around generally and that is to do with education."

GAA crowds also declined during the 1960s but, as Whelan shows, the association responded with carefully-planned measures to regenerate their games, putting down roots in the new suburbs that arose during the 1970s and 1980s and developing Croke Park into a world-class facility. Soccer was the most popular game with kids on the street but organisationally it was stuck in a time-warp. Nobody ever thought of a way to make the domestic league relevant to a new generation of TV-watching, mainly suburban kids who, in John Waters' words, "dreamed of playing at the highest level, so ending up at Sligo Rovers would be, by definition, a defeat... The FAI has always seemed to be a kind of interloper in the dream that soccer offered."

Whelan is good on the 1977 return of John Giles to Shamrock Rovers. In an interview with Vincent Browne in Magill magazine, Giles claimed Rovers could be European Champions within five years. (He now denies saying any such thing. "It is amazing what journalists write in their papers... I would never say anything like that. I wasn't a fool.") Giles' messianic mission came to grief in the long grass of bumpy country pitches, his dreams wrecked by the begrudgery of small-minded rivals. At least that's how his youth-team coach Eamon Dunphy tells it. Dunphy quit the project after a year, disgusted with the hostility he and Giles encountered. "They didn't want us to rise, because they knew they couldn't rise." Dunphy characterises League of Ireland officialdom as "the worst of the working class... the most exploitative of the working class, that county councillor type... Nothing good is allowed develop here... They want what is best for the lowest common denominator... They hate talented people, they are repelled by talented people."

Who Stole Our Game? contains many more such stories, mostly leading to the conclusion that the outlook for the Eircom League is bleak. The GAA has shed its staid image, while Irish rugby has never been in better shape. Whelan writes: "The GAA and international sports reflect back to us a pleasing picture of ourselves." Meanwhile the Eircom League is seen by most as a confederation of losers and second-raters. And if there's one thing we hate in Ireland these days, it's a loser.

Thankfully not everyone involved in Irish soccer is a loser. The winners are the subject of Patrick West's book, Beating Them at Their Own Game – How the Irish conquered English Soccer. West, a London-born author of Irish descent, has written a collection of biographies of the best Irish players of the past 50 years, from Con Martin and Charlie Hurley to Roy Keane and Damien Duff. He accompanies these with a neat social history of football in post-war Ireland.

There is not much new information on the players, but then that can be hard to get. Retired footballers usually want money for interviews. Former Liverpool full-back Phil Neal demanded stg£3,500 from the Observer for his thoughts on the Heysel tragedy, while an author who recently published a collection of interviews with retired players tells me the rate was around stg£31,000 apiece. The active ones don't need money, but they hate interviews and rarely say anything interesting. West's biographies are thus heavily reliant on already-published material and press clippings. Many of them are absorbing, especially the chapter on Danny Blanchflower – Spurs' 'dressing-room Disraeli', an Einstein among footballers who used to write a column in the New Statesman.

The only real let-down is the chapter on Roy Keane, which begins promisingly with a storming Nietzschean epigraph and an amusing riff on which mythological character best embodies Keane's strange personality. Unfortunately West then claims Keane broke Alfie Haaland's leg (he didn't, and Haaland is Norwegian, not Dutch), kicked a woman in a 1999 bar brawl (he didn't, though he did have a glass thrown in his face) and called Mick McCarthy an "English cunt" at Saipan (he didn't, at least according to everyone who was actually in the room at the time). But the mythos around Keane is so vast and varied that even the footballer's own autobiography took poetic license with some of the details, and elsewhere West usually calls it right.p