Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
I went from playing Leaving Cert in
ALAN KIRBY RECALLS MAGIC OF EURO TOURNAMENT IN IRELAND
THERE are times in life when you just have to be there; right place, right time, right wing.
For Alan Kirby, that was April 1994. He was 16 years old, unknown outside his Avondale estate in Waterford, but in the eyeline of one of the most famous League of Ireland managers of all time.
Turlough O’connor had won titles with Athlone and Dundalk, and was the obvious man to call when the FAI needed an emergency manager for the 1994 European Under 16 championships.
O’connor was a Westmeath man and fully aware of the inbuilt prejudices against players from Beyond The Pale. Tales of injustices passed down through the decades and now that he was an Ireland international manager, he wasn’t going to be guilty of adding his name to that unsavoury list.
“Players,” he said at the time, “will be picked on ability.”
It didn’t matter to O’connor if Kirby’s games were played on Johnville’s second pitch rather than their main one, where the managers sometimes had to clean the dogshit off the playing surface.
“It was all we knew,”kirby says.“we didn’t complain. We were happy to get football.”
Now he was about to get something different.
His country had called. Or rather they had written a letter, direct to the club secretary.
“Alan Kirby, Johnville FC, has been invited to train with the national Under-16 team on Sunday week.”
Standing
He remembers catching the early train out of Waterford Plunkett, making his way from Heuston Station to Liberty
Hall, standing on his own in the rain until a gangly kid from Galway arrived 10 minutes later with a kit bag in his hand.
“You a footballer,? the chap asked him.
“Yeah. Colin Hawkins is my name.”
A few minutes later a kid from Drogheda called Ian Harte joined them.
Then a mini-bus pulled up with lads from all across Dublin. Their immediate destination was the AUL complex for a training session. But they wanted the journey to end with a European Under 16 championship medal, for it was 30 years ago this month, when all these boys rst caught the nation’s eye.
“To get called into an Ireland squad was a big thing,”kirby recalls.
It is Friday, in Ballinalee, near Longford. Since Covid, he juggles his work load between the office in Dublin and his home in the Midlands. These days he is an accountant but for 17 years he didn’t wear a shirt and tie to work but a pair of football boots.
He wears his achievements lightly, rummaging through a cupboard to nd a shoebox lled with memories: a signed squad list from 1994, the Ireland shirt he wore, his accreditation cards from that tournament.
For a moment he is silent. At 46, he is still sprightly and upright, instantly familiar.
Yet these pieces of paper and cardboard have stirred a memory.
He is one of only 200 Irish players to have ever played in these championships and is remembering how it felt to carry that pressure, to represent Avondale, Johnville, Waterford, his mum, his dad.
Only 23 football matches were screened live on RTE that year; he played in two of those.
He, Ireland, didn’t win either. They lost the rst game to RCS - the last time Czechoslovakia played together as one nation, a year after they had peacefully split into two, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Three days later it was England. Brian Frawley scored. Tolka Park erupted. Then, two minutes from time, Stephen Clemence - son of Ray - equalised.
Dream
And by the time the week was out, Ireland was out of the tournament, a 3-0 defeat to Portugal killing off the dream.
As he re ects on this, there is frustration; the what-ifs, the narrow failure, the sliding door moments.
Yet then he stops and re ects. If he hadn’t played in that tournament, he wouldn’t have been spotted by Eddie Corcoran, the scout who recommended him to Aston Villa.
They brought him across for a trial: “Yeah, we want to sign you son.”
Kirby was ecstatic, his father less so.“i remember his reaction,”kirby says.“now that I’m a dad myself, I know exactly what he was thinking: ‘Finish the Leaving Cert, son,’ he advised.
“I did that. Then that August I moved over. Dad brought me across. I’ll never forget the moment his car pulled out of the car park to head back home.
“I was 16, in a strange city. I didn’t know whether to run after the car or stay.”
He stayed. Saw out the three years. Got a move to Waterford United. Four years later, he played in a FAI Cup semi
nal against Longford Town. Waterford should have won the
rst game but Longford were dogged, inspired by a young manager called Stephen Kenny.
It went to a replay. A guy called Stephen Kelly scored the winner. Two weeks ago, Stephen’s son, also Stephen, played for Kelly’s Kenagh against Kirby’s Killoe in an Under 13 Longford Cup nal.
“The football world may seem huge but in reality it is tiny.
“If it wasn’t for the 1994 Europeans, I’d never have played for Villa.”
A domino effect began, one good thing leading to another. Unknown to him, Brian Kerr was at all three of Ireland’s games, and when Kerr got catapulted into the youth manager’s job two-and-a-half years later, he had to throw together a squad for the World Under 20 championships in Malaysia.
He remembered Kirby from the 1994 Euros, and also eight others, including Hawkins. Ireland ended up with a bronze medal from that 1997 tournament, Kirby with that contract from Waterford. Kenny too had been at those three games in Tolka Park. That was when he was rst impressed by Kirby.
Fate
Had he not been there, had he, Corcoran and Kerr not been impressed, fate would have been different. Kirby wouldn’t have ended up signing for either Villa or Longford, wouldn’t have met his wife, Caitriona, wouldn’t have been dad to his two girls, Leah and Lauren.
“I still think about it,” he says of 1994, when Ireland were knocked out by Portugal and England in the group stages.
“We’d lost 1-0 to Czechoslovakia but could have beaten them. We were winning against