An All-Ireland Team? Why Not?

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Irish Voice Sport

An All-Ireland Team? Why Not?

June 28, 2007

IT is funnythe things you remember from your childhood, as the sudden death of the Northern Ireland football legend Derek Dougan emphasized on Sunday. For a start my kids had no idea who I was talking about when I announced that the big center forward with the flowing locks had passed away.

And why would they? Dougan belonged to a different era, to the late 1960s and early ‘70s when I wasn’t even their age, and football on the telly consisted of highlight programs on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon.

Every so often we’d get a live game thrown in for good measure. And in the days when color television was in its infancy and a novelty in Ireland the bright gold shirt worn by Dougan and his Wolves teammates was quite striking.

My memory of it sounds rather bizarre now, simply because I always thought it looked one of the shirts worn by Spock or Scotty or one of those great characters in the original Star Trek TV series, long before Colm Meaney introduced a Dublin accent to life Jim, but not as we know it!

Anyway, Wolves had a shirt that looked a Star Trek uniform as far as I was concerned and Dougan, with the long hair and the fierce smile, looked like something from another galaxy, which made Match of the Day or the Big Match all the more interesting.

Today Star Trek has moved on and so has the Wolves shirt, a shirt now worn by players who are managed by Mick McCarthy of course.

Those players will wear black armbands when they finally return to first team action after their summer holidays as a mark of respect to Dougan, a man who knew his finest moments in their gold shirt.

And rightly so. All week tributes have poured in to celebrate the life and times of the boy from Belfast, including one from the current Irish Football Association (IFA) President Jim Boyce in the North.

Sadly, previous officers of the IFA didn’t quite treat Dougan with the honor he deserved. He was one of the prime movers behind the 1973 game at Lansdowne Road when an all-Ireland team, playing under the Shamrock Rovers name, took on the might of Brazil at Lansdowne Road and lost 4-3 in a thriller.

The match, as you can imagine, was a hot political football as it brought together the best players from north and south of the border at a time when the Troubles were rampant with the likes of Martin O’Neill and Pat Jennings playing alongside Johnny Giles and Don Givens.

George Best, by the way, didn’t play in that game because of death threats from Protestant paramilitaries as he later revealed, but the occasion was a huge success.

Unfortunately it was never repeated. The blazers in the IFA and, to a lesser extent the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) in the south, didn’t think it was such a great idea, and Dougan’s vision of one team to represent the island of Ireland was lost, probably forever.

Incredibly Dougan, a Protestant by the way who believed in the healing power of sport, was cast to the wilderness by his own football people in the North for his part in the whole affair. The bigots in charge of Northern Ireland football back then ensured he never played for his country from that night on.

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t pay too much attention to the sympathies pouring forth from the IFA offices in Belfast on the occasion of Derek Dougan’s death. The least they could have done was apologize to his family for the way he was treated post-1973.

And if they really want to pay tribute to him now that he’s gone, why not revive his idea of an All-Ireland team?

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