Both ended up being bang average and fucked out the door by Sunderland
Anyone with a brain knows it was McGrath
Always very cute to watch the United fans sticking up for Keane because all they have left are those memories
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I’ve never met sir Alex Ferguson
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Jesus, Cluxton is some fucking odd ball all the same.
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Why do you call him by his knighthood title?
My support of Liverpool is limited to the extent that I’m not from Liverpool and cannot comment at all on Lancashire rivalries.
In fact Manchester has much more going for it than Liverpool in terms of music etc.
I have a mate from Manchester who supports United. His Mam had a pub in a right rough part - apparently where it is situated has a United piece and City piece geographically. Basically a line down the pub.
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I met Zara Phillips and Chris kamara. I’d say they were two of the most famous people I’ve held a conversation with.
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It’s very strange behaviour.
Night in November: Remembering most sectarian-stained international ever at Windsor Park as ROI faced Northern Ireland
In an edited extract from his book ‘Malcolm Brodie and Me’, John Laverty recalls the notorious Northern Ireland v Republic of Ireland World Cup qualifier, played on November 17, 1993 amid the backdrop of paramilitary mayhem and murder
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John Laverty
November 17 2023 6:50 PM
In early November, 1993, it was confirmed that, despite the almost unbearable tension in the aftermath of the Shankill and Greysteel massacres, the World Cup Group 3 qualifier between the Republic of Ireland and the North would take place in Belfast and not Old Trafford, the former’s preferred destination.
Jack Charlton’s team’s reluctance to come north had ramped up an already highly-charged atmosphere.
So too had Northern Ireland manager Billy Bingham, who’d ditched traditional diplomacy in favour of anomalous, goading invective — for instance, labelling the Republic’s non-Irish-born players as “mercenaries” and “carpetbaggers”.
I could hardly believe my ears when a newly bombastic Bingy ranted: “They couldn’t find a way of making it with England or Scotland. I take a totally cynical view of the whole business, and I’m happy to state it is our intention to stuff the Republic.”
Holy God! Was this the same Bingy who’d gone through 117 previous internationals in charge of Northern Ireland — in two spells over 17 years — without uttering a contentious word?
It was as if he’d thought “f**k it, this is my last match before retirement and I’ll say whatever the hell I want.”
It probably influenced Bingy’s thinking that he’d nothing to play for but pride, with Northern Ireland already out of it in terms of qualifying for the finals in the United States.
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The Dublin press corps was suitably aghast by the wee man’s behaviour.
“It’s as if he’s regressed to being that wee Billy Boy from east Belfast once more,” said Irish Press veteran Charlie Stuart.
He added: “In the interests of preserving a precarious peace, I’ll not remind Mr Bingham of where Kevin Wilson, Danny Wilson and his beloved Kingsley Black were born…”
A few days before the November 17 match, the Belfast Telegraph and other newspapers published one of the most chilling pictures of the Troubles — Greysteel killer Torrens Knight snarling back at a jeering crowd as he was led, handcuffed, into Limavady courthouse to face eight murder charges.
Politicians from all sides called for calm, and for Northern Ireland supporters to behave responsibly at Windsor Park, where the attendance had been restricted to 10,500; home fans only.
Wise words… so why was Bingy, of all people, inciting the crowd with animated gestures during the warm-up — something he’d repeat at half time?
This was a side of the man I hadn’t seen before — and didn’t particularly care for.
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I’m all for sports tribalism, but this was a seething cauldron of naked sectarian hatred, by far the most depressing I’d ever witnessed.
The prelude to this tinderbox encounter required a calming influence, not the gross irresponsibility being displayed by someone like Bingy who should have known better.
Many thought his uncharacteristic behaviour was a legacy of the Lansdowne Road tanking eight months earlier (the day our boys wore that ghastly blue ‘butcher’s apron’ strip) when jubilant Republic fans chanted “there’s only one team in Ireland”.
Whatever. Republic of Ireland manager Jack Charlton was flapping like a demented ostrich by the time he arrived in Belfast.
His ‘mercenaries’ — shorn of injured Steve Staunton, Ronnie Whelan, John Sheridan, Kevin Sheedy and Kevin Moran — needed a win to ensure qualification; a draw would only be enough if their other Group 3 rivals, Spain and Denmark, failed to share the spoils in Seville.
Charlton had wanted the match to be played at noon, but football’s world governing body Fifa insisted that both qualifiers had to kick off simultaneously at 8pm.
Not only that, but it was decreed the Republic squad would have to fly to Belfast — even though their training camp was the Nuremore Hotel, just across the border in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan.
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That meant ‘going south’; would such symbolism extend to their World Cup ambitions?
The Republic’s team bus — with its interior lights switched off and apprehensive players cowering on aisle seats rather than up against the windows — arrived at Windsor from the Dunadry Hotel in Co Antrim to jeering natives who trained imaginary rifles at them and made throat slash gestures; welcome to Belfast.
Charlton strode onto the Windsor pitch for only the second time since October 1966 — when he and his England team-mates, the newly-crowned world champions, played their first match on ‘home’ soil since defeating West Germany at Wembley.
Predictably, Charlton got dogs’ abuse as he walked down the Windsor touchline this time.
On arrival at the dugout, cigarette already in mouth, he searched in vain for a lighter.
In desperation, he turned to the fans behind the fence and, seconds after baying for his blood, they were falling over themselves to be the first man to light a grateful Big Jack’s Benson & Hedges.
Save for the two unforgettable goals, it was a tension-riddled stinker of a game, the soundtrack of which was a cacophony of hatred and bile cascading down from the stands.
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The almost incessant wall of vitriolic noise reminded me of an Old Firm derby, only this time the hostility was unilateral.
The musical accompaniment began with a more raucous than usual God Save The Queen; the playing of Amhrán na bhFiann had been deemed as ill-advised.
“Why aren’t you blow-in fenian f*****s joining in?” was a rhetorical roar from one wild-eyed local diehard at, presumably, the seven starters in the ‘Plastic Paddy’ team who’d been born and raised on Her Majesty’s mainland manor.
Amid the inevitable party songs was a topical new entry to the ignominious playlist: chants of “trick or treat” — a chilling, revolting reference to what one of the murderous UFF gunmen is reported to have shouted prior to spraying Greysteel’s Rising Sun bar with bullets.
Republic defender Alan Kernaghan — the Yorkshire-born, Bangor-raised Protestant, former Northern Ireland schoolboy international (and future Glens manager) — heard his mother being described as “the Pope’s whore.”
His father and brother, sitting ashen-faced and incognito in the stands, heard it too.
Kernaghan, whose paternal grandparents hailed from these shores, wasn’t eligible for ‘the north’ at senior level because, unlike their counterparts in Dublin, the IFA hadn’t yet resorted to the controversial ‘granny rule’.
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“Ah, the irony,” I remarked to Malky as the “Pope’s whore” and “turncoat” chants gained traction in the old wooden South Stand.
But irony and nuance weren’t hard to find on that toxic night.
The stadium became an amphitheatre for vile monkey chants directed at Paul McGrath (best friend of Windsor terrace hero Norman Whiteside) and Terry Phelan.
The stunning volley that put Northern Ireland 1-0 up on 71 minutes was scored by a Newtownabbey Catholic whose family fled Rathcoole in the early 70s… one of the first to congratulate Jimmy Quinn on his wonder goal was his close pal, Northern Ireland skipper Alan McDonald, who was raised a few hundred yards away.
And assistant manager Jimmy Nicholl (Canadian-born but another alumnus of the sprawling loyalist estate), completed a Rathcoole ‘hat-trick’ by brandishing two fingers and screaming {what was reported as} “up yours” at his Republic counterpart Maurice Setters.
Never, in my experience, had the ‘Billy Boys’ been delivered with such gusto than in the moments following Quinn’s marvellous 72nd minute effort, two and a half hours short of his 34th birthday.
A decade before Sir Alex Ferguson had coined that immortal phrase, it was ‘squeaky bum time’ for Big Jack and Co.
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Another good pal of Quinn’s was Alan McLoughlin (ex-Swindon team-mate of the Northern Ireland and Reading striker), who hadn’t featured in any of the previous qualifiers, hadn’t scored at international level – and had failed to rate a single mention in the copious column inches that preceded this nauseating hate-fest.
The southern hacks in the heaving press-box looked baffled when little known Portsmouth midfielder McLoughlin — a Mancunian whose previous claim to fame was that he’d gone to school with Oasis star Noel Gallagher — came on as sub just before his old Swindon team-mate Quinn, latching on to Kevin Wilson’s clever knock-back, managed to lift the ball over Packie Bonner from 20 yards out.
Shortly afterwards I remember screaming — like thousands of other Norn Iron fans — “that’s NEVER a free kick” after Northern Ireland’s Nigel Worthington was adjudged to have shoulder-charged Eddie McGoldrick near the apex of the Spion Kop and North Stand.
Denis Irwin floated the hotly disputed free kick over, McLoughlin latched onto Gerry Taggart’s weak clearance header and the rest is history (although Charlton actually missed it; he was too busy tearing into substitute Tony Cascarino for leaving his match shirt in the changing room).
Lurgan man Taggart would later quip that they should have granted him the Freedom of Dublin after that ‘assist’ for McLoughlin, whose 77th minute guided missile whizzed past goalkeeper Tommy Wright and briefly plunged the stadium into an eerie silence.
Jack’s boys were on their way to the States. If the scores stayed the same, that is…
Those were the medieval days… before smartphones. Only those who’d brought transistor radios knew if ten-man Spain had held onto Fernando Hierro’s 64th minute goal.
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Ergo, the Republic players’ post-match jubilations on the Windsor pitch were premature.
While they indulged in gawky jigs and reels on the pitch, there was still time for Denmark to equalise in the Estadio Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan.
That would have meant adios muchachos for a suddenly ashen-faced Charlton, who’d been (wrongly) informed by McLoughlin that Spain had already won — and responded by angrily buttonholing Bingham and vengefully ‘reciprocating’ the earlier Nicholl/Setters encounter.
Charlton’s instant karma was being forced to watch the final throes of the Seville game on a monitor near the tunnel, surrounded by hacks, photographers and other equally anxious players.
Talk about skin-of-the-teeth… Jack’s boys finished level with Denmark on 18 points, and with an identical goal difference (+13), but squeezed through courtesy of ‘goals scored’ (19 to the Danes’ 15) during the 12-match campaign.
McLoughlin — who afterwards told me in the chaotic tunnel that he was dedicating his goal to all the people “back in Ireland” — had clearly made an indelible mark on the Republic’s sporting history.
Despite security men urging him to board the airport-bound bus soon after the poisonous encounter had ended, a chastened, emotional Charlton opted instead to gatecrash Bingham’s press conference in the bowels of the South Stand, just as the retiring legend was telling us, one last time, how well his team had played.
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There was an audible gasp as Jack walked up to the podium, holding a parcel.
Jack: “Can I say something, please?”
Bingy: “Who IS this man?”
Jack: “I said something to Billy after the match which I shouldn’t have said, and I regret it. I’ll regret it for the rest o’ me life. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I apologise.”
Bingy: “Forget it, let’s have a drink. By the way, is that a retirement present you have for me?”
I was glad Bingham hadn’t lost his final game and, from a professional point of view, delighted that the Republic were going to their second Mundial.
There was a sense of an ending that night, and not just with regard to the legendary Northern Ireland manager’s illustrious career.
No, as the Windsor floodlights dimmed, you couldn’t help feeling that a violent, horrific storm engulfing our troubled wee country had finally passed.
Just as there had been no further atrocities in the two weeks preceding this game, that would also be the case for the rest of November 1993.
Sadly, it wasn’t the end of the Troubles, merely the conclusion to one particularly horrific chapter.
Zaras a grand bit of stuff. Id like to ride her.
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Nice lady. It was 2016 I met her. Was very inquisitive about the 100 year celebrations of 1916 in Ireland.
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Didn’t she go out with Dickie Johnson at one stage?
Couldn’t be sure tbh.
Correct
Keane be like, 'They just paid me to take a few fotos"
Imagine thinking you could do that to someone in a charity game. McAteer doesn’t know of him so it can’t be overly personal sledging…he’ll run up against the wrong lad some day, and they won’t stop. Not to mind the job he is in. Kerry made him.
How the mediocre have fallen.
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I know Noel. Think he is from Kilmihill direction. Sound man