Football

FOR me Frank O’Farrell was a sad, grey face sketched in 25-year-old newspaper print.

As a young lad brainwashed by an uncle with a season ticket for the Stretford End before Ryanair brought it closer to home, my brother and I were swaddled in United red – despite the unease of a Leeds United supporting father.

We pored over books and books on the Munich Air Disaster, Cup wins, and league titles won. Names and places like Best, Wembley ’68, McGrath, Whiteside and Robson became familiar.

Before the days when you could buy flash replica jerseys and official club merchandise in every sports shop on every high street in the land, I was given an Aberdeen jersey (they were good at the time) and told, in my innocence, it was a Manchester United shirt.

Neighbours still remind me of that one, quarter of a century on.

Once, home for a family funeral, my uncle ducked out of the pub in Blackpool on Cork city’s northside, to get us a parcel of match programmes from Old Trafford as well as a heap of dusty homemade scrap books from the ‘60s 1970s.

The chunky News of the World headlines told tales of names like McIlroy, McQueen, Strachan and Stapleton.  It was great.

At that funeral, we could have walked for three minutes up the road and hit upon the homeplace of one of those featured in those pages of course.

Frank O’Farrell was born and reared on Dublin Hill, on the other side of the railway bridge, many will know from journeys ending in Kent Station. He watched the carriages rattle by daily and dreamed of one day driving the engine.

Instead his talent as a footballer saw his life on a different track altogether. And one which I did not appreciate until RTÉ aired a wonderful, Christmas treat of a documentary about the man last week.

‘The Shadow of Busby’  framed a tall, soft-spoken man now well into his golden years.. who remains the only Irishman to manage the famous club, Manchester United.

It unwrapped a wonderful secret history of Old Trafford’s backrooms and dark corridors – but like the best history lessons, it was weighed down with contemporary relevance.

The short version is this: O’Farrell played with Cork United until 1947 before he was tempted across to the bright lights of East London to play for West Ham. Far from indulging in the city’s excesses, such as they were, the devout Catholic lad joined the Salvation Army and attended mass daily.

In a familiar twist, injury brought the curtain down on a good career. Someone comfortable as leader, he took the reigns as manager at Torquay and after tasting promotion, took a bigger job at Leicester.

He became the first Irishman to lead out a team in the FA Cup final when he took Leicester to within one stride of the 39 steps.  He was denied by Manchester City.

Twelve months previously on the same patch of grass, Matt Busby had realised his quest to win the European Cup as Best, Charlton, Law et al beat Benfica under the Twin Towers. That should have been the final bar of Busby’s song.

Instead he ‘moved upstairs’ –as was the euphemism – and Wilf Mcguinness was installed as the boss. In fact there was no moving anywhere – Busby remained behind his desk in his office. McGuinness was gone less than a year later.

That summer of ‘69, after a spell as caretaker, Busby sat at Farrell’s kitchen table offering him one of the biggest jobs in football.

Tellingly, he told O’Farrell that he would be on a yearly salary of £12,000 – an old man now, Farrell has no problem remembering the figure. This one sticks in the craw.

Later when the pair –as well as Louis Edwards were sealing the deal – the chairman let slip that the salary he sanctioned was in fact £15k. He should have slapped Busby’s hand away then rather shake it then.

Ultimately, O’Farrell was shafted – you know that. But this testimony put meat on the bones of what is a forgotten Old Trafford tale. For me, reading those books from England all those years ago, Farrell was a failure – a forgotten footnote in the club’s long history. It’s an unfair telling of his tale. And though quietly spoken, he could obviously look after himself on the pitch and off it – and this programme showed him pulling no punches. Even when tilting at United’s idols.

O’Farrell talked of trying to curb the drinking of George Best, he labelled, with some understatement, club legend and English football great Bobby Charlton ‘a bit of a moaner’, and settled scores, calmly and matter-of-factly, with Busby himself.

The Scot had the ear of senior players like Charlton and Law as they went on regular golf outings together. Busby still refused to vacate his manager’s chair and his shadow loomed large.

Now, the shadows are lengthening for the 84-year-old Farrell. He sits in his garden in Torquay, surrounded by family and happy to have been at the top – if not for such a fleeting time.

“I was manager of Manchester United,” he says in a familiar accent. “they can’t take that away from me.”

Alex Ferguson, whomever comes after him, and those ‘upstairs’ in the boardroom at the Theatre of Dreams would do well not to forget the their history.

First appeared in the Irish Examiner on December 23, 2011

ON Sunday morning, many of us will be woken by electronic bleeps and whirrs as new computer-powered gadgets and toys are plugged in, charged up and used for the first time.

But in a world unmarked by Xboxes, the analogue sounds of Christmases past, soundtracked December 25.

Think Meccano pieces clicking, bike wheels turning or – if you were lucky – plastic footballer figures clacking against a disproportionally large ball.

“So, you’re the man exploring the underbelly of Irish table football,” says national champion Mark Farrell as he picks up the phone in Dublin, having been warned I was to call.

I imagine he’s wearing a crown and sitting on a throne with a branded green felt pitch at his feet after his latest All-Ireland victory.

The 33-year-old is at the centre of a ‘resurgence’ in the game in recent years. He and like-minded individuals gather in parish halls, community centres, each others homes every week.

They roll out the pitch, set up the goals and flick-to-kick as the famous slogan went.

“The majority of the players these days would be guys who remember the game from their youth and they’ve probably grown up with the game. There’s a quantity of junior players still but the vast majority would be in their 20s and 30s.

“These fellas remember the game from their youth – these fellas with XBoxes and Playstations are growing up with those games. They don’t really have an affiliation with table football, you know, and its harder for them to get into it.

“I started playing about 20 years ago when I was about 12 or 13. And it was a big association then. The 90s would have been the heyday then around the game Europe. I played for about five or six years and then I stopped, went  off to college and everything else became more important.

“And then I came back to it when I turned about 30. Like a lot of guys.”

John Moore is one of the reasons the game is on the up again despite the fact that – to paraphrase the late Apple chief Steve Jobs – there’s probably an app for that.

“I started playing when I was about eight years of age, he says. “I encouraged all the friends to play as well, we would have leagues, cups, World Cups and play the old Division One in England with transfers, suspensions, sending offs, injuries.  It was the first version of [computer game] Championship Manager I suppose.

“I had received email a couple of years ago and decided to enter a team in the world cup in Birmingham.  That’s where it all started off again.  Since that tournament , Irish players have travelled to about 10 countries playing in about 40 competitions in the last eight years.”

You might remember punk band Half Man Half Biscuit and their hit song: All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit. It conveyed brilliantly the longing felt by Subbutteo enthusiasts for the extensive collection of paraphernalia that came hand-in-hand with enjoying the game.

“Ah yeah, that used to be a huge thing and that’s what got kids into it years ago,” says Farrell.
“You wanted to have the Liverpool or the Man U side but truthfully nowadays the supplier Waddingtons don’t make it anymore.

“The stuff isn’t available anymore in the high street – you used to be able to buy every little item – from replica World Cups trophies, the goals, advertising hoarding – every nook and cranny. But nowadays it’s mostly Ebay, there’s a lot of sellers out there and you buy teams and start from scratch and build up from there.”

Both table football exponents admit their hobby – (quick fact: Subbutteo comes from the Latin word for hobby) – leaves them open to a ‘slagging’.

“That’s the thing. At time you did get a bit of a slagging and they hear you’re playing table football and they’re like : ah sure that’s a kids’ game, what are you doing still playing that? But I think when people check out the website and they see what’s involved, their eyes are opened.

“When they see you’ve won a national title or whatever, they take you a little bit more seriously and realise there’s a bit of structure to it. We’re just not blokes in our 20s and 30s flicking a ball around a table.”

• Email irishtablefootball@hotmail.com for more details 

In 1992 my father fired myself, my brother and two cousins into a car as a long, wet Sunday yawned in front of us.

From there we beat our way towards the capital, clogging the not-yet bypassed arteries of Monasterevin, Abbeyleix, Durrow . A clutch of tickets for Cork City’s FAI Cup final against the mighty Bohemians sat on the dash.

We sat through a dour game, high in the West Stand, before the Bohs captain Paul Whelan – brother of Liverpool and Ireland legend Ronnie – lifted the cup, thanks to a single Dave Tilson goal. We were thrown into the car again and sang all the way home anyway.

Fast forward 13 years and I’m sitting next to my Dad again, high in a Lansdowne Road stand on another wild Sunday afternoon with the punched stub of another cup final ticket in my pocket. City lose again – though this time two-nil.

And at our feet on the pitch below us it’s all too familiar; the man who scores the heart-breaking first goal for the upstarts from Louth has the name ‘Whelan’ emblazoned on his maroon Drogheda shirt. Meet Gavin Whelan, son of the Bohs skipper a decade earlier.

Despite his blue blood however, this is a man who knows that it’s graft that’ll win games – not the name printed on your back.

After retiring in his mid 20s with a successful career in the League of Ireland tucked in his boot bag, Whelan is now making his way in the business world. His nascent enterprise sees him cross the white line every night however as he demonstrates new football training equipment to those around the country. It’s another game – but does it replace working on the best manicured shop floors in Ireland every Friday night?

“I don’t miss it – I’m too busy at the moment trying to get this off the ground and get going,” he tells me as he points the car in the direction of Trim for another demonstration of his training equipment. “But you’d see fellas on Twitter and wherever who you played with and against all the way up. A guy like Keith Fahey was one and Kevin Doyle played in the league and… 30 grand a week… it’s not a bad life is it?

“But there was no way the part time thing could go on to be honest. You’re playing for three or four hundred quid a week. There’s no future in it. But, you know, you say you’ll give it a go again, you’re trying to balance your work and life and in the end you ask ‘is it worth your while?’

“Then you throw your hat at it and you miss it. But I have a three-year-old boy now too to think about so I’m happy to concentrate on this. I’m too busy to miss anything.”

Though one suspects many professional footballers find the sound of the dressingroom door swinging shut for the last time a disconcerting wake-up call, Whelan was not found napping when it came to preparing himself for life in stud-less footwear.

He worked for an audio-visual company selling projectors and the like, worked with the Liverpool Legends and their various events here and took a job with the Irish game’s top brass.

“I got a job with the FAI selling premium seats in the new stadium and did that for a year. Then I was looking around and had a couple of projects on the go really. Eventually I kind of crossed paths with Michael and this one business – SportsLions.com – got off the ground.”

And though hocking seats in the stadium – where maybe I’ll one day see Cork City win a cup final with my kid – was valuable experience, being back on the actual turf is home.

“The FAI job was great but it’s a different thing selling a seat worth thousands to a corporate client and going out and shaking hands with someone who volunteers their time for young lads. It’s salt of the earth stuff,” Whelan explains.

“Do you know what I mean? We’re just all on a level – they’re no better than me, and vice versa. They might know me from my playing days, Michael has a GAA background too so they might know him, and it’s easier.

Those of us who remember his enterprising midfield play in the spit-and-sawdust word of League of Ireland football won’t be surprised by the entrepreneurial spirit he brings to his new life. The gear he’s selling is impressively presented equipment for the country’s coaches. (“It rolls out and pumps up, it’s manufactured with the same rigid technology used in those RIB boats. They’re really useful for indoor or outdoors games in schools or clubs and the storage is no problem,” he says, describing one product used for training sessions) But will coaching be something he’ll return to?

“I’d like to down the line but I think I’d like to be secure before I commit to going out with a team every Tuesday and Thursday. I want to get this thing going and then definitely. God knows enough people helped me all the way and I’d like to give that back down the line,” he says. For now the business is enough of a game plan. And though he says goodbye through the hands-free set as he inches towards Trim, he mentions he’d love to bring his products to Cork.

“But I might have upset a few people did I?” he jokes? Well, we certainly remember the name.

This post first appeared in the Irish Examiner

WHEN I was 15-years-old or so I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go on a school trip to Barcelona.

But before we felt any sand between our toes or stood in the shadow of the Sagrada Família, the spectacular, unfinished modernist cathedral by Gaudí, the journey almost ended in the damp school hall. Summoned to a meeting on the eve of our planned departure we were told the ferry company had gone on strike.

We either leave in a couple of hours taking a different, circuitous route to our sunny destination or we don’t go at all, lads? Puff! Twenty five teenage boys squeeze through the swinging double doors and sprint home to grab a gear bag.

Then it was a bus to Rosslare. Ferry to Wales. Another coach to Portsmouth. Boat to France. I won’t suger-coat it, there was a lot of vomit spilled.

We then swung into Paris for breakfast and a leg-stretching stroll before bravely heading south with merely an ‘Oasis: Live at Maine Road’ video, a 50-card deck and inside jokes to keep us occupied.

At dusk some time days later, our coach wended its way down the corkscrew roads from the steep hills that hug the north of the city. The more mature amongst us sported a backpacker’s whiskers, we exchanged road stories like relieved army vets choppering out of Saigon. Weary from interminable days in transit and repeat renditions of Wonderwall, we still knew it was worth it.

Our teacher – a teak-tough hurler with an obvious taste for the dramatic – took a tape from his top pocket and pushed it into the driver’s stereo system. Freddy Mercury and Montserrat Caballé singing the soaring anthem to the 1992 Olympic Games. Barcelona. Yes, it was worth it.

Antonio Mantero, a 31-year-old Dubliner, has been on the road to Barcelona a bit longer. He spent the first nine years of his life living in Portugal.

Growing up as a football-mad kid he stood on the terraces of Sporting Lisbon’s famous Stadium of Light. When he was sent to boarding in school by his parents back in Ireland, he unpacked a Mediterranean approach to football as well as a new uniform.

Like a lot of us, ‘girls and everything else’ seduced him and the games of ball on a Sunday morning slipped down the list of priorities. But when his young nephew’s underage side was left rudderless after both their manager and coach walked away from the sidelines, he pulled on the studs again and laced a whistle round his neck.

“I thought if I’m going to do this, I might as well do it right. So I went and got my FAI badges and I met David Berber on the course.

“You’d get to know each other I suppose and we were talking over a coffee about our football philosophies and everything else. Normal chat. But later on we realised one of us knew of a friend of a friend with a connection to Barcelona so that call was made and we went over for a look eventually.”

And in the best traditions of exchange programmes, now the Nou Camp’s best trainers are to visit their new Irish friends.

Next month, dozens of football coaches from throughout the country will cram into a function room in Kildare’s Carton house. There they’ll be treated to a treatise on tika-taka from Catalan footballing evangelists. Some of the FCB’s brains trust will then file out to the hotel’s state-of-the-art pitches and teach Ireland’s volunteer coaches the same drills and exercises that they themselves put the likes of Mess, Xavi and Iniesta through. Not a bad, Saturday.

“We’ve had an unbelievable response,” says Mantero, “We’ll be lucky if we make any money out of it but really it’s about spreading the word. I’d love to make a real change to the way we train young players in this country. The FAI try their best but it’s the leagues who hold on the power so we have to start from the bottom up.”

Mantero now coaches the little U10s at Lourdes Celtic in the capital. And he’s stubbornly sticking to his belief in neat, sophisticated football despite some resistance.

“To be honest we lost all our first games. When I took over they were a real kick-and-rush side. They had been managed by a guy in his 60s – a good guy – but we have a completely different philosophy.

“The whole underage thing should be about enjoying it. You go to any park or pitch in the country on a Saturday morning and you’ll see coaches and parents like maniacs on the sidelines and very little smiling on the pitch itself; that’s just wrong.

“I go over to the parents before every match and say ‘listen, please don’t coach the kids. Encourage them if you want but trust us’. To be honest if I had my way I’d have all the parents over in the far corner where the kids couldn’t hear them.”

But the parents have a bit more to cheer about now at least. “We won nine on the row after we settled down. But to be honest it’s really not about that. We say to them every week: go out and enjoy yourself. And we mean it.”

Just like Guadi’s unfinished masterpiece, La Sagrida Famillia in the centre of Barcelona, he’s building from the bottom. But it’s a beautiful work in progress, and he thinks it’ll be worth it.

* Check out Antonio Mantero’s new website at thecoachdiary.com for more on Champions FCBarcelona Coaching Clinic.

Email: adrianjrussell@gmail.com Twitter: @adrianrussell

IT was once said by Napoleon – Bonaparte, not Dynamite – that one should never watch a sausage or a law being made if ‘you want to keep your stomach about you’.

The same is probably true of picking World Cup hosts.

First though, let’s begin with some real football, a world away from the corporate, joyless world of sports administration.

The Dublin Devils train every Friday night under lights in north Dublin. They play games in an astro league during the winter on Tuesday nights. They win, they lose, they draw.

The side – formed in 2005 – are also the country’s first male gay football team. Originally called Men United, the Devils are now a well-known and respected side in their league. During the summer they train in the Phoenix Park, not far from the Papal Cross.

And they can play a bit.

The team invited me – in a spirit of inclusivity, I suppose – to train with them and come along to their floodlit matches. It’s real football. Sepp Blatter would not be interested.

I, like a lot of others, watched the live feed from Zurich a couple of Fridays ago.

The ins-and-outs of the horsetrading that ultimately concluded in a blinged-out patch of desert in the Middle East being awarded the 2022 Coupe de Monde has been fully explored at this stage.

And perhaps nothing should surprise us when we’re talking about the suits in FIFA. But Blatter is really doing his best to shock these days.

I saw him roll by in a convoy of dark cars at the 2006 World Cup – I think in Hanover, but maybe not – as I waited to get into a group game.

The man from the Examiner at that stage had a €15 Dunnes Stores tent strapped to his back, a first-name relationship with every tout on both sides of the Berlin Wall and little self-respect left.

As a group of us stragglers were stopped by security guards on the street to allow the FIFA president to freewheel past, we might have stolen a glimpse behind the velvet rope – into the air-conditioned, comfortable world he inhabited.

The same way the Queen of England probably thinks that the world smells of drying emulsion because of the preparations her subjects make before her visits, so too Blatter must not realise that the world is not one huge buffet.

As he rolled past I clutched an ill-gotten ticket with the name of the Trinidad and Tobago FA emblazoned across it.

Statistics are sometimes said to be like a lamp-post to a drunken man – more for leaning on than illumination; and certainly this Weiss-bier stained stat might be more redundant than most.

But by the end of my time in Germany I had seen over half a dozen games thanks to the controversial Jack Warner and his policy of flogging his association’s tickets.

Essentially, over an area that stretched from beneath the glare of the Reeperbahn’s neon signage to the shadows of Nuremburg’s cathedral, more than half the tickets I bought from touts and fans alike, came from Trinidad or Tobago.

It later transpired Blatter’s lieutenant Warner made a cool £1million personally, from the World Cup in 2006 as he oversaw the sale of this four-yearly commodity. He said he’d pay it back.

When Warner pulled the rug from under England’s 2018 bid a fortnight ago then, no one thought it was out of character.

He had been wined and dined by the British prime minster, David Cameron; he took calls from the future King of England and welcomed it’s favourite son David Beckham for training camps with kids.

But when he took his ball – and crucial votes – away from his those he pledged in Britain, the words of Seamus Brennan to the Greens during government negotiations sprung to mind: ye’re playing senior hurling now lads.

Welcome to FIFA HQ.

And all the while Blatter watched as this mucky ritual unfolded below him. A man who, the former NBA basketball player John Amaechi said this week: ‘wields the power to summon kings, princes, presidents and prime ministers to bid at their pleasure’.

And he added, he ‘uses that power not to foster positive change but to further entrench bigotry’.

Amaechi, of course, was not particularly exercised by FIFA’s decision to award the tournament to a country other than his native England. But as a gay man, he wasn’t too impressed when Blatter said this week that gay people should not have sex if they plan on visiting Qatar for the tournament.

In 2007 Amaechi became the first NBA star to come out as gay and post-basketball works as an academic, activist and commentator.

He does not believe FIFA will take the problem seriously, pointing to his previous dealings with the organisation. “I sent a letter and an email (on Monday night) raising my objections and requesting an apology,” he added. “I haven’t received anything back, and am not expecting to.”

He’s right not to worry about a reply. And the real football is played out on park pitches – not in conference rooms and air-conditioned stadiums.

Mail: adrianjrussell@gmail.com Twitter: @adrianrussell

HUGH McILVANNEY, the great Scottish sportswriter, sketched a scene for his readers of a Saturday afternoon in an Old Trafford press box which coughed out cigarette smoke.

The number 11 in red unfurled an outrageous piece of skill in front of the visiting reporters. After drilling the ball into the roof of the net with “a fierce simplicity”, he wheeled away with his hand raised in familiar celebration.

“What was the time for that Best goal?” a cub reporter asked a wily veteran at his elbow.

The old-timer tugged on a Woodbine, gazed into the middle distance and answered: “Never mind the time, son. Just write down the date.”

It was five years ago today that Belfast buried George Best. There’s been enough ink spilled — in enough cramped media centres — in the attempt to encapsulate the United legend’s life and death. I’m certainly not going to manage it here.

As my train steamed over a wrinkled sheet of snow towards Dublin this week, I instead re-read that old piece that McIlvanney tap-tap-tapped out all those years ago.

He and a grey-bearded Best, we’re told, meet in a pub off Chelsea’s Fulham Road one Saturday lunchtime.

Unsurprisingly they have a pint — or two — and then head for a Man United away game at White Hart Lane.

McIlvanney — who once admitted that writing a note to the milkman is a quiet torture — penned an absolute love-letter of a feature on the aging Best.

The Scot described how Spurs fans, young and old, queued to touch Bestie’s hem in the players’ lounge while Gazza — the day’s big star — remained relatively untroubled in his shadow.

The Sunday Times man couldn’t have then known the twin tracks that those two careers and lives would chug along.

But he certainly had the wit to realise that Best was drowning in drink.

The day Best died, I was part of the team that produces The Last Word programme on Today FM. The late-afternoon cold nipped under the door as news came though that the Northern Ireland hero had died.

It still came as shock, I think, despite the whispered rumours of his demise that marked the weeks previously.

After a life of chaos — fittingly maybe — it was a scramble to line up someone interesting and relevant to join the presenter Matt Cooper, who was already on air in the adjacent studio. We all worked the phones — unsuccessfully for a while. I eventually and luckily got through to an old contemporary of McIlvanney.

The august Brian Glanville picked up the ringing handset somewhere in England’s Home Counties. I imagined him by a roaring fire in a smoking jacket, nursing a generous highball of brandy with an open, well-thumbed copy of Dante’s Inferno on his lap. Glanville hadn’t heard the news before I told him.

He started then, essentially, thinking aloud about days and nights he and Best spent together in London and elsewhere. Good times.

But he remembered the champagne football more fondly than the beery nights up the west end with El Beatle.

For someone who turned to Glanville’s column first in every month’s issue of World Soccer, this was a real treat — but we needed to get on air. I tried to hurry him gently. “Quite right,” he said, “Important day.”

And he sighed sadly. Just write down the date.

nI spoke this week to someone who’s not quite living his life like the womanising Bestie, but George would certainly be impressed by this lad’s full dance card. Breifne Earley, from Carrick-on-Shannon in lovely Leitrim looked at himself a few months ago — like most of us, I’d imagine — and admits he didn’t particularly like what he saw. But unlike most of us, he decided to change it.

The 29-year-old who works for the Colleges and Universities Association of Ireland is currently on week seven of 52 in which he plans to — deep breath — lose 30kgs weight, go on 50 blind dates, perform in 10 concerts/gigs, save 10% of his salary in savings, swim 400m every week, visit 10 different countries, cycle a total of 50km each week, attend 10 cookery classes, complete 10 10km races, apply for 10 dream jobs.

And exhale.

What the hell motivates someone to do ALL that? “I was grossly overweight, and I wasn’t particularly happy with the way things were,” he tells me. “I had been single for over a year and I was sick of the doom and gloom with the recession and wage cuts and all that. So I decided to do something positive and the reaction has been unbelievable. I’ve currently achieved a total of zero of the 10 targets — but that’s the nature of the list. It’ll take time to have 50 blind dates, won’t it? The thing is though it’s forcing me out the door in the evening. I used to just come home from work, watch TV and go to bed.

“Now I have to go and meet a girl I’ve never met before or go to the gym.”

Breifne will sit into a rowing boat on Saturday, December 18 to undertake his first athletic challenge at the National Indoor Rowing Championships at DCU. To help him raise money for the Paralympic Council of Ireland visit challengeten.com.

Sure what else would you be doing?

Twitter: @adrianrussell; mail: adrianjrussell@gmail.com

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner

John Giles ambled down his staircase in his Yorkshirte home one morning to bafflingly find a pair of match caps had dropped in the letterbox from Dublin. The Leeds legend – who’s excellent autobiography is out at the moment by the way – had played in midfield in a defeat to Trinidad and Tobago. The FAI issued two caps.

But representing your country is never cheap.

However, not since Dana was elected to Brussels will Europe have welcomed Irish representatives as unlikely as the crowd we’re sending out next week. Meet Steven Conway and Ireland’s first Football Tennis team.

As in an Aaron Sorkin screenplay like The Social Network, let’s wind back a little. A few weeks ago Conway and a few college friends were knocking a football around a green area in the university town of Maynooth.

They eventually fell into a game of tennis, essentially, with the football, lobbing it back and forth over an imagined net.

Later – and after a few drinks admittedly – as the sun ducked behind the old grey-bricked buildings, and the lads headed back to their digs. They cracked open a laptop – and instead of inventing Facebook – they tapped the Google serach box thus: F-O-O-T-B-A-L-L-T-E-N-N-I-S.

“Basically Jamie – our team captain – sent an email to the organisers, FIFTA. We saw there was this tournament coming up with free accommodation, free meals and stuff in Turkey,” says Conway, who plays for Sligo club Kilglass/Enniscrone

And after settling in for the night with a few cans, they were surprised a few days later when a terse reply dropped into Jamie’s inbox: “Yes we would love for Ireland to be represented at our world championships”. Wow.

“We couldn’t believe when we got an invitation back – we still can’t believe it!” says Conway, when I rang him this week after they’d finished their mid-day training session in the midlands college town.

“I had to tell my local soccer club that I would be unavailable for selection next week as I would be away on international duty. Who doesn’t want to do that…” The club v country debate rages on as the Collingwood Cup tips into view.

Now, to paraphrase Corinthians, it’s time to fold away childish things. The students – I’m guessing – tucked away the borrowed traffic cones from the sitting room, swore off bargain-store own-brand beer Galahad and got organised for this world title bid.

They first registered their new “organisation” as part of the Football Tennis federation so they could compete, paying €60 each. They are now the governing body of the sport in Ireland. Next stop the world championships in Turkey. What a country, ladies and gentlemen.

There they expect to face teams from Moldova, North Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia, Turkey and India over three days from December 9.

But they’re unsure of how many games they’ll get exactly: “We think when we get out there there’ll be a group stage first, but we don’t really know. It’s hard to get details out of the organiser because the promoter is so busy – and his English is so bad.”

Like the Caribbean produces a statistically improbable number of sprinters – does Budapest produce pros in football tennis?

“Pros? Well I don’t know if those countries have too many pros do they? But looking at the clips on YouTube, they’re pretty serious about the whole thing. We’re practicing four and five times a week and we’re just trying to get a handle on the laws.

“We had the rule book emailed to us from the president and it must have been the first time they were translated into English because the wording was hilarious. A lack of good quality videos on YouTube and the fact there are videos with the old rules up made it confusing there for a good while,” Conway – an Arts graduate adds.

“We’ve gotten our jerseys made by O’Neill’s, the flights are booked, accommodation and food sorted. We badly need some sponsorship to cover the costs but it’s not an ideal time with Christmas coming up and that budget on the horizon really.” As well as campaigning on the website Boob.ie, they’ve set up a Facebook page that potential sponsors can find by search Football Tennis Ireland.

Of the eight heading out, only six will pull on the new jerseys they had commissioned. Two – chief delegate and manager – will wear suits on the sideline. Their other duties are as yet unclear. It is unclear if the non-playing members will receive caps. Or medals if the Maynoot students take the world title.

This column first appeared in the print edition of the Irish Examiner.

Lets’s think back a moment, before we look forward. You’ve just had your dinner. A warm mug of milky tea is perched on the arm of the sofa as you sit back in short trousers on another yawning summer evening.

Old friends fill the TV screen for the eighth night on the trot: O’Herlihy, Dunphy, Giles — and like a wedding invitation; plus one. We’ve just watched 90 minutes of intriguing, incident-filled World Cup football between a muscular west African side and a technically-gifted outfit from a small central European mountain top.

Giles it has to be said, is not in the habit of Googling the names of centre-halves who ply their trade in the Russian second tier. Dunphy — though he likes the bit of La Liga of a Sunday evening — is not interested in dissecting the action between two dozen strangers for too long.

Soon, with Bill happy to facilitate a more general chat, we’re deep in a barstool-economics seminar where the consensus is soon formed: poor countries produce better players.

“When I was a lad,” Giles has said more than once on RTÉ through the years, “we went out and played for hours in the Liberties — we had nothing else to do, Bill.”

“It’s an escape route from poverty,” Dunphy, and many others, have argued, “the lads from developing nations just want it more.”

I realise we’re scratching the bottom of long-drained barrels here… but is there a silver lining in the economic storms at our doorstep, as Bob Dylan almost said? Now that we’re poorer, will we produce better football teams, at least?

“Dunphy is wrong,” says Simon Kuper, a columnist with the Financial Times and co-author of the acclaimed Soccernomics: Why England Lose, Why Germany and Brazil Win. “Essentially there are three factors that decide whether you’re going to be successful on the football pitch: wealth, population and length of soccer-playing experience.

“Having money is a huge advantage. If you look at Africa — and you have guys aren’t going to end up like a typical African country, of course — but a player goes into a training camp and the conditions are bad, the expert coaching isn’t available, computer data which is increasingly important is non-existent, you can’t scout and talk to your players as easily if you’re the manager. There’s a million disadvantages.

“But as well as that we’ve found that wealth correlates with organisation; the best coaches and infrastructure come with money. If you’re in Nigeria, the chances of being first discovered and then coached properly are much, much shorter than Holland, for example.

“But here’s the contradiction. In rich countries the best players come from the poorest backgrounds. So in France you see black kids from ghettos or children of immigrants making up the national team.

“That’s not because they’re poor, there’s a few factors at play: you’re more likely to play outside because of cramped living conditions, typically there’s less pressure to do homework, you have few other leisure pursuits like computer games so you practice more. And if you want to be a professional footballer, you have to practice.”

So Giles was right. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, his book on geniuses and how they’re produced, coined a term for it: the 10,000-hour rule — the amount of time one must practice before they become expert. The Leeds United legend would’ve hopped a ball off the terrace gables for more than that as a lad I’d guess.

“You want to get a situation where kids are encouraged to go out and play on estates,” continues Kuper — who is based in the multi-ethnic suburbs of Paris, “This readjustment in Ireland is not going to be that dramatic. What is it? 10-15% of GDP? It’s not going to be that drastic either way. I don’t think it’s going to make a huge difference to the amount of points you’ll collect in European qualifiers.

“But in order to improve, think of Germany as the ultimate in best practice at the moment — they have absolutely hundreds of the best youth academies coaching players in the best way. And I just don’t think that Ireland is going to find the money to make that investment in the next few years.”

Yeah, you think?

This week, as some of our wealthiest young men dipped in and out of fluorescent cones in Malahide ahead of tonight’s bread and circuses performance at the Aviva, Minister for Children Barry Andrews said that child benefit for high earners should be looked at as part of this year’s budget. Who knows how long the payment in any form will last at all?

But with the harsh, unprejudiced ramifications of unemployment, cuts in salaries and increased taxes the lunch boxes of the nation’s children are that bit lighter or filled with cheaper, less nutritious alternatives. Will that mean that those bodies filling the green jersey in 10 or 15 years’ time will be at another disadvantage?

“Diet is going to be a problem,” admits Kuper, “If you take as an extreme example the US — which has a large obesity issue with kids. I don’t know the figures but say you have to strike out roughly a quarter of youth population because of obesity — okay so you have a smaller pool.

“In Ireland you have a very small pool anyway and if obesity becomes an issue then the pool shrinks more.

“But that aside, I think your biggest disadvantage is being at the margins of Europe — and following the British football tradition — which as we know is not a very healthy tradition of football.”

And I thought it was something to do with the Eurozone.

* adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

This column first appeared in this morning’s Irish Examiner newspaper