Colin Sheridan: What life in a war-torn country taught me about Irish football
PUNCHING BELOW OUR WEIGHT: Ireland's manager Heimir Hallgrímsson after the win over Armenia last week. Pic: INPHO/James Crombie
When yours truly was deployed to the former Yugoslav province of Kosovo as a peacekeeper over 20 years ago, the most striking thing about the landscape wasn’t the remnants of war, but the domes inflated across the countryside.
These weren’t airplane hangars or mushroom houses; they were football pitches. AstroTurfed, full-sized, covered, and air-conditioned - gleaming like space capsules on a battered moon-scape. Their purpose was simple: to protect against the severity of the bitter Balkan winter and provide a refuge for teams and teens to congregate and play ball. It’s about 25 kilometres from the capital Pristina to the town of Lipjan, where most of the Irish were based. Along that short stretch of road, I can recall at least four of these facilities.
We used them often, a blessed release from the monotony of patrolling and reporting and the loneliness of being so far from home. I was 24, a middle-class Irish lad from one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, and despite having spent half my young life playing Gaelic football, soccer, tennis, rugby - everything with a ball - this was the first time I’d ever set foot on a synthetic sporting surface. The first time I’d played a field sport indoors. Up to that point, “indoor football” meant a hairy green ball pinging off a school gym wall, jumpers for goalposts, a teacher roaring from the sideline. Yet there I was, in one of Europe’s poorest corners, stepping into a warm, bright, perfectly flat pitch under a great white dome.
It was 2004, if not the peak of the Celtic Tiger, then certainly the precipice of it, a time when the helicopters lifted off from Ballybrit with the frequency of a rain shower, ferrying the great and the good to oysters and caviar at Moran’s on the Weir. Meanwhile, back at my adopted Gaelic football club in Salthill-Knocknacarra, we trained under flickering street lights in a public park, or borrowed a pitch in An Spidéal, 20 kilometres away.
It struck me then - and strikes me still - that I had to go to a war-torn country to play football in comfort.
A lot of money poured into Kosovo after the war ended in 1999. Who built those domes, I couldn’t tell you. It could have been local initiative, money laundering, or the crumbs of foreign aid. But whoever did it, they made a wise investment. Amid rubble and unemployment and political limbo, those domes were an oasis in a desert of depression - a symbol that the country valued play, community, and the small mercy of light in the dark months.
Fast forward 20 years. Kosovo, a nation of just 1.5 million people, remains one of Europe’s poorest. Yet it sent nine athletes to last year’s Olympic Games in Paris, winning two medals in Judo. The former Yugoslavia’s footballing heritage still casts a long shadow, and though Kosovo can’t yet boast the likes of a Modrić or a Džeko, football thrives. Their best-known exports, Xherdan Shaqiri and Granit Xhaka, were born in Switzerland to Kosovar parents - a diaspora success story if ever there was one.
Their current star is Vedat Muriqi, who plays his football in La Liga for Mallorca. Their manager is a German called Franco Foda, whose name sounds like a Star Wars bounty hunter. Under him, Kosovo have played 17, won 11, lost five and drawn once. That includes home and away wins against Sweden, leaving them second in their World Cup qualification group, behind the Swiss.
And then there’s us.
Heimir Hallgrímsson - the Icelandic dentist with the easy charm and a nation’s hopes in his dental mirror - has been in charge of Ireland for 14 games. Five wins, six losses, three draws. Our World Cup hopes? Slimmer than a supermodel on Ozempic.
Comparisons in international football are often lazy excuses to fill column inches, but indulge me. Kosovo is younger than some of our squad members. It exists under constant international pressure, has unresolved borders, a fragile economy, and a football federation barely out of its teens. Yet, somehow, it is punching well above its weight on the pitch.
Northern Ireland, too - with its sectarian baggage, limited resources, and a domestic league that would struggle to fill a Lidl car park - routinely produces teams that play above themselves.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Ireland - a nation finally with resources, facilities, and a global diaspora of footballers - keeps tripping over its own shoelaces.
It’s not that our players aren’t good enough. They have to be good enough to out-perform Kosovo, Northern Ireland and Armenia. In fact, pound for pound, the current crop is technically superior to many of the teams that brought us closer to major tournaments in the past. The problem lies both in the present and the past - in decades of neglect at grassroots level, in a culture that treats football as an inconvenience rather than an investment, and in a governing body that’s long mistaken survival for strategy. Mix that in with the crippling consequence of low expectations and you find yourself where we are now - purgatory.
Kosovo’s domes were built out of necessity. Ours should have been built out of abundance. Yet in Ireland, even during the Tiger years, we left kids playing in muck under streetlights, while helicopters buzzed overhead.
When you hire an Icelandic dentist to coach your international football team, it can look cool and edgy - provided you win games and qualify for tournaments. But when you don’t, the dentist’s gambit looks less avant-garde and more idiotic. Kosovo might never win a major tournament, but it has already done something remarkable: it has built something from nothing, and believed that sport could matter. We, on the other hand, seem determined to prove the opposite.
Maybe it’s time we stopped envying the domes in the metaphorical desert and started building a few of our own.
Six weeks ago, the name Nick Woltemade was a punchline to a joke. Now, there’s a moment, just before the ball leaves his boot, when stadiums seem to exhale. It happened again this weekend against Brighton - a feathery touch, a glance, and then the kind of finish that looks preordained rather than rehearsed. A brushstroke, not a bludgeon. This is the same Nick Woltemade that Newcastle paid £69 million for in the summer, to howls of disbelief from the terraces and snide emojis online. He arrived from Stuttgart as a 22-year-old curiosity: tall, angular, almost bashful in demeanour, the sort of forward you’d expect to play a Bach fugue rather than bury a chance. He was signed to replace Alexander Isak - a player of silk and menace, adored on Tyneside - and that felt, at the time, like heresy. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge labelled Newcastle “idiots” for signing him. German Op-eds were dedicated to smearing his credentials. But football loves a redemption story written in advance. Three months in, the jeers have dissolved into applause. Woltemade doesn’t so much chase the ball as invite it for coffee. His touch has a softness that slows the game, and his finishing has a clarity that borders on arrogance. Yesterday’s goal - a one-touch caress across the keeper - was his seventh in nine games. There’s something wonderfully un-Premier-League about him: no gestures, no hashtags, just a long stride and a calm certainty. Eddie Howe calls him “the quietest loud signing we’ve ever made,” which feels about right. The £69m that once looked like financial lunacy now seems like foresight. Isak was poetry; Woltemade is prose - clean, deliberate, enduring. He doesn’t need fireworks because the light comes from within. For Newcastle, he’s been less a replacement than a revelation. And if there’s any justice left in the game, the laughter that greeted his arrival will soon be remembered as the overture to something far more beautiful.
Tipperary’s sporting year has been gilded with triumph - an All-Ireland hurling title, the county’s colours flying high again - yet it now carries the weight of sorrow. The sudden passing of senior football manager Philly Ryan has left a silence that no medal can fill. To his players, Ryan was more than a coach; he was a heartbeat in a code that often fights for air. His loss reminds us that behind every jersey and scoreboard are people - fragile, human, and deeply connected. Amid the joy of victory, Ryan’s passing is a quiet, sobering truth: that sport gives us community, and sometimes, it hopefully teaches us how to grieve together.
Irish swimmer Shane Ryan’s decision to join the so-called Enhanced Games - the breakaway event that removes anti-doping restrictions - is as unsettling as it is perhaps understandable. Ryan, an Olympian and national record-holder, has spent a lifetime chasing tenths of seconds for modest reward. The Enhanced Games promise money, exposure, and a kind of twisted equality - everyone enhanced, no one pretending otherwise. It exposes the uneasy truth at the heart of elite sport: the world demands purity but rewards spectacle. For athletes like Ryan, the choice becomes painfully clear - sacrifice or salary, integrity or income. His defection isn’t just a rebellion against rules; it’s a mirror held up to a system that too often forgets what it asks of its athletes.
