Kieran Shannon: Scotland game a pivotal moment in Irish football
PIVOTAL MOMENT: Ireland manager Vera Pauw. Pic: INPHO/Ryan Byrne
When Sue Anstiss was looking for a title for her 2021 book on the “unstoppable rise” of women’s sport in her native UK and beyond, she eventually settled on Game On because it elicited how she felt about the subject matter.
“The dictionary says ‘game on’ is ‘used to show that a competition of some kind is about to start, usually when you are excited about it.’ The slang dictionary says it’s ‘an expression used to kick off a contest, issue a challenge, or express general enthusiasm.’ And that’s it for me. Excited and enthusiastic [about the progress made] but recognising there is still a big challenge ahead,” wrote Antsiss.
She then went on to select a dozen moments over the previous decade which seemed to resonate most with her and the public in advancing the positive change apparent in women’s sport.
The most obvious tipping point was the 2012 London Games, so much so that it has been commonly referred to as “the women’s games”. It was the first Olympics in which women could compete in all events, including boxing, while the poster athlete for a dominant home nation had been Jessica Ennis-Hill.
A series of other game-changers shortly followed. In 2013 Anstiss, a former GB senior triathlete herself, and some friends founded the Women’s Sports Trust, a charity and awareness scheme with the aim of moving women’s sport from “worthy to irresistible” to sponsors, NGBs and media organisations; for instance they’d partner with and challenge Getty Images to increase their visibility of female athletes and the way they were portrayed.
Also name-checked were the 2015 Boat race when the annual Oxford-Cambridge showdown extended to women and the sponsors insisted on the women enjoying equal funding and billing; the GB hockey team winning gold in Rio; Muirfield in 2017 finally allowing women to join; the 2018 ban on the outdated and tawdry practice of walk-on girls and grid girls at darts and Formula 1 events; Barclays sponsoring the 2019 FA Women’s Super League and the FIFA women’s World Cup the same year which was watched by an estimated 1.2 billion people.
Reading her book it prompted the obvious question as to what would qualify as the equivalent milestones in this country.
London 2012 was as seminal for us as it was for Anstiss. After all, the reason why women could compete in a sport like boxing was because of Katie Taylor who would go on to join Ennis-Hill as one of the faces of those Games.
Niamh Briggs & Co winning the 2013 Grand Slam changed how we knew, viewed and felt about women’s rugby in this country though subsequent events would show how much the IRFU itself still had to travel on that count.
In Gaelic Games you had the founding of the Women’s Gaelic Players Association in 2015; the ground-breaking partnership between Lidl and the LGFA in 2016; and then the All-Ireland final in 2017 when over 46,000 descended upon Croke Park to catch Dublin-Mayo, the highest-attended women's team sports event in Europe that year.
Then there’s been the stars. Kellie. Katie again and again. Rachael Blackmore. And Leona, though she’s yet to quite have her London, Cheltenham, Tokyo moment; Toledo in the Solheim, for all its and her splendour, wasn’t quite it.
Watching her in the flesh in Dromoland a fortnight ago in the company of my daughter and son and the latter’s determined attempts to secure her autograph, it echoed an observation of Anstiss’s: “Ultimately it’s about respect. If men and boys respect sportswomen for their achievements, if they are in awe of their ability and accomplishments, surely they are more likely to respect the other women in their lives too? Celebrating women in sport undoubtedly impacts the way in which a man views his colleagues and female family members.”
All the more so because in that moment he didn’t see a female sport star. He just saw a supreme sporting talent, like he was trying to get the signature of Rory McIlroy.
There’s been the establishment of the Irish Times sportswoman of the month and year award scheme; Sarah Keane being appointed CEO of the Olympic Federation of Ireland; our hockey team reaching the World Cup final in 2018.
The brilliant 20x20 campaign was our equivalent of the Women’s Sports Trust, the “provocative glue” as Antsiss might put it to serve as a “catalyst for conversations behind the scenes” and just importantly some completely out in the open.
Worthy of consideration too is another that event that made Anstiss’s list: the 2019 FIFA World Cup. With RTÉ showing extensive live coverage of the event, we all saw and followed it. My son’s local soccer team and teammates participated in a bracketology competition the way you would for the men’s tournament. For many children of either gender it was their Espana ’82, Mexico ’86.
Only there was one problem with it: there was no team from Ireland in it. All we got to see of Louise Quinn and her teammates that month was in the Montrose studio, not on a field in France. The tournament was merely significant here, but not monumental.
But a World Cup featuring the Republic?
That is why Tuesday evening's game in Hampden Park is such a pivotal moment in not just Irish women’s sport but in Irish football, dwarfing the recent meeting of the two countries in the men’s Nations League. The country already likes this team, is ready to embrace it and craves to be part of a major football tournament again.
It is potentially a Gary McKay, Alan McLoughlin, Aldo in Malta moment, a gateway to a Katie McCabe or Denise O’Sullivan putting the ball in an English or USA net, a Genoa or Giants Stadium.
As you probably already know, a win against the Scots does not assure qualification, though depending on results elsewhere, it could. What is important, though, is that you know the game is on and that it’s worth watching. Because should that result and others fall Ireland’s way, it’s Game On as Anstiss might say in a way Irish sport has rarely known before.
