Gavin Cooney

“WHAT WE ARE fighting for here is equality”, said Emma Byrne at Liberty Hall 1,976 days ago. “We are fighting for the future of women’s football.”

A fragment of a future secured: Katie McCabe and Denise O’Sullivan, arms locked around each other, eyes glistening and smiles beaming.

For once, a couple of world-class Irish female footballers have not been let down by the environment around them.  

Denise O'Sullivan and Katie McCabe. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO

Instead they’ve been elevated by it, their class beguiling a side built on all the grimy stuff: grit, determination, and the sheer bloody-mindedness that has its lineage to the team’s public stand against the feckless blazers of their own Association. The players had to threaten to go on strike in 2017 to earn the basics of match fees and proper services, but where once they changed out of other people’s tracksuits, now they can legitimately build a legacy that can change other kids’ lives. 

A World Cup play-off has been secured with a 1-0 win against Finland and a performance that wasn’t good but great all the same: they started nervously, edgily holding on to what they had before realising that, yes, this game was just another thing to grab, another thing they deserved.

Calling this the biggest game in the team’s history was hyperbole – they’ve been in a Euros play-off once before – but it was big in its own right and Ireland started as if they’d freighted it too heavily. 

Vera Pauw said ahead of the game that Ireland wouldn’t be nervous and hadn’t see any anxiety among her players in camp, but they were clammy and keyed up on the pitch. When Courtney Brosnan flapped at an early corner, Katie McCabe’s goal-line clearance ricocheted off Megan Connolly before she thwacked it clear again, and later Diane Caldwell sliced a clearance over her shoulder and into her own box.

Ireland dropped off: they were too passive, too deep. McCabe, supposedly liberated to play further forward, spent too much of the first-half at left-back.

One of the reasons Pauw expected a nerveless performance was the fact that the players are so drilled in her system and on their individual jobs, but the reality of this game was a different picture to the one they might have visualised. 

They had been told the game sold out in 30 minutes but walked out to clusters of empty seats scattered around the ground like Tetris squares. Some of them were filled by late arrivals and others were left empty altogether, though the FAI did subsequently announce a record attendance of just shy of 7,000. 

Other uneasy facts were Finland’s match-sharpness – eight of their starting team are in the middle of their seasons, whereas eight of Ireland’s are in pre-season – and their unpredictability, under new management having lost all of their group games at the Euros.

But better to be there losing than not be there at all.

Ireland missed out on the play-off that earned Northern Ireland Euros qualification in absurd disappointment against Ukraine, missing a penalty and losing 1-0 to a slapstick own goal.  Eight of tonight’s starting Irish team played on that fraught night, and you’d forgive them for carrying some of the scars with them tonight. 

But this was a game to attack, not to grimly cling onto. But that’s what Ireland initially did, encapsulated by the fact Ruesha Littlejohn was injured at the kick-off yet played-on on to the 40-minute mark. She dropped deep and thrice to the floor, but should have been saved from her own tenacity long before she was. 

Lily Agg replaced her and made an instant impact, pushing the tempo and her team-mates higher. Ireland carried their renewed vigor into the second half. McCabe was finally higher on the left wing, and striker Heather Payne was pressing centre-halves rather than midfielders. Ten minutes into the second-half, McCabe clattered recklessly into a tackle from which she came off the worst, but only the Finnish defender was told to leave the pitch having received treatment.

Agg stood in the vacated space from the resulting free-kick, and saw Megan Connolly’s free-kick sail her way. She had enough time to glance ahead of her and see the Finland goalkeeper charge madly at her. No shirking it: she braced for impact and headed Ireland in front. 

Lily Agg celebrates her crucial goal. Tom Maher / INPHO Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO

From there Ireland looked an occasional threat on the counter but largely dropped off again, though by this point they were troubled more by the thought of losing their lead than the realistic prospect of it, with Finland hitting Hail Marys into the arms of Courtney Brosnan, whose flourishing conviction has been vital to Ireland’s campaign.

But then everything has been vital to Ireland’s campaign.

Pauw has forged a fierce resolve and tactical architecture from the harsh smithy of defeat in Ukraine.

She found and then stuck with a back-three system for all the qualifying games bar the turkey-shoots against Georgia, and decided it would be better to learn than win by picking a series of elite-end friendly opponents. Ireland lost seven-straight games before beating Australia in the last game before the campaign started, results sacrificed for those that were to come. 

Quiet tales of heroism and sacrifice abound. Chloe Mustaki recovered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma and then a ruptured ACL to play away at left wing-back away to Sweden, which released McCabe to play further forward and score the goal that earned Ireland a famous draw. 

Ireland now sail for a byzantine play-off system, rightly thinking less of what’s passing than what is yet to come. But what has passed has an important lesson. 

Those who fight for the future write the history too.