Books 2024: The foreign game has come a long long way on a bumpy road

GAA club histories are plentiful, but soccer equivalents are scarce and needed. This one is a beautiful, ambitious production.

11th November 2024: Innishvilla's Eolann McSweeney and Everton Athetic's Jakub Piotr Sienicki tussle for the ball during the Beamish Stout MSL junior 3rd division game at Everton Park. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

A narrative holds that Jack Charlton and his team fertilised soccer across parish fields in Ireland’s corners round about 1990. There’s a view too, not shouted as loud, that Jack and his teammates sowed the seeds a quarter of a century earlier in winning England the World Cup.

Con Houlihan once wrote that showing the 1966 World Cup on Irish television “effected a quiet revolution in our island”. Bringing the game out from the cities, “it opened windows and blew away cobwebs – and implanted soccer in almost every parish.”