What Ireland really feels about England, an 800-year rivalry of shades of grey, green and white

England meet the Republic of Ireland tonight in just the 17th meeting between the two countries, and only the fourth in 30 years

When Declan Rice finally decided to commit to England last year, there was genuine “shock” among some of the Ireland camp. The West Ham United midfielder had given the strong impression he was emotionally invested in the whole Irish football set-up. Some team-mates who will face him tonight were disappointed, but ultimately pragmatic in the way professionals can be, not least regarding dual nationality. Others around the squad were less forgiving.

“It’s about what you feel,” one figure close to the camp says, referring to both Rice and Jack Grealish. “The reality is that, deep down, they must feel more English than Irish.”

Their cases have added an extra layer to tonight’s friendly between the two countries, but also raised much bigger questions about what is one of the most complicated relationships in football – at least on one side.

That is what Ireland feels about England.

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There is a multitude of angles and elements that charge that feeling. Most generally, there are “800 years” of history and British occupation; a century of post-colonialism; decades of the English top flight serving as one of Ireland’s primary cultural influences; hundreds of players and – at least up until today – a 35-year unbeaten record.

One line frequently uttered in Irish academia is that “England is a huge part of Irish history but Ireland a tiny part of English history”. That is perfectly illustrated by football.

For England, Ireland don’t really register, other than an occasionally romantic story at a tournament. They’re certainly not Scotland in terms of rivalry. Ireland, however, view England exactly as the Scots do. They’re the “auld enemy”, the football culture they constantly cast themselves against. That goes deeper than in matches. There’s always “800 years”.

Before the most famous match, the opening group game of Euro 88, Irish physio Mick Byrne turned to fans in Stuttgart and growled “we’ll do them for yiz today!” There was a lot wrapped up in that line, and a lot wrapped up in the game. The eventual 1-0 victory has gone down as one of the greatest moments in Irish sporting history, and one of the launchpad moments for what was still a relatively young independent country. The fact that first ever tournament win, in a first ever tournament game, came against England was crucial to that.

Ireland were finally on the international stage, and it came against the team that conditioned their entire view of that stage, about whom they had a complex.

Many Irish players were irritated at the “arrogance” of the English media before that 1988 game, particularly comments about how Ireland were only there to make up the numbers, and references to their “English” players. Liam Brady made his displeasure known on ITV, taking issue with Brian Moore’s remarks about the background of some individuals, and Brian Clough’s about their quality.

After the game – and Ray Houghton’s winner – there was only joy. The dressing room was filled with dignitaries and celebrities, all in tears. It was a moment of national transcendence. “Incredible,” right-back Chris Morris told this reporter in 2010. “And particularly incredible as it was against England.”

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That it was masterminded by the late, great Jack Charlton only added depth, and raised what was at that point an under-acknowledged part of it all, which still ripples out today in the cases of Rice and Grealish. That is how inevitably intertwined the two countries have been.

Ireland’s greatest football figure is English. So many of Ireland’s greatest players were part Irish, part English. The same is now true of many of the current English side. To go with Rice and Grealish, all of Harry Kane, Harry Maguire, Michael Keane and Conor Coady very evidently have an Irish background – and that’s just from the names. So many English people talk of an Irish grandparent.

They’d all be able to declare.

That reflects how Ireland foreshadowed an issue that is becoming an increasing complication for England and so many other nations: the number of players with dual nationality. The cases of Wilf Zaha with the Ivory Coast and Bukayo Saka with Nigeria were preceded by a series of examples involving another green shirt. Ireland is also likely to be at the centre of many more, because it has some of the most open nationality laws in the world. It is this that gave rise to the “granny rule” term. Third-generation Irish people are eligible for passports – and, because of Fifa’s rules, the national team – in order to reflect the historical diaspora. Much of that migration has been to the country that historians would debate was the initial cause of the diaspora: England.

Manchester United’s Shay Brennan was the first English-born player to be capped for Ireland, a decision that author Adam Ward described as “one of the most controversial and momentous occasions in Irish history”. That showed some of the tension around the so-called “Anglos” for some time, as did a paragraph in the Irish Supporters Club newsletter when the federation were in the middle of the managerial search that would eventually lead to Charlton. “With many people not exactly ecstatic with the present squad containing too many English-born players, imagine the outcry if an Englishman is appointed.” That was to change.

Charlton was the first to really exploit the potential of these rules, by pragmatically scouting for any serviceable player with Irish connections. It ensured the complicated issue of Anglo-Irishness came to the fore, and that many committed to Ireland without having had much prior feeling for the shirt. Former Irish captain Andy Townsend spoke last week about how, a mere year before declaring, he was cheering on England in that Euro 88 match. “I’d nicked a bike and had to cycle about five miles to find a bar [in Minorca] that was showing the game,” he told Paul Kimmage. “I was in shock.” Two years later, he was playing for Ireland against England on an even bigger stage, at the 1990 World Cup.

Townsend’s good friend Tony Cascarino, meanwhile, provides the most famous case, given the controversy about his declaration. His mother was adopted by a part-Irish family. It should be clarified that the rules actually meant Cascarino was always eligible. It just didn’t do much for the “Plastic Paddy” claim that was so prevalent around the 1980s and 1990s.

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That is a term that has always provoked a reaction in Gary Breen, who is a classic product of the diaspora. “For me, despite my accent, it’s never been a decision,” Breen tells The Independent. “I’ve always considered myself Irish. I’ve got no English relatives. I was brought up in Camden Town in the 70s and 80s, where there were probably more Irish people than in some of the counties in Ireland. All my friends in school were very similar. Holidays in Ireland, Irish music. As a youngster, with the ‘Plastic Paddy’ thing, I was probably fighting a corner because of other cases. Obviously this escalated with Declan, but it’s always been there.”

This is why the cases of Rice and Grealish have been so loaded, beyond their obvious quality. They’ve touched on deeper issues. While Breen’s words illustrate there was always some consciousness about accents – and the many English accents in Irish squads – he admits he was always conscious about “feeling”. The former centre-half explains his thought process when there would be a new call-up: “It might be a bit cutting, but I used to think: ‘Let me work this out in my own head: In 1988, who were you cheering for? When you were 12 or 13 – and football meant everything to you – were you cheering for England or were you cheering for Ireland?’ And I didn’t even have to ask so many. I would know.”

Stephen Hunt explains that all that ultimately mattered was fitting into the team culture. “The biggest thing was buying into our way. They had to understand the history, the mentality, the craic – I suppose – and what way you look at it as a whole. That goes back a long time. That’s the key to it. Most of the players who had come in that are ‘English’, they’d have had it from Irish families anyway. Listen, there have probably been one or two over the years that haven’t bought into it, and haven’t lasted long. I won’t say names. But lads like Liam Lawrence, Sean St Ledger, they all bought into it.”

It’s something Breen agrees with. “That’s not to say those same guys wouldn’t give everything,” he says. “They did. I never felt any of them let us down. But it doesn’t stop you prying when they first came in. I remember so many others, like Mark Noble, who said he didn’t consider himself Irish. I really respect that. That’s why I felt hoodwinked by Declan.”

The wider point here is that there are significant shades of grey. It’s not just green and white. Rice and Grealish are really the next generation on from players like Breen and Kevin Kilbane, where the sense of Irishness is naturally that bit more diluted. “My background is very different to Declan, which is one grandmother,” Breen says. “His dad’s second generation.” By the same token, this is almost a new generation of England-Ireland fixture. You can trace the relationship – and history – between the two nations through their games.

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The 1991 European Championships qualifier at Wembley, in a rare period when Ireland were the superior side, came at a particularly volatile time of the troubles in Northern Ireland. Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six wrongly convicted for an IRA bombing, attended the game just two weeks after his release. Chants of “No surrender” punctuated the night. Charlton was meanwhile back at Wembley for his only away match against England as Ireland manager, and was called “Judas”. Hearing this, he turned to Cascarino and angrily said: “I won the World Cup for this country.”

Most infamously, the 1995 Lansdowne Road friendly had to be abandoned after 27 minutes due to rioting by England fans. This became even more pointed over time. Irish fans always took pride in their good behaviour, sometimes consciously casting themselves as a contrast to the aggression of some of the English support. It was this game that also led to a long hiatus between matches, a period that saw immense change in Irish society, as well as an economic boom. The only interaction with England on the international stage was watching them in tournaments. As a reflection of Ireland’s new self-confidence as a nation, each of these tournaments was accompanied by media introspections over whether the country should be “mature” enough to support England.

Many resistant pointed to the perceived “hubris” of England, others to history. Some just put it down to feeling. It’s England.

One abiding memory is a Dublin bar on the night of England’s Euro 2004 elimination to Portugal, where hundreds of people got up on tables and started singing “they’re going home!” to the tune of Three Lions. A common counterpoint to all this was that those same Irish people have absolutely no problem supporting these same English players for their English clubs. Ireland has often treated the Premier League as if it were its own league, the media covering it in the same way the English media do.

It’s commonly said you can guess an Irish person’s age by who they support in England. While Manchester United and Liverpool are constants, Leeds United would indicate they were a child in the 1970s, due to the influence of John Giles. An Aston Villa supporter would be a child of the 1990s, due to Paul McGrath, Steve Staunton, Houghton and Townsend. The Premier League is “the dream”.

This has long been a point of contention for many in the League of Ireland, and how it affects the domestic competition – not least in terms of revenue, and thereby development. It is also an added aspect to the appointment of Stephen Kenny. His willingness to assert a new identity, one based on progressive football, involves the football culture’s first conscious attempt to unanchor itself from England. Pure proximity has naturally led to a lot of crossover.

It points to how this match takes place in a very different context to the past – and not just for the lack of fans. From that perspective, the empty stadium might provide a bit of a relief for Rice and Grealish. They would surely have faced a few boos from Irish fans.

Martin Prendergast, the chairman of the London branch of the Irish supporters club, believes it would have been no more than “pantomime”. “That’s the word, yes,” he says. “I think there would be a few heckles, but they’d be drowned out by England fans, and it would have been good-natured. A lot of fans would say don’t entertain it, they’ve moved on, we’ve moved on.”

That’s also an indication of the relationship. It is symbolic that Prendergast’s branch is based near Wembley, where he grew up, amid a similar background to Breen. The home of English football is also the home of one of the UK’s largest Irish communities.

Tonight, it stages just the 17th meeting between the two countries, and only the fourth in 30 years. That puts a slightly different spin on the fact Ireland are unbeaten in the fixture in 35 years. Again, a few shades of grey, rather than just green and white.

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