Sir, - I would like to congratulate everyone, and especially the players, who had anything to do with the success of our Under-18 soccer team who so gallantly and nail-bitingly won the European Championship. If you combine this victory with our Under-16 European Championship win, it must augur well for our future national side. We are the only European country ever to have won both titles in the same season.
I do, however, have one sour grape to air. I have yet to hear, see or read a reference of any kind to this prestigious achievement of ours anywhere in the British mass media. It is as if it never happened. In my naivety, maybe, I find this complete lack of interest quite incredible.
It isn't as if the viewers, listeners and readers of the UK media do not have an interest; they most certainly do. Some of our team players were born in England and most of them play for well-known UK sides. They could and should have been rejoicing at our success as, after all, "we" defeated the rest of the best in Europe with their help.
I had nothing but sympathy in my heart for the way the English team went out of the World Cup but not any more, at least, not "until hell freezes over". Unless someone can give me a reasonable explanation for this deliberate slight I will forever regard the British as a mean-spirited, self-centred, ungracious-in-defeat nation.
What was it Napoleon said? "A nation of shopkeepers", I do believe. - Yours, etc., W. G. A. Scott,
Friars Hill,
Wicklow.