How a drab Cup semi-final provoked the split between the two Irish football associations

This piece was written by David Owen for Issue 41

On 25 February 1904, Dublin’s Molesworth Hall hosted the first staging of Riders to the Sea, a one-act play by John Millington Synge now viewed as a key work in the Irish Literary Renaissance. 17 years later, the same venue was the setting for a more private gathering which was to prove another important Irish cultural landmark.

The 29th annual meeting of the Leinster Football Association (LFA), held on 1 June 1921 – so, a century ago – took the momentous decision to break loose from the Belfast-based Irish Football Association (IFA).

According to one account, the motion that “the time had now come to set up a new association in Leinster independent of the IFA” was proposed by a Mr L Sheridan and seconded by a Mr Harrison, who “dwelt on the disabilities under which Leinster football had laboured”. A Mr Ritchie – who, according to a short report in the Lisburn Standard, was “a Northerner” – argued for remaining in; but Mr Wigoder, the newly-re- elected LFA president, backed the proposal “provided better officials and referees were provided”, whereupon the resolution was adopted. In this way, with little fuss, the split in football administration on the island of Ireland that persists to this day came into effect.

You might think that this was a natural consequence of the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland, with partition taking effect on 3 May 1921. And an association football split echoing that political divide might well have occurred sooner or later. Other sports have, nevertheless, retained an all-Ireland structure. For the author Neal Garnham indeed, soccer is “almost unique as a sport in Ireland in that its administration split contemporaneously with the political division of the country”.

In fact, the direct cause of the breakaway was a long-forgotten and frankly dull Irish Cup semi-final that had taken place three months earlier, on 5 March 1921, at Windsor Park in Belfast. This game pitted Glenavon from the small town of Lurgan in County Armagh against Shelbourne from Dublin, south of the soon-to-be- created border.

These were troubled times. The Anglo- Irish War, which had broken out in 1919, continued to sputter. Shelbourne’s home city of Dublin was under curfew; Belfast was every bit as tense. None of this was conducive to the efficient and problem- free staging of any sports encounter. As the Northern Whig newspaper noted on the day of the match, for “the first time this season a Dublin club will make the journey north of the Boyne”, a river which flows through the town of Drogheda, 50km north of the Irish capital, and has traversed Irish history since the eponymous battle in 1690.

The paper also explained how the Dublin curfew had influenced kick-off time. “It was originally intended that this game should start at three o’clock,” it noted. However, “owing to the fact that curfew now comes into operation in Dublin at nine o’clock, the Shels are forced to remain overnight in the city, and so the kick-off has been fixed for 3.30.”

Shelbourne travelled north as cup-holders, having won the 1920 competition in unusual circumstances, beating Glenavon en route, after two semi-finalists – Belfast Celtic and Glentoran – were ejected in the wake of a riot. A year on, though, the Dublin side were the underdogs, with Glenavon favoured to progress to the final to play either Glentoran or Brantwood.

In the event, the Dubliners parked the bus, and their determined rearguard- action was enough to earn a replay. Under the headline, “Shelbourne create a surprise in Irish Cup semi-final”, the Athletic News reporter called Scribe wrote that it was “a case of Shelbourne defence against the Glenavon forwards”.

However, “the Lurgan forwards never really settled down to their usual game, and though Jack Brown [who was to make his international debut for Ireland against Wales in a hailstorm at Swansea a month later] went up forward in the second half, replacing Cochrane, they simply could not get through.”

Scribe also commented on a “remarkable display” by Paddy Walsh, the Shelbourne goalkeeper. This, he wrote, was “really the outstanding feature of the game”.

A reporter from Freeman’s Journal was of the same mind. “While Shelbourne never looked like scoring, but for Walsh Glenavon must have run up a heavy score against them,” he wrote. Through this man-of-the-match performance, it might be argued that Walsh – soon to depart with several teammates for an unlikely, and short-lived, football revolution in Pontypridd, South Wales – unknowingly played a key part in the sport’s Irish partition. It was, after all, with the replay earned by his saves that the path towards some sort of schism gathered decisive momentum.

With the tie having been played in the north – albeit not Lurgan – one might under normal circumstances have expected the replay to be assigned to Dublin, where Shelbourne had triumphed 3-0 over the same opponents the previous year. However, the IFA, still the ultimate authority for the sport throughout Ireland, decided in its wisdom to summon the two teams once again to its northern base for the game on March 16.

In its defence, these were anything but normal circumstances. As Garnham wrote in his book, Association Football and Society in Pre-partition Ireland, Dublin was “a city in turmoil”. The curfew, he went on, had been in force there for “more than a year, and six Republican prisoners were to be executed two days before the intended replay. An identical set of executions in Cork the previous month had led to the killing of six soldiers in the city in retaliation.”

Then again, there was a widespread perception in the south that the IFA had tended to favour northern clubs in various ways, such as international selection and financial assistance, over a prolonged period.

The Belfast News-Letter was in no doubt where its sympathies lay. “Public opinion is all against this decision,” it claimed. “There was an opportunity to make good the talk some time ago of resuming relations between the Belfast and Dublin clubs, and then when a chance occurs to do so it is knocked on the head… It is a great pity to see any schism, but the decision has done no good to senior football.”

Seen in this context, it was scarcely a surprise that Dublin-based administrators should take a dim view of the replay ruling. Shelbourne refused to travel north again, resulting in the tie being awarded to Glenavon. The Lurgan club went on to lose the final 2-0 to Glentoran, who had beaten Brantwood 4-3 in the other semi-final.

The first reaction by the LFA, representing the Irish province where Dublin is located, was to pass a resolution condemning the “unsportsmanlike action of the Senior Clubs’ Protest and Appeals Committee of the IFA in ordering Shelbourne to replay in Belfast their drawn Cup tie with Glenavon”. It added, “We regard the decision to be against the best interests of the game.”

A report of this meeting in the Dublin newspaper Sport by a journalist called Viator was followed by a warning that “the Dublin clubs will seriously consider the question of the advisability of severing their connection with the Belfast Association at the end of the present season”. This turned out to be all too prescient. Less than three months later came that landmark decision at Molesworth Hall. Then, on 2 September 1921, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) held its inaugural meeting.

Notwithstanding the political partition of the island with which the football split closely coincided, the long-established IFA and newly minted FAI were not at first differentiated along strictly geographical lines. As the Athletic News put it: “The new association do not intend to confine themselves to their own immediate circle in Dublin. They plan to carry their sphere of operations all over Ireland.”

In July 1921, a competition called the Falls League, based in West Belfast, decided to affiliate with the Dublin body, the FAI. Sport viewed this as a “bombshell”, observing: “the IFA has taken this badly, and not surprising”.

Two years after the fateful Irish Cup semi-final which precipitated the split, on 17 March 1923, a Falls League side called Alton United travelled to a still tense Dublin and actually won the second FAI Cup final at Dalymount Park, upsetting Shelbourne by one goal to nil in front of a crowd of 14,000. Paddy Walsh, back from Pontypridd – which in 1922 had failed by 32 to 21 to gain admission to the English Football League at the expense of Exeter City – lined up once again in the Shelbourne goal.

This time Walsh was not the star. The Dublin Evening Telegraph reported that “the ball entered an empty net with Walsh and [the defender Paddy] Kavanagh in collision, due to a stupid piece of misunderstanding”. Such are the vicissitudes of the goalkeeper’s lot.

Walsh played more than 100 games for Shelbourne in all, between 1915-16 and 1927-28, earning frequent plaudits for the quality of his shot-stopping. A few months after Alton United’s cup triumph, the FAI was granted membership of Fifa, effectively setting in concrete Irish football’s administrative split. The Dublin body agreed to confine itself to clubs from within what had become known as the Irish Free State, the 26 counties excluding Northern Ireland, changing its name in consequence to the Football Association of the Irish Free State.

The following year, the Irish Free State took its place in a bumper 22-team Olympic football tournament in Paris, eliminating Bulgaria with a goal by Paddy Duncan of the St James’s Gate club, before going down narrowly at the quarter-final stage, having taken the Netherlands to extra-time.

Even after the Dublin body gained Fifa membership, it took a remarkably long time for the administrative split to be fully reflected at the playing level. Dozens of Irish footballers became dual internationals. In 1950, four players – Tom Aherne, Cornelius “Con” Martin, Reg Ryan and Davy Walsh – managed to represent both Irish national teams in the same World Cup qualifying tournament.

After the FAI’s Ireland team had been eliminated from contention by Sweden in November 1949, the quartet achieved the feat some four months’ later by turning out in the Home International clash against Wales at Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground. That season’s British Home Championship was doubling up as a World Cup qualifying group.

Having conceded eight goals against Scotland and nine against England, the IFA’s selection bowed out of the competition, somewhat improbably, with a clean sheet in a game that saw the Welsh great John Charles make his international debut.

“It was a Third Div. international,” claimed a headline in the Birmingham Gazette afterwards, the abbreviation making it seem all the more dismissive. The reporter Charles Harrold bemoaned a “tame, often boring, goalless draw that barely reached the standard of the football Wrexham see every other weekend”. Harrold did concede that one of the four dual internationals, Con Martin, a “last-minute choice for the centre-half position and the Irish captaincy” had been “the outstanding player on the field”. The 18-year-old Charles, though, “on his Wrexham showing” had been “rushed into international football much too soon”.

It was a further 28 years before, on 20 September 1978, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland took the field against one another for an official international match. That game too, fittingly – or so you might think – ended goalless.

David Owen is a former Financial Times sports editor and author of Foinavon: the Story of the Grand National’s Biggest Upset, a winner of the Dr Tony Ryan Award. Chief columnist at insidethegames.biz, his latest book, A Short History of Cricket at Everdon Hall, was published this year. @dodo938.