Eimear Ryan: You'd like the Ireland v England rivalry to mean as much to them
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I’m convinced that every sports fan has a blind spot. No matter how experienced or well-read you are, no matter how long you’ve been a student of the game, there will be a sport that eludes you. For me, it’s rugby. It’s not that I can’t appreciate its thrills and spills, or enjoy the excitement when an unlikely pocket of space opens up and the whole game changes direction. I can recognise its beauty without understanding its subtleties and machinations. It’s just that, as a sport, it’s not legible to me. I don’t understand the positions, the set pieces, why one hit is a foul and another is not. As soon as I think I have it all square in my head, it falls apart like a house of cards.
I bring my GAA goggles to every sporting spectacle I watch, and they have their limitations; they lend themselves better to free-flowing games like soccer and basketball than they do to rugby and its American cousin, NFL. Those oval-ball pursuits are more like chess, and I have never had the patience for chess.
Because of this shortcoming of mine, I probably don’t watch as much rugby as I should. But for reasons of drama and national pride, I was, along with everyone else, parked in front of the TV last weekend, GAA goggles notwithstanding. Ireland v England is a must in any code – it could be tiddlywinks or ultimate frisbee and I’ll still be glued to the flight of each colourful disc. Every match won – even every score that we put up against our nearest neighbours – goes some way to alleviating some of our post-colonial baggage. I must admit it felt novel and enjoyable to go into last weekend’s game with expectations of success, though losing to the auld enemy always stings, even if – or maybe especially if – it’s by just one point.
The question is: do they care? England, I mean. Does the word ‘Stuttgart’ have any resonance for them, the way it does for Irish sports fans? Do they ever lose whole afternoons remembering their first visit to Croke Park in 2007? I think they care a bit about the rivalry, but not in the same way that we do. They probably don’t experience the same kind of schadenfreude as we feel when we see them lose to another team. They probably hold their rivalries with Scotland or Wales or even France more dearly.
The 800 years loom larger for us; while our history books feature England as the main antagonist, we merit just a few colourful footnotes in theirs. One can’t help but think of the much-memed elevator scene in , where an aggrieved copywriter, having had his work stolen by protagonist Don Draper, says: ‘You know, I feel bad for you.’ Devastatingly, Draper responds, ‘I don’t think about you at all.’
Gluttons for punishment that we are, we’ll soon get to experience the Ireland-England rivalry in a whole new dimension. In the recent draw for Euro Women’s 2025 qualifiers, Ireland ended up in a group with defending champions England, along with Sweden and France, two of the semi-finalists at the 2022 Euros. ‘Group of death’ somehow feels like an understatement. At last year’s World Cup, France made the quarter-finals, Sweden made the semis, and England made the final. We, meanwhile, finished bottom of our group. Retired Swiss keeper Gaëlle Thalmann, who drew out Ireland’s little plastic ball from the bowl in the qualifier draw, actually apologised before throwing us to the Lionesses.
Ireland are evolving at a rapid pace, as their string of victories in the Nations League in the latter half of last year demonstrated. However, we’re currently in that strange liminal space where we were plainly too strong for much of our League B opposition, but will be stretched to our very limits against the top tier. (We played relatively well in a friendly against France before the World Cup last summer, but still lost 3-0.)
There’s no way around it, however; a challenge such as this has to be met head-on. As Denise O’Sullivan tweeted: ‘We wanted to be here, now we are. Let’s have it.’ It’s a tall order, but unlike in the rugby, the underdog factor will be firmly in Ireland’s favour. Hammerings were feared when we were drawn in another tough group at last year’s World Cup, but no hammerings actually materialised. If we can defend assertively, and if we have a full complement of players available – Sinead Farrelly, Denise O’Sullivan, and Tyler Toland were all absentees from the most recent camp – we might be able to spring a few surprises.
On the plus side, there’s a playoff available to us even if we finish bottom of the group, and at the very least, we’ll have some big days out to look forward to. Our first two home games, against England and Sweden, will be held in the Aviva. The England fixture in particular, on 9 April, promises to be a massive occasion. While the actual sporting rivalry between these teams is negligible – they have no recent history with each other to speak of – the players on both squads know one another inside-out from playing with and against each other in the WSL. The two captains, Katie McCabe and Leah Williamson, share a dressing room at Arsenal. The group chats must be going wild.
And let’s not forget the men! They’ll have their own Nations League outings against England in the latter part of 2024, with the likely presence of the ones that got away (Rice and Grealish) adding a bit of an edge to the proceedings. It promises to be a standout year in the centuries-long Ireland-England rivalry; here’s hoping we have a few victories to celebrate at the end of all this, and preferably not of the moral variety.