The island of Ireland is a place where history casts a particularly long shadow.
So perhaps I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am that so few people seem to know about a proud episode in the island’s footballing history that took place 99 years ago.
I first stumbled upon this years ago during one of my periodic trawls through the pages of an old Rothmans football yearbook.
With the centenary approaching, I decided a few months ago to try and find out more about it, with the aim of writing an article for The Blizzard, a new and unashamedly literary football quarterly based in Sunderland in north-east England.
There was, it turned out, more than one thing that happened in 1914: as well as the start of the Great War, it was the year that Ireland first managed to win the old Home International football championship, the annual contest that pitted what were then the four constituent parts of the United Kingdom against one another.
What were they like, I wondered, these men who together comprised the first half-decent international football team to represent Ireland? Were they all Protestant boys from industrial Belfast, or a broader cross-section of their, as yet undivided, homeland? And what became of them at this momentous, bloody time in the history of Europe – and of Ireland?
If you are interested, you can find the full article in Issue Eight of The Blizzard, available now from www.theblizzard.co.uk.
What I thought I would do here is map out the last act in the drama, which took place amid atrocious conditions at Windsor Park, Belfast on 14 March 1914.
A hard-working, slick-passing Irish team had already beaten Wales and England – the latter by an emphatic three goals to nil at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, in a scoreline not that much less surprising than North Korea 1 Italy 0, registered at the same venue 52 years later.
While defeat by Scotland’s robust side might yet deprive them of their first title, Ireland knew ahead of time that a draw would be enough to secure the championship.
It might have been a stroll, but in fact a series of setbacks kept a highly partisan (and damp) 28,000 crowd, under their “forest of gleaming umbrellas”, on tenterhooks until the end.
The first setback, indeed, occurred in the days leading up to the big match and illustrated that the issue of “club versus country” is far from an exclusively modern phenomenon.
This was when it emerged that Billy Gillespie, the Sheffield United forward who had become the team’s talisman since scoring twice on his international debut the previous year in another victory over England, was needed for an FA Cup match that had gone to a second replay and would hence be unavailable.
The incessant rain that had turned the pitch into what one journalist described memorably as a passable imitation of “a Kerry moving bog” was unwelcome too, since it was felt likely to favour the physical approach expected to be deployed by the Scots.
And when play did get under way, the home team’s spirit was tested further by a series of injuries that left them depleted, with no substitutes permitted.
Among the injured was goalkeeper Fred McKee, an eccentric amateur who worked as a tea merchant.
McKee left the action with a fractured collar-bone shortly after half-time, leaving defender Bill McConnell, himself injured, to take his place, having first struggled into “a jersey two sizes too small”.
In the 68th minute, a final, decisive setback appeared to have broken Irish hearts, when a mistake by the unfortunate makeshift goalkeeper enabled Scotland’s Joe Donnachie to score.
The home team now had barely 20 minutes to retrieve the situation.
Just eight of these remained when Sam Young of Linfield, a 31-year-old forward playing on his home ground, burst on to a through ball and thumped home an unstoppable shot.
There was a suspicion of offside, but the goal stood.
The home side nearly went on to win the match in the closing minutes, but they had done enough.
Quite what this team of 1914 might have achieved had domestic politics and the disastrous machinations of the great European powers not intervened is impossible to say.
It included no giants of the game, but in the likes of Gillespie, Billy Lacey and Frank Thompson, a Bradford City FA Cup hero in 1911, it had plenty of players with real talent.
The Athletic News and Cyclists’ Journal which, in spite of its name, was one of the foremost football papers of its day, hailed a “new era” and predicted that the success should prove a “powerful stimulant to the cultivation” of football on the island.
History, unfortunately, decreed otherwise.
Nonetheless, the men responsible for this first competitive landmark in the Irish international game deserve to be remembered.
Are you listening, Mr Blatter?
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938