Now the battle returns to the field of play for Ireland

The Ireland senior women’s team have had more attention for wearing the ‘Respect’ shirt than the green shirt, writes Liam Mackey.

I wrote last September about a visit to Tallaght Stadium. Ireland were hosting Portugal in a senior women’s international. It was a dead rubber game for the home side, since qualification for this year’s European Championship finals in the Netherlands, was beyond their reach.

Still, it was a night of considerable consequence for my wide-eyed companions: my young daughter and two of her equally football-mad friends, whose disappointment at Ireland losing 1-0 was swept away in the game’s aftermath, as they waded into a throng of excited children pitch-side to meet the Irish players.

And joy knew no bounds when my daughter, and one of her pals, caught skipper, Emma Byrne’s gloves, after she had tossed them into the crowd. These were the very gloves with which the ‘keeper had kept out a penalty 12 minutes from the end of the game, only to suffer the instant agony of being beaten on the rebound for the goal that decided the tie in the visitors’ favour.

So, I filed a column, at the time, about the experience, in particular noting the huge impression the players’ charm offensive had made on three young girls.

“Call it glove at first sight, if you must (and I must),” I wrote, “but, from the excitable chatter in the car all the way home, to the spring in the step going into school the next day, and on into football training in the evening, there was no escaping the enthusiasm generated by one memorable night of football in Tallaght. Despite their best efforts, the Irish team might not have won on the pitch, but, thanks also to their best efforts, they definitely won off it.”

Since the last thing I expected to be said of the piece was that it was controversial — I was more prepared for the charge of ‘corny’ — I was taken aback a few days later to be told that it had caused a few rumblings of discontent out in Abbotstown.

For some in the FAI (but by no means all), it seemed, the notion that the senior women’s team should be praised for high-fiving, signing autographs, and posing for selfies with supporters — even though many other international women’s teams do exactly the same thing and for the same good reason — sat uneasily with the reality that these were Irish players coming off the pitch after another defeat, which marked the end of another doomed attempt at qualifying for a major tournament.

Implicit in the criticism, I remember thinking, was the suggestion that it might be better if the girls in green were a bit more Roy Keane about their attitude to success and failure.

Well, no-one can deny that the women channelled their inner-Saipan, and put it on show for all to see, this week.

After their impressive display of unity at Tuesday’s extraordinary press conference in Liberty Hall, Stephanie Roche acknowledged that the players had actually talked and joked about Keane before coming down to face the media.

And even as the forward reflected on what had brought her and her comrades to the brink of a strike, you could almost detect a Cork lilt in the Dubliner’s voice.

“It’s an Irish thing that you just get on with it and go with the flow, and we’ve done that for a number of years and tried to keep plugging away,” she said.

“But I think we’ve all come to an understanding that it’s never going to happen, if we don’t have all the resources that we need.”

While it should never have even come close to the team having to threaten the nuclear option of a strike, their firm stand could hardly have secured a more satisfactory outcome: a comprehensive resolution to the dispute which, first of all, allows the team to return to action in Tallaght, on Monday — when they play Slovakia in a friendly, albeit at the less than friendly kick-off time of 2pm — and which, in the longer-term, will, hopefully, help them, under new manager, Colin Bell, build without further distraction towards that historic, first-ever tournament qualification.

And there are some who think that the public airing of their grievances — and the dignified and uplifting manner in which they did so — might even have broader ramifications.

Ethel Buckley, one of the SIPTU officials who took part in the negotiations with the FAI, on behalf of the players, says: “I don’t think the issues that the national senior squad raised are unique to them. They really are role models, not just for young women, but for young people generally.

“They’ve shown that, when people stand up for themselves and when they stick together and when they take a stance against injustice, they can overcome real hurdles and win improvements.

“The women very deliberately chose ‘Respect’ as their slogan. I never picked up from them that the financial aspect was what was at the core of all this: it was more ‘treat us with the respect we deserve, we’re the national squad, we’re proud to wear the green’.”

There has been pretty much universal approval for the stance the women took this week.

Indeed, it’s not unfair to say they’ve had more public attention paid to them for wearing the ‘Respect’ shirt than the green shirt. (And I’m not exempting the media from this, by the way).

To change that, of course, requires success on the field of play, because nothing will serve to heighten the profile of women’s football in this country more than the sight of the senior team appearing in the finals of a World Cup or European Championship.

They’ve won big off the pitch — again. Now, one hopes, they can focus on trying to win big on it.