From McCabe to Shine, Rowe to Mustaki - Remembering when Ireland U19s shocked the world

Dave Connell was getting agitated. It was rare that he’d lose his rag with this team but he and his assistant Dave Bell were starting to feel their patience slipping now. Today was a good day, maybe the best day. So why didn’t it feel like it?

It was Tuesday, July 22nd 2014 and Ireland were the toast of Oslo. They were in Norway for the women’s Under-19 European Championships and Connell’s side had stunned everyone by dominating the opening week. Three games played, three games won. The powerhouse nations of England, Spain and Sweden all left with their pockets turned inside out, wondering what had happened.

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The semi-final wasn’t until Thursday so Connell gave the team Tuesday off. No football, no training, no video, nothing. Problem was, they couldn’t decide what to do. Some wanted to go to a local shopping centre. Some wanted to go into the city centre. Some wanted to drift off on their own. Connell listened and bit his tongue for a while but eventually he rounded on them.

“You’re either a team or you’re not,” he said. “Whatever you do, do it together. If you’re not together off the pitch, how can you be together on it? How can you rely on each other?” And with that, he and the other coaches tramped off for coffee and left the squad to stew in their juices.

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When they returned a while later, any worries over what a special bunch they had dissolved. The Ireland squad hadn’t gone shopping or sight-seeing. They were gathered around a piano, singing together. Centre-back Ciara O’Connell at the keys, the rest of the players leaning over her, belting out Read All About It by Emelie Sandé.

The coaches looked up and saw players from the other three teams left in the tournament, peering down from their balconies into the lobby. These young Irish girls, who came to Norway ranked a distant eighth of the eight teams involved, who everyone presumed would be flying home today, were huddled up as one. A single, singing, smiling thing.

When they finished, everyone applauded. Dutch players, Spanish players, Norwegians, coaches, hotel staff. Everyone. The best fortnight of their lives had a bit of magic left in it yet.

“They were collectively a really tight-knit group, who wanted to succeed,” says Connell now. “You’re talking about a lot of different characters. We were proud of what we did to prepare them for international football but it was such a huge jump from where they were. The league was in its infancy here at the time and they were coming up against players who were in full-time set-ups, playing for the likes of Ajax, PSV, Bayern Munich.

“Whereas in Ireland, it was still something that passed most people by. These girls were nearly all still in school, they were doing their Leaving Cert or some of them were only just finished their Junior Certs. The FAI at the time wouldn’t have had a lot of interest. I remember even after we came home, somebody saying to me, ‘Well, yis really only made a semi-final.’”

The women’s Under-19 Euros have been played 23 times – Ireland had never qualified before and haven’t done it again since. They were drawn in a group against reigning world champions Spain, the previous year’s runners-up England and a Swedish team that were Under-17 runners-up in 2013. They beat all three, coming from behind against the latter pair. In the semi-final, they ran into a Dutch team containing Vivianne Miedema, the player of the tournament and now one of the top five players in the world. Only a semi-final? Eesh.

“We had a good qualifying phase so we were confident enough,” says Chloe Mustaki, team captain for the tournament. “But I think as an Irish team, we kind of enjoyed being the underdog. It kind of relieved the pressure a bit. We went to Oslo with the idea that if we got anything out of the group stage in terms of results, we’d be happy enough. Nobody expected anything from us.

“But we were a talented bunch, you know? There’s a lot of girls from the squad playing elite sport now all these years later – whether that’s soccer, camogie, GAA, Aussie Rules. You’re talking about athletes who are dedicated, committed, hard-working, all the rest of it. We had been together for the previous 12 months and it just came together that summer.”

The feeling that they were a uniquely star-crossed group was borne out in the years that followed. Of the 18-woman squad who went to Norway, 10 subsequently became senior internationals. Five of them were in the squad in Hampden Park last October when Ireland beat Scotland to qualify for this summer’s World Cup.

In fact, it would have been seven had Megan Connolly and Savannah McCarthy not been out injured at the time. Courtney Brosnan played in the 2014 qualifiers but was injured for the tournament. Tot it all up and it’s perfectly possible that a third of Vera Pauw’s squad for the World Cup will have come from that crop.

They all followed their own roads. The front three in Norway had Katie McCabe and Sarah Rowe playing either side of Clare Shine. Behind them were Mustaki and Amy O’Connor in midfield. None of them could have had an inkling of what life had in store.

McCabe went on to be the biggest star in Irish soccer, just last week the subject of a quarter-million-pound tug-of-war between Chelsea and Arsenal. Rowe played in All-Ireland football finals for Mayo and is heading into her sixth season in the AFLW with Collingwood. O’Connor has three camogie All-Irelands to her name with Cork and will captain them this year.

“My main memory is missing a load of school!” O’Connor laughs now. “We had so many camps and training weekends. It meant we spent so much time in each other’s company that the bond between us grew and grew. I played with some of those girls from Under-12 all the way up so we were really close-knit by the time we went over there.

“That was the last international soccer I played, really. I would have played much more soccer than camogie growing up actually. But after that tournament, I sort of had to make a choice and I went down the camogie route. I’m still in touch with loads of that group though. I met Clare in town last week and I’d catch up with Megan [Connolly] any time she’s home. It was such a brilliant time.”

For Mustaki, 2014 was the best of times and the worst of times. As captain, she led the side with intelligence and determination. As part of the Irish midfield, she reckons she underperformed. She had a good reason though – within a fortnight of coming home, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

“Yeah, that year was full of highs and lows,” she says. “I turned 19 that July, just after we got home actually. I was so privileged to captain the team and it was such a brilliant time with good friends. But I felt mixed about because I wasn’t playing the best that I could. So it was mixed emotions – some of the highest highs I have experienced in my career mixed in with what could have been some of the lowest lows.

“But I can’t really call them the lowest lows because I didn’t know what was going on. There were difficult moments after games where I was trying to work out why I wasn’t performing or showing the kind of player that I thought I was. Then I was diagnosed in August, quite soon after we came home.”

And then there was Clare Shine. Of them all, she was the one whose ability screamed loudest. Connell’s side had plenty of worker bees and stubborn defenders, lots of possession-winners and dead-ball strikers. But the hardest thing remains the hardest thing. Shine was a natural goalscorer, the rarest pearl in the sea.

“They all had their own personalities and their own talents,” says Connell. “Sarah did so much work for the time, she was the fittest member of the squad. You’ve seen it since, whether she was playing for Mayo or down in Australia. Katie was Katie, total street footballer. We just told her to get on the ball and cause chaos. It’s no surprise that she has turned into the superstar she is now.

“But Clare was a brilliant finisher. She liked to drop a bit deeper, she was so hard to move off the ball. No question, she was one of the top five strikers in Europe at her age at the time.”

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But all the while, Shine was struggling with mental health problems and addiction. In her often brutally raw autobiography released last year, she treasures the memory of that tournament but also lays out in grim detail her descent after it. When they got back to Dublin, the whole team partied – Shine got so out of it so quickly she was in bed by the time the rest of them went out on the town.

Her struggles ever since have been public but it has always been noticeable how vocal that 2014 crew have been in their support of her. McCabe and Rowe have used their enormous public profiles to cheer her on through her sobriety – it’s coming up on three years this summer. In a different life, Shine could be Ireland’s star striker heading to the World Cup. That wasn’t her road, though. She retired from all football last year.

Life is life. They were girls then, some of them as young as 16. They took everyone by surprise and couldn’t have known they were laying the first bits of foundation for where Irish women’s soccer is now. When the World Cup comes around in July and history is made, one strand of it will lead back to that fortnight in Norway nine years before. And when it’s over, regardless of what happens, they’ll still have 2014.

“Generally when you play team sport, you tend to forge friendships for life,” says Mustaki. “But I think in particular when you experience such highs with a group of people, you tend to keep an affinity towards them that will be lifelong. We’ll always be there for each other. We’re always chatting in WhatsApp groups together. When you have magic moments like we had, you’ll always be bound by them.”