Ireland and Poland renew friendship that has brought fond memories for blazers

Jackie Carey is said to have written in his official report to the FAI on the game between Ireland and Poland in Katowice in May 1958 that it was “fitting that our association should be the first to resume international games with this predominantly Catholic country.”

This curious observation raises a couple of points. The first is: What on earth was the team “manager” on about?

The Poles had been back in international football for a decade by the time the game took place and their first post-war attempt to qualify for a World Cup, which included a 2-1 win over the Soviet Union in front of 93,000 in the same stadium where Ireland played, had only ended the previous year with a play-off defeat by the same opponents in "neutral" East Germany.

The second is that while there may well have been some sort of significance to the religion thing – this weekend’s meeting with Poland will be the 26th between the two countries, matching the current record of games against Ireland held by another staunchly Catholic country, Spain, with whom the FAI also arranged many games while the country was being ruled by a brutal dictatorship – there is no great sense of piety in the tales that survive from the association’s trips to central Europe.

The story that did the rounds, in fact, was that Ireland kept arranging games against the Poles – 11 during the ’60s and ’70s, another four during the ’80s, all of them friendlies – because somebody in a position of power in Merrion Square was keen to maintain a relationship that was romantic in nature: in the language of the street, he had a woman on the go.

Dreamland The story came complete with a name that, sadly, actually made it seem a little less plausible, which is not to say that there were not some ulterior motives involved in the rash of games. Eamon Dunphy recounted in his autobiography, The Rocky Road: "For some of the blazers, this was dreamland. The man with the hundred-dollar bill was king. Some shopped for the best local

good. Others bought local girls. One arsehole from rural Ireland boasted of buying a young woman, a student, he claimed, for 200 Marlboro cigarettes.”

When Joe Wickham, the well-liked general secretary of the FAI, collapsed at half-time of the May 1968 friendly, again in Katowice, Dunphy recalls a row breaking out among the Irish officials over which of them would get to stay with the hospitalised Dubliner who, as it turned out, died there a few days later. The players didn’t cover themselves in glory that night either with the news initially greeted in the dressing room with a stony silence until somebody thought to ask whether before taking ill he had signed “the message”, as the cheques to cover appearance fees was apparently known.

In May 1970, the Irish party left Poznan, where they had lost 1-2, for Berlin and the second half of their "post-season tour", a game against mighty West Germany. Train "reservations hadn't been made," though, as Eoin Hand politely put it and so, most of the players ended up passing the bulk of the journey perched on suitcases in the luggage compartment. Dunphy described the journey as "hellish" but Hand admits he got off lightly, securing one of the coveted few seats alongside the association officials and the travelling press.

Needless to say, Franz Beckenbauer and co won the game.

Hand was less forgiving about the infamous trip to Bydgoszcz in May 1981, another double-header that this time kicked off with a game against a West German B team in Bremen. Ireland travelled hoping to improve on a really miserable away record but they were very well beaten by a German side that included a few big names.

And so they headed for Warsaw where, to the surprise of Hand, who was now the manager, and the general astonishment of the players, the officials checked into the best hotel the city had to offer before bidding the squad itself farewell.

"A group of the official jumped off the coach at a big hotel in Warsaw," recalled Mark Lawrenson. "All with big bright eyes, saying 'See you later, boys.' That last impression was imprinted on our brains.''

A sweaty five-hour journey followed on a dilapidated bus that lacked air conditioning before the players arrived at a hotel that Lawrenson suggests was something of a disappointment. “It was dirty,” he says. “There were no towels, no toilet paper, stuff like that.”

Poland was in the midst of a huge political crisis at the time with the communists making a last-ditch attempt to retain power by suppressing the Solidarity movement. The FAI, had been advised to pull out of the game. This, though, was an organisation capable back then of playing friendlies against Chile in the Santiago stadium where political prisoners had recently been detained, tortured and, in many cases, murdered, and attempting to defy all reason by sending a team drawn mainly from English clubs to Argentina during the Falklands war.

They were not, in short, going to be deterred by the mere idea of getting caught up in the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc. Dodgy hotels? Well, that’s another thing. Many of the officials never did make the 300-kilometre journey to Bydgoszcz for the game, Packie Bonner’s debut.

Terrible mistake

Again, Ireland lost 3-0. Dave O’Leary, who scored an own goal, said afterwards he hadn’t really been fit enough to travel and doing so had been “a terrible mistake”. Most of his team-mates took a similar view.

Food was generally in short supply because of the political turmoil and whatever there was generally was considered to be terrible. The general sense of misery was compounded when Hand’s assistant, Terry Conroy, who had gathered almost everybody’s spending money in order to exchange it at higher rates on the black market returned to the hotel.

“Terry arrived back full of the joys of spring – mission accomplished and the group gathered for the pay-out,” recalled the manager. “Terry paid out to the first four or five when he found he had run out of money. Only then did it dawn on him that he had been conned by the old ‘folded money’ trick.”

Having been similarly hung out to dry by his employers, Hand apparently decided that it was best to let the players have a few beers. “It wasn’t the manager’s fault, it wasn’t the hotel’s fault, it was the fault of somebody in a five-star hotel 200 miles away, lording it up,” said Lawrenson.

“That was the first time I saw the players in danger of revolting and saying we weren’t going to play. The secretary, Peadar O’Driscoll [‘Big Dinner’ as he was widely known] waltzed into the hotel on the day of the game and we just went nuts at him.”

After the game, four of the squad came down with food poisoning and one suffered so badly on the bus back to Warsaw that, one by one, the rest of the players had to hand over the finely embroidered table linen they had been given by their hosts as souvenirs. Piece by piece it was used, crudely bundled up and thrown out the window.

In his book, The Team That Jack Built, Paul Rowan describes the scene that awaited the players back in the officials hotel as "like something out of a saucy seaside revue".

It was to be another decade before the two nations finally met in a competitive game and the second such encounter, a 3-3 draw in Poznan, is no more fondly remembered by the Irish players , even if their grievances this time were largely, as they say, “for football reasons”.

The game in Dublin had ended scoreless and with England's visit to Lansdowne Road also having produced a draw, Ireland's qualification hopes were finely balanced. Still, Jack Charlton reckoned another point would be a decent return from the game in Poznan as the Poles would then host an England side needing a win, while victory in Turkey would, in that eventuality, be good enough to put Ireland through.

Fifth midfielder

Charlton sprung a surprise beforehand with his team selection. “I decided to change tack,” he said later. “Instead of going with two front players, I played a fifth midfielder. The plan was for

Roy Keane

[who was making his competitive debut after a strong showing in a friendly] and Andy Townsend to run at the Poles from deep positions and get on the end of crosses from our full backs. For an hour it worked brilliantly.

“But then came the miscalculation. I hadn’t realised how much our new running game would take out of our players and our midfielders [were] forced back on top of our defenders. Poland got in for two late goals and a share of the points.”

The approach, said Charlton, required “an extra couple of pairs of legs on the bench”, but Alan McLoughlin was the only midfielder held in reserve and the manager actually chose not to call on him.

At 3-1 up with 13 minutes left on the clock, a mistake by O’Leary led to the hosts getting a goal that got them back into it and when Bonner called for a cross to be left for him nine minutes later and Kevin Moran complied, striker Jan Urban stole into head home a dramatic equaliser.

Townsend, who was felt by some to have had the game of his international career that night, was vague about how the game was allowed to slip away but Keane has said that the Poles deserved their point.

Ireland, in any case, had only themselves to blame; something that changed the following month when Charlton’s original game-plan seemed set to play out. Ireland beat Turkey 3-1 and when the home side’s manager, Sepp Piontek, came to shake hands at the final whistle, he congratulated the Englishman on qualifying for Euro ’92.

The former German international was mistaken, however, in believing that the Poland versus England game had ended 1-0. The hosts had indeed led and, the story went, should have had the opportunity to double their advantage from the penalty spot towards the end. But they were refused the penalty by the Belgian referee and a minute later Gary Lineker scored the equaliser that sent England to the finals.

Almost 24 years, and four more friendlies, later, Ireland need to win tomorrow if they are to take a little more control of their own destiny this time around. Either way, though, Sopot suggests there’s at least one FAI official looking forward to a big night out in Warsaw this October.