Sideline Cut: It might just be easier to unite a country than to break up a dressingroom

There's a time and place for everything. Across Ireland, people are tired and battered and a bit weepy because we're not sure when the government is going to let us go out dancing again and the era of zoom parties and virtual quizzes is very, very over so it was a bit too much, really, to flick on RTÉ on a cold Monday night to find the great and good from Both Sides of our daft, dazzling little island going at it hammer and tongs.

There they were: Mary Lou and Gregory Campbell, the Taois' himself, Joe Brolly (briefly) and Andrew Trimble among a competing cast of voices and faces who got together for a cosy fireside chat to debate the Big question: Do we want a United Ireland?

Millions of citizens in the 32 counties must have taken a deep breath when confronted with this particular six-marker. You are bringing this up now? A United Ireland? A nation once again? Four Green Fields? You really want to talk about that now? Pretty sure that the answer from all quarters – from the Lambeg drummers in Sandy Row to the ghosts wandering through Casement Park and down through the greenest homesteads of the interior was unanimous.

A United Ireland? Right now, we’d settle for a pint, a jukebox and the sound of laughter.

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Ireland – North or South, United or Divided – has, for millions of us, been nothing more than a remembered dream. Nobody has been anywhere or seen anyone, and you can pass by your best friend down the local shops because everyone's masked to the hilt and getting on with it. The incendiary question of the Border and the reunification of Ireland have been pushed to the far, far corners of most minds. And yet, and yet. On Wednesday night in Belgrade, the Republic of Ireland football team lost 3-2 to Serbia in the World Cup qualifiers. One night later, Northern Ireland went down 2-0 against Italy over in Parma.

‘Daft buggahs’

The presence of two international football teams on this tiny island should tell international onlookers all they need to know about the Irish: that we are, in the fond words of the late Jack Charlton, "daft buggahs". Orange or green, North or South, it doesn't really matter. It's only four years since the Republic of Ireland enjoyed a famous football night against glamorous Italy in the rain in Lille. Imagine the conversations in the Italian dressing room on Thursday as their players wandered in stopping briefly to figure out which Ireland they'd be playing this time out. Italy has a population of 60 million people, many of whom are brilliant at smoking or football, often at both and sometimes at the same time. The Italians are born to score goals under the hot sun of World Cup afternoons, peeling away in front of the adoring crowd, looking cinematic and vaguely tragic. This kind of stuff comes naturally to them. And like the Irish, they're famously quarrelsome. But they seem agreed that the best way of fielding their strongest team is to pick the 11 best players.

There’s just under seven million of us on the island of Ireland. As a breed we are too modest to produce flamboyant goal scorers: look at any famous Irish goal, North or South. Our goal scorers always looked momentarily stunned when the ball actually hits the net and never look comfortable or natural in their celebrations.

But for all that, both Irish football teams become annoyed with themselves when they can’t beat a football nation such as Italy. They share an unreasonable stubborn belief that selecting two international football teams from the pick of a small island with a football tradition consisting of two extremely modest semi-professional leagues should deter them from getting to European championships and to World Cups.

And the accomplishments of both teams have, over the decades, been absurdly rich. There is something lastingly miraculous about Northern Ireland's appearance in the quarter finals of the 1982 World Cup: a flash of happiness in a dark political summer. "We thought: we've united the country," Gerry Armstrong said in the documentary Division: The Irish Soccer Split, remembering the giddy few hours within the squad after Northern Ireland had beaten hosts Spain and parties broke out in Catholic and Loyalist Belfast. The escapist adventures of Ireland under Charlton were relived last year to mark the 30th anniversary of Italia 90.

Both teams have produced extraordinary footballers – John Giles and Pat Jennings, Roy Keane and Derek Dougan, Liam Brady and Mark Lawrenson and Martin O'Neill and Paul McGrath – and, of course, Belfast gave the world George Best, who exists somewhere between world football genius and pop cultural touchstone.

There was something thrillingly contrary, too, about having two football teams and everybody knew it and felt it. That poisonous night when the two teams met in Windsor Park for the World Cup play-off game in 1993 was an illumination of just how unfathomably far apart both countries and communities were at that point in time. It was seething: a border rivalry that could make most others feel tame and lame in comparison.

But that was almost 30 years ago. And it doesn’t make it any less of a shame that Ireland – as an island – never got to see what an all-Ireland team in the Giles-Best era might have done together. An all-Ireland 11 was something that Best always said he hoped to live to see.

Loaves and fishes

Fifteen years after his death, it is no closer to becoming a reality. In Belgrade on Wednesday, the Irish manager Stephen Kenny was forced to select players who cannot get regularly first team football with their clubs. As it is, the Republic squad is bolstered with players born in the North. His young team played some highly promising football and lost. Tonight, they face Luxembourg. The Free State mood: jittery. Ian Baraclough, too, must always keep his fingers crossed against any late injury limiting his squad before Northern Ireland games. It's a fine line. Both of Ireland's football teams have done the loaves and fishes thing in the past. But for how long more can they keep it up?

As the committed and prominent yapped on Monday night, Claire Byrne bore the look of someone who had thrown a house party when the parents were away and was worried it was all about to go off. But at least they were talking.

And the thought occurred that even if they do manage to untangle the 400-odd years of political and religious complexities; that even if the airy talk of a united Ireland advances beyond thorny television debate, the peace-brokers will have a hell of a job in convincing the football crowds that it’s time to merge. It’s hard to forget Brian Kerr’s observation made in that same documentary about the mutual willingness of administrators on both sides to merge and become a united team. “It would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.”

And it’s true: both Irish football traditions are so entrenched that it might just be easier to unite a country than to break up a dressing room. After all, if we are all in this together, then what are we going to have to give out about?

It’s kind of funny, in an Irish way, when you think about it – and desperately sad.