Watch your own house

FOOTBALL supporters of Ireland, their country needs you.

We are well acquainted with English clubs hoovering up the best of Irish football talent; now it seems they’re scouting fans and even home buyers.

In Sunderland recently, Niall Quinn couldn’t have made a more direct appeal for Irish bums on seats at the Stadium of Light if he’d renamed himself Lord Drumaville, grown a waxy moustache and printed up posters of himself pointing a beckoning finger in the general direction of his homeland.

Enthusiastic as ever, Quinn painted a picture of jet-trails filling the skies above the Irish Sea, as Wild Geese ‘Makems’ depart Ireland for the joys of Wearside. The greening of Sunderland, it seems, won’t be complete until it has spread from the boardroom and the dressing room to the stands.

This week, it was Arsenal’s turn to court the Gael, but what they called “the ultimate football fantasy” had more to do with bricks and mortar than bovril and pies.

Arsenal managing director Keith Edelman, backed by Liam Brady, was in Dublin to promote the sale of apartments at Highbury Square, the redeveloped residential site at the Gunners’ famous old home in Islington. According to Edelman: “Interest in the development from Ireland has already been fantastic...this is an exceptional opportunity for supporters and investors alike.”

While ‘Watch your house’ looks set to take on a whole new meaning in north

London, some are more concerned about the folks left back at home. While apartments and penthouses which range in price from £300,000 (€442,000) to £1.4 million (€2 million) — even if they do look out from refurbished stands onto a landscaped garden once the scene of some of ‘Chippy’ Brady’s greatest exploits — are likely to prove resistible to the majority who occupy the terraces in the League of Ireland,

Sunderland’s Irish recruitment policy has touched a nerve.

The National League Supporters’ Association (NLSA) was quick to condemn the lure of the English shilling, especially since it was being proffered by a Dub who, at one point, looked like having a role in shaping the future of the local game.

PRO Kevin McDaid noted that Niall Quinn had briefly occupied a position on the

Independent Assessment Group, the body charged with deciding the criteria by which clubs will go into the new League of Ireland in 2007 — a live issue since the FAI is meeting in Cahir this very lunchtime to vote on a merger with the league.

According to NLSA: “Mr Quinn, a former Republic of Ireland international, appears to want to further strip the potential support base for League of Ireland clubs.”

PRO Kevin McDaid added: “Mr Quinn took a position on a group overseeing the merger between the FAI and the eircom League with the express aim of further improving the League of Ireland. However his recent comments appear to set him in direct competition to the domestic leagues.”

For the record, Niall Quinn, when his duties at Sunderland became more onerous, stepped down from his post on the Independent Assessment Group, to be replaced by Cork-born Richard Collins, a director, former chairman and life president of Charlton FC.

Regardless, I suspect that the conflict of interest argument, in its wider application, is really a philosophical one, and rooted in the sincerely-held belief that Irish football supporters should put Irish football first.

Sincere but not necessarily realistic. Bemoaning the deep Irish interest in the English game is pointless: you might as well demand that folk watch RTÉ instead of BBC or listen to David Kitt instead of the Arctic Monkeys. It’s a matter of choice, and people will simply go where their fancy takes them.

Your correspondent is long enough in the tooth to recall a heaving Milltown but also the increasing gaps in the crowd as Brian Moore and ‘The Big Match’ became essential Sunday afternoon viewing on the box back in the early 70s.

At the upper levels of the eircom League, standards have undoubtedly improved with the likes of Cork City, Derry City, Shelbourne and Drogheda United to the fore. Anyone who saw the pulsating league decider at Turner’s Cross last season will know how rewarding a night out at the local game can be, while the recent exploits in Europe of all four teams demonstrated that the days of Irish clubs being led like lambs to the slaughter on the continent are over.

And yet, even this week, Derry City’s magnificent run in the UEFA Cup ended, almost inevitably, in heroic failure in Paris.

For Irish clubs — even the bigger fishes in the small pool — there is a point at which the sign still reads: thus far and no further.

By all means, football fans here should be enticed and encouraged into supporting the local game — but they won’t be browbeaten into it, nor shamed by accusations that they are being unpatriotic if they give their allegiance exclusively to Celtic, Man United, Liverpool — or even Sunderland. And unless Bohs turn into Bohski, the chances are that Irish club football will continue to play a poor second fiddle to its higher quality, wealthier, more star-studded and more glamorous big brother across the water.

Of course, there is always the option of the dual mandate. In Quinner’s brave new world, that might mean taking in an eircom League game on Friday night and flying to Sunderland early on Saturday morning. How you might square such commitment with your beloved is another matter — perhaps they’d be more understanding if you chipped in with a nice apartment in north London for use on weekends.