How England v Ireland football hooliganism disgraced a nation

Terry Venables, a man whom words rarely failed, said that he could not describe how dreadful the England team and the English Football Association felt about the matter. Alan Mullery, a newspaper columnist in those days, said that it would be impossible for England to host Euro ’96 the following year. The prime minister of the time, John Major, called it “a disgrace and a very great embarrassment”.

That was Feb 15, 1995 in Dublin and one of only three England internationals in the national team’s 152-year history to be abandoned. The first was the result of a waterlogged pitch in Montevideo in 1953, the second because of fog in Bratislava in 1975. At Lansdowne, Road it was rioting fans, chiefly a far-Right English element whose presence in Ireland, and the failure to anticipate it, would be the subject of blame and counter-blame between English and Irish authorities for weeks after the game. It stopped in the 27th minute with the Republic of Ireland leading by a David Kelly goal, fights breaking out at the old stadium and parts of it, including seats, thrown on the tier below.

The modern history of England against Ireland, who face one another on Saturday in Dublin, often leads back to this abandoned match. It was the fifth in a seven-year run between two nations which included some monumental games, high on drama but low on quality. The 1995 debacle was the end of an era, but what an era it had been for Irish football.

In the days that followed the 1995 abandonment, more than 30 English fans were processed through Dublin’s district court. The National Football Intelligence Unit, as it was then, a British cross-force police agency, claimed that it had warned the Garda, the Irish police, a week in advance that 11 separate hooligan groups were planning to travel. The Football Association of Ireland claimed a “serious information gap” from the Garda and also blamed the English FA.

The FAI claimed it knew only five minutes before kick-off that travelling British nationals who had been banned from games in England had been identified by spotters. By then, it said, there were operations organised by members of the National Front to rush the turnstiles.

Speaking to Telegraph Sport after a morning in court in Dublin, David O’Loughlin, then 29, a Leeds United fan from Rochdale, claimed he had stepped out of a bar into what he said was a “pitched battle that was like a civil war”. He did, nevertheless, plead guilty to a breach of the peace.

Managed by the England World Cup winner Jack Charlton since 1986, Ireland were more than a thorn in the side of the English. They beat England 1-0 in the group stages at Euro ’88, and drew with them 1-1 at the 1990 World Cup. After that famous game in Cagliari, two further Euro ’92 qualifiers followed. Two draws in those games only increased the scepticism around Graham Taylor.

Ireland had the measure of England and perhaps they would also have beaten Venables’s team in 1995. Fan violence was by then an inevitable part of the English game. It had been prevalent in Stuttgart before the Euro ’88 game, and had cast a shadow 10 years earlier. Then, the English and Irish authorities had decided not to sell any tickets for a 1978 Euro ’80 qualifier in Dublin to anyone with an English postal address.

Yet after the 1995 abandonment, the two nations would not play one another for 18 years. When finally they did, in May 2013 at Wembley, Ireland again secured a draw that was embarrassing for England. Gary Lineker, by then a BBC presenter, complained that Roy Hodgson’s team’s approach had been a “step back into the dark ages”, echoing a theme of the past.

Back in 1991, Taylor, struggling to move on from the 1980s Lineker generation of players, was confounded both by the robust approach of Charlton’s side and the evident admiration for it.

“We can’t play like the Irish unless we change our personnel,” Taylor lamented after a 1-1 draw at Wembley in March of that year. “Is that what people want?” Charlton’s teams of Irish and Irish-heritage players were certainly greater than the sum of their parts and their determination disrupted England.

“Direct to the point of primitive,” was the description by The Daily Telegraph of the quality of the Euro ’88 game between the nations. That day, the Irish withstood a battering from an England team desperately chasing an equaliser. Ray Houghton, the Liverpool midfielder born in Glasgow and raised chiefly in London, scored the only goal. At the 1990 World Cup, as an electrical storm swept in from the Bay of Cagliari, Ireland adopted the same approach. Their equaliser came when Everton’s Kevin Sheedy, born in Wales and the son of an Irishman, took the ball off Liverpool’s Steve McMahon.

England would go on to reach the semi-finals, but the lesson stuck with the more conservative Taylor. When England played Ireland again in the first Euro ’92 qualifier at Lansdowne Road the following November, he left the nation’s superstar, Paul Gascoigne, out of the team. In his place came Gordon Cowans, 32, winning his first cap in four years under his former Aston Villa manager. Taylor seemed dubious about Gascoigne’s reliability and the effect of the intense media interest in him.

In both those Euro ’92 qualifiers, the outstanding player was Ireland great Paul McGrath, playing out of position in midfield.

After the second game in 1991, England would not complete 90 minutes against the Irish in Dublin for more than 20 years. The scar of 1995 ran much too deep. There have been no competitive fixtures since 1991, although Saturday’s game at the Aviva Stadium, on the site of Lansdowne Road, is a Nations League match. Officially a Uefa competitive game, albeit of a weaker flavour.

The first game between England and the Irish Republic was in 1946, more than 20 years after the latter’s recognition by Fifa as a football nation in its own right. The Telegraph’s correspondent of the day, Frank Coles, steered well clear of hundreds of years of empire and two decades of partition when he described it simply as a “notable soccer occasion”. Coles saw it thus: “The resumption of international rivalry with the Irish in Dublin after a lapse of 34 years.”

Ireland under British rule competed in the Home Championship every year from 1882 until partition, most often in Belfast. The games continued even through the two years of Ireland’s war of independence. In October 1921, while Prime Minister David Lloyd George met Michael Collins in London during a truce, The Telegraph reported preparations for the England team’s embarkation to Belfast by ship.

The English FA’s chief consideration for the October scheduling was nothing to do with the state of the war. Rather the autumn weather, The Telegraph reported, was “more likely to favour a smooth crossing” on the Irish Sea. They had good reason to be wary; a Glasgow-to-Dublin steamer, the Rowan, had gone down that month after a double collision, with the loss of 22 lives.

By 1946, the travel arrangements were of greater sophistication. Two days before the first game against the Irish Republic at Dalymount Park, England played Northern Ireland in the Home Championship at Windsor Park. They won that game 7-2 but beat the Republic only 1-0 with a late Tom Finney goal.

So began a significant rivalry, but one comparatively rarely played. Saturday’s game in Dublin is, including 1995, just the 18th between the nations. Lee Carsley is the first former Ireland international to manage England, and declined an offer to take the Ireland job this year. Declan Rice is the first former Ireland international potentially to play against Ireland. One expects that one or both will provoke some reaction. Last time out in Dublin in 2015, Raheem Sterling was booed by Irish fans who seemed displeased with his intention to leave Liverpool.

“Forty thousand Irishmen outdid Hampden [Park] in fervour of their cheering,” was how The Telegraph reported the attitude of the home crowd in England’s first trip to face the Republic in Dublin, 78 years ago. It certainly has rarely felt that straightforward.