Northern Ireland vs Switzerland (21/03/2025)

We followed it up with a dramatic 2-1 victory over Denmark at Windsor Park. It was the game in which our goals were scored by two subs, including a sub who came on for the first sub. The goals were netted by Derek Spence, who had come on as a substitute for Sammy Morgan and injured himself when scoring, and his replacement Trevor Anderson, who duly scored the winner. Then there was a successful visit to Sofia where, thanks to goals from Gerry Armstrong and Billy Caskey, we ran out victors by two goals to nil against Bulgaria. It meant 1978 ended very optimistically for those of us who rolled and fell in green (apologies Ms Bush). Of course optimism for the football fan is often a temporary and tenuous thing and our bubble was well and truly burst in ’79 (although that’s an altogether different story which sowed the seeds for the Billy Bingham-inspired success of the 1980s). So if you are fortunate enough to hear the Kate Bush classic, or maybe unlike me you have already downloaded it to your playlists, perhaps you can reflect on how footballing fortunes can rise and fall. Regardless of the alien land of the past, we can relive the thrills and wallow in the rose-tinted nostalgia. But football, whether at club or international level, is a right here, right now currency. The cliché that you are only as good as your last match is true. The highs of 1978 are worth not a jot to the class of 2025. Today’s matches and squad is the currency we are trading in and the future starts tonight. The past is gone, the future lies tantalisingly beckoning ahead. Let’s grab it with both hands and make new stories, new memories, new heroes.

I don’t have Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights on my Spotify playlist (yet) but in a recent 24-hour period I heard the song three times on the radio. Her flowing ethereal voice cascading its magic over the listener, we are out on the moors with Kate (and Cathy), the winds howling in the menace and the foreboding of the moors. Cathy is so cold – let her in. What a song. It was inspired by Emily Bronte’s classic novel of the same name (what a book by the way). Miss Bush’s song is being played, I suppose, because it was 47 years ago when it topped the charts. Yes, forty seven. As the saying goes, the past is another planet (according to LP Hartley), and for those of us of a certain age 1978 certainly fits that bill… no mobile phones, no wi-fi, no internet (how did people survive?). The only McDonald’s on the island of Ireland was in Dublin, trousers were wide, collars were large, Starsky and Hutch and Kojak caught the bad guys on a Saturday night, James Callaghan was the struggling Labour Prime Minister about to face the winter of discontent. In addition £100 then would be worth over £700 today, Linfield won the Irish League and Irish Cup double (I suppose there are some things that don’t change that much!) and the Northern Ireland manager was our hero of the 1958 World Cup, Danny Blanchflower, who loved to beguile the media - they were the ‘press’ in those days - with his oblique utterances. In the British Championships in May that year we would draw at Hampden Park with Scotland (1-1), with a goal from our captain Martin O’Neill, but fall 1-0 to both England and Wales. In European Championship qualifiers starting in the autumn, having been drawn against the Republic, Northern Ireland were preparing to travel to Dublin in September for the historic first game since partition (it ended as a turgid 0-0).

IRISHFA.COM

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