Generation of fans may be lost forever

For those of us of a childish disposition the few days before the start of a World Cup are filled with a kind of puerile anticipation. Until the first ball is kicked everything is possible - "Ronaldo has just been nutmegged by Tosh McKinlay" or "Tony Adams beats Raul hands down for pace" can sound like the most plausible lines of commentary ever uttered. All, of course, until reality kicks in.

Unfortunately we can't even fantasise this week about "and that's Iain Dowie's hattrick" or "that goal caps a marvellous return to international football for Terry Phelan" because for the first time in 16 years there won't be a team from this island at the finals. Northern Ireland's trips of 1982 and 1986 were followed by Italia '90 and USA '94 for the Republic but two indifferent qualifying campaigns mean that the Jamaicans now have no serious competition for the title of "the most friendly football fans in the world". It is 16 years this month since Northern Ireland's epic campaign in Spain and the Northern media has been awash with television retrospectives and newspaper splashes of "what they did then and where are they now" variety.

The focus for most of the nostalgia was that epic night in Valencia when Billy Bingham's 10 men held on for a 1-0 win over the hosts that carried them on a tide of emotion into the second phase. The pictures from that steamy night are redolent of a different football era with the figure hugging shorts, cap sleeved shirts and 1980s issue footballers' haircuts. And they drive home the fact that this was the singularly most successful group of players ever to represent Northern Ireland.

Most have gone on to scale considerable heights - Martin O'Neill is a much coveted Premiership manager of some repute, Pat Jennings is now part of Lawrie McMenemy's international management team and there looks every possibility that Norman Whiteside can spend the next 50 years basking in the celebrity of being the youngest man to play in the finals.

But all this rememberance of things past throws into sharp relief what has happened in the years since Northern Ireland's footballing high watermark. Even allowing for the sepia tones that time can cast, it does genuinely seem that 1982 was a true cross-community occasion here.

There were Protestants and Catholics side by side in Bingham's squad and there are numerous first hand accounts of as many Espana celebration parties in west Belfast as there were in the east of the city. And Billy Hamilton's falling tree-trunk impression for his headed goal against Austria was repeated in playgrounds across the land for years afterwards.

Now, in the doldrums that have characterised the 1990s for Northern Ireland the national side excites only marginal interest among the bulk of the Catholic/nationalist population. Windsor Park's sectarian atmosphere has made it an unpalatable place for them to go and watch football and on occasions it's been even worse for the players on the team. Anton Rogan had an international career destroyed by the booing and cat-calling that greeted his every touch at what the diehards refer to as "The Shrine". His "offence" was to be a Catholic who played for Celtic.

The decline of the Northern Ireland team as a central, possibly unifying force in sporting life here reached its nadir on that poisonous night at Windsor in November 1993 when the Republic got the draw they needed to send them States-bound. It was an occasion when the red-rawness that characterises some of the bitterest political arguments here was transplanted into the football arena.

Much of the tension has been taken out of daily life here since then, but it looks like a whole generation of potential Northern Ireland supporters has been lost forever. The biggest single factor in that was the rise and rise of the Republic in the period 1986-1994 at precisely the time when Martin O'Neill, Gerry Armstrong et al, reached the end of the line with no ready replacements in sight.

Huge swathes of football obsessives in nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry jumped horses in midstream and hitched their wagons to the Jack Charlton experience. For green Northern Ireland shirts now read the green of the Republic. The colour remains the same, the cultural signals couldn't be more different.

Bryan Hamilton's spell as international team manager gave indications that the IFA was emerging from its torpor and realising that the battle for footballing minds had to be taken to the schools and the youth clubs throughout Northern Ireland. Hamilton was a truly progressive figure, unafraid to take his international training sessions to the uncharted territories of places like the Donegal Celtic complex deep in the heart of nationalist Belfast.

He carried off the not inconsiderable task of saying that he wanted to transform Northern Ireland into "a team for all the people" and making it sound convincing. Hamilton was a breath of fresh air through the stuffy corridors of the IFA and for a while genuine cross-religion support for his side looked a realistic possibility. But good community relations do not make a successful international manager and Hamilton ultimately walked the plank because of a dismal World Cup qualifying campaign.

Which brings us back to where we started. The potential impact here of a Northern Ireland side again reaching the World Cup Finals is almost impossible to quantify. Would there be a huge outpouring of support like we saw 16 years ago or would another World Cup odyssey provoke only indifference? The old maxim is that nothing succeeds like success. But the sectarian fault lines here run very, very deep.