In a league of his own...
QUESTION Who is the oldest player from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland to have played in soccer’s World Cup?
THE famed Northern Ireland goalkeeper, Pat Jennings, was, by the time he played in his last World Cup match, in 1986, the oldest Irish player, at 41, ever to have taken part in the tournament, up until then.
Jennings was born in Newry in 1945 and he assumed that he would pursue a career in forestry; instead, he made his mark in soccer.
He began by playing at the age of 11 with Shamrock Rovers under-18 side, but until he was 16, he was much more interested in Gaelic football.
Then when he was 17, in 1963, he signed for Watford, beginning his journey to the pinnacle of crosschannel soccer. He stayed at Watford for one season before moving on to Tottenham Hotspur. By this time, his immense skills as a goalkeeper were clearly evident. Jennings went on to spend 13 years at Spurs, making a total of 591 appearances.
In 1997, the then boss at White Hart Lane, Keith Burkinshaw, decided that Jennings’ best playing days were behind him, allowing him to join north London rivals, Arsenal. There, over the next eight years, Jennings proved his former boss wrong and helped Arsenal win a 3–2 victory over Manchester United in the 1979 Cup Final.
Apart from an outstanding crosschannel career, Pat Jennings made a total of 119 appearances for Northern Ireland. During the 1982 World Cup final in Spain, Northern Ireland beat the hosts, Spain, 1-0 and it was thanks to Gerry Armstrong’s winner and Jennings’s skills as goalkeeper.
In 1985, Northern Ireland got the draw they needed against England, again thanks to Jennings, to ensure that they made the 1986 World Cup. Altogether, Pat Jennings took part in the qualifying stages of six World Cups between 1966 and 1986. By the time of his last World Cup appearance, in 1986, he was 41, the oldest player from either part of Ireland to have played in the World Cup. This game was Northern Ireland’s final group game in that year’s World Cup, but they were beaten by Brazil, 3–0.
By the time he played his last World Cup, he had well and truly cemented his reputation as one of the best goalkeepers of all time. After making more than 1,000 appearances in first-class matches for the English clubs he played for, Jennings retired. After his retirement, he returned to Spurs and started working for the club as a goalkeeping coach in 1993. A decade later, Jennings was inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame.
He’s still associated with Spurs and hosts corporate hospitality fans in the Pat Jennings Lounge at White Hart Lane, while he remains the goalkeeping consultant for the club. He is still as much revered by Arsenal fans as those at Spurs. His son, Pat Jennings junior, who was born in 1979, continues the family footballing tradition, as a goalkeeper and a coach for St. Patrick’s Athletic in Dublin.
At the time of the 1986 World Cup, Pat Jennings was the oldest participant to have ever played in World Cup matches. But since then, a few older players have beaten that record, including Faryd Mondragón of Colombia, who played in the 2014 World Cup at the age of 43.
Essam El-Hadary, the Egyptian goalkeeper, has surpassed this record by playing in this year’s World Cup. He’s 45, which makes him the oldest player ever to have taken part in the tournament.
But Pat Jennings’s outstanding record as a goalkeeper, including for Northern Ireland, remains untarnished. D. Page, Dublin 7.
QUESTION During World Wars I and II, did dachshunds fall out of favour in Britain?
WILLIAM Llewellyn ‘Buster’ Lloyd-Jones (1914-1980) was a British veterinary practitioner. Buster cared for sick, injured and abandoned animals during World War II and founded Denes herbal medicine for animals.
Buster Lloyd-Jones wrote in his autobiography, The Animals Came In One By One, that ‘the men went off to war and the women to war work, the children were evacuated; with the family gone there was no place for the family pets. All over the country they were put to sleep in their thousands...As soon as the war started the dachshund began to feature in political cartoons as wicked, cowardly, treacherous, evil German sausage dogs, opposing the gallant British Bulldog.
‘In an instant the dachshund became unpopular. People threw things at them, chased them, kicked them. Dachshund owners were looked upon as dangerously unpatriotic. They came to me to be destroyed and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
‘I had 60 dachshunds and almost 100 others of all shapes, as well as dozens of cats and still they came. Indeed the accommodation problem became so acute that we soon realised that we had to move.’ Ms A. Murfitt, St Austell, Cornwall. THE Kaiser’s love of dachshunds was well-documented. Two particularly bad-tempered dachshunds belonging to the German Emperor, named Wadl and Hexl, almost caused an international incident, when they set upon the heir-presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s priceless golden pheasant on a state visit.
Author Graham Greene was a schoolboy in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire at the outbreak of World War I, and recorded in his 1971 autobiography, A Sort Of Life: ‘There were dramatic incidents even in Berkhamsted. A German master was denounced to my father as a spy because he had been seen under the railway bridge without a hat, a dachshund was stoned in the High Street.’
The American Kennel Club reported the breed had gone from being the sixth most popular breed in the US to the 28th by 1930.
Attempts were made to re-brand the breed, with the Kennel Club officially renaming it the ‘badger dog’ (a literal translation from the German). German shepherd dogs received a similar treatment, and are still known by some as Alsatians today – a label given in a bid to emphasise the breed’s original popularity in Alsace in France, rather than its German roots. Eric Bruce, Dunstable, Beds.
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