by Tim Wigmore
A year later, Niall O’Brien made his debut in a four-wicket defeat to the might of Berkshire in the first round of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy. He reflected that it was ‘very much an amateur organisation’ at the time. ‘I was given a cap and a jumper and that was about that. I was probably given my expenses in a brown envelope and away you go. There wasn’t too much to it.’ Some players even ‘wore different coloured jerseys and different coloured hats’.
Ireland only ran the minor county that close because extras top-scored with 27. No one would have imagined that, three years later, Ireland would qualify for the World Cup.
The 2005 ICC Trophy, which determined qualification for the 2007 World Cup, was hosted by Ireland. It came at a time of renewed vibrancy in Irish cricket. In 2003, Ireland had appointed its first chief executive – the Irish Cricket Union’s first full-time professional administrator. In the same year, the side defeated Zimbabwe by ten wickets – Ireland’s first victory against a Test nation since the West Indies win in 1969.
In 2004 they overhauled a target of 293 to beat the West Indies, though the fact that Brian Lara batted at number eight says much for the seriousness with which the visitors approached the fixture: it was not a proper international game of cricket, after all.
Perhaps more noteworthy was the victory over Surrey in that year’s Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy: Ireland chased 262 against a side containing six Test bowlers to record their second victory against a county. Trent Johnston took 1-35 on his Ireland debut.
By now, Ireland had a South African coach. When Birrell was interviewed for the job in 2002 he had never been to Ireland before. He took a pay cut from his previous job as head coach at Eastern Province in South Africa – ‘a leap of faith’ as he put it.
On his first day, Birrell realised that he had no office. He was handed the keys to a car, and told that the boot doubled as the storeroom for Ireland’s kit. ‘It was very sobering and somewhat disappointing that there was nothing. I was the only full-time employed person. I literally just didn’t have a clue of where to start or how.’
His first game was against Nottinghamshire. Ireland lost by six wickets but ‘the guys were pretty happy and laughed a lot. They were quite pleased that they weren’t getting annihilated.’
Birrell had not come to Ireland to tolerate such a mindset. ‘He had big, big brains and a vision for Irish cricket and he sold it to the players and we all bought into it,’ McCallan reflected. ‘He identified talented young cricketers and worked with them.’
In 2005, Joyce had Ireland back for the ICC Trophy, the tournament that would determine which associates qualified for the 2007 World Cup. As Ireland’s solitary player of proven county class, charged with underpinning their batting efforts from number four, he faced an onerous burden. And the tournament was played against a particularly curious personal backdrop for Joyce. On its first day, 1 July, Joyce officially qualified as an England player.
If the tournament would prove to be his last contribution for Ireland – and no one thought otherwise – Joyce ensured he left his country with the ultimate parting gift.
Had he been focused exclusively on impressing the England selectors, Joyce would probably have been better served playing for Middlesex. But Ireland had history to make: qualification for their first World Cup. They would not have succeeded without Joyce’s 399 runs at 99.75.
His innings against the UAE is still discussed with reverence in Ireland; Joyce hit 115 not out to lift Ireland to their target of 231 from the wreckage of 23/4. It may be one of the great forgotten innings; and without it, Irish cricket might have remained stuck in stasis.
Birrell is in no doubt of Joyce’s contribution to Irish cricket. ‘We didn’t have another experienced player like him. He forged a way for the others. There is always one trailblazer that shows that it can be done – that an Irish player can be a successful county player – and he gave the others a role model to follow.’
A year later, Joyce made his ODI debut – for England at Stormont. ‘If I could have chosen, I wouldn’t have made my debut against Ireland,’ he later admitted, saying he was used to ‘the green and blue of Ireland’.
While Joyce opened for England, making just ten and having the bizarre distinction of being Ireland’s first ODI wicket, his younger brother Dominick opened for Ireland. When Ed met his old team-mates again in the World Cup his father reportedly wanted England to lose.
When Ireland went to the 2007 World Cup they fundamentally remained an amateur side. Only Niall O’Brien and a 20-year-old Eoin Morgan were full-time professionals. For the remainder of the side, cricket co-existed alongside their more ordinary existences.
Not everyone wished Ireland well. After they had qualified for the World Cup, Matthew Engel used the Editor’s Notes in Wisden in 2006 to rail against what he termed ‘The expansion menace’. Engel lamented that ODIs such as Ireland against England would ‘add another layer of distortion to cricket’s poor old statistics. Far more often than not, it will also create yet more bad cricket, leaving less time for the great contests which the public want to watch.’
He mocked Ireland’s claims to have a separate international team, ‘It is just a historical quirk that the England cricket team is not called Britain or the British Isles. Every Scotsman and Irishman who gets good at cricket wants to play for England, and always has done. Of course they do.’
The editor of Wisden was also adamant that Ireland would cause no shocks in the World Cup. ‘We have enough form lines to go on to know how good these teams are: stronger than a Minor County; worse than the weakest first-class county,’ he wrote. ‘The idea that they can provide proper opposition for any genuine Test team is ludicrous. But the World Cup will be substantially ruined to perpetuate this myth.’
Ironically, had Ireland won the ICC Trophy they would have been hard-pressed to prove Engel wrong: Scotland’s reward for beating Ireland in the final was to be drawn with Australia and South Africa (as well as the Netherlands). Ireland were pitted against three Test nations, but Zimbabwe were one in such turmoil that they had recently voluntarily withdrawn their status.
Just before the World Cup, Ireland fared poorly in a tournament in Kenya – losing to the hosts, Canada, Scotland and the Netherlands and beating only Bermuda. But they had given South Africa a scare in a pre-tournament warm-up game, as they benefited from a glimpse of life as professional cricketers.
Kyle McCallan earned 226 caps between 1996 and 2009, and was until recently Ireland’s most capped player. He fitted it all in alongside his teaching commitments. ‘You’re always training when you’re not at your freshest,’ he reflected. ‘You’re not hitting as many balls as professional cricketers are. You’re not thinking as much as other professional cricketers are, because really I’m accountable to students for A Level results and GCSEs. That’s what pays my mortgage so I had to make sure I did the right thing for them.’
McCallan was able to take a sabbatical before the World Cup; he and the rest of the side got to glimpse life as professionals. ‘I pretty much had a professional team for six months,’ Birrell reflected. ‘There was a hidden force and a belief that we were better prepared than anyone thought we were. There was a belief that we could create an upset.’
Ireland’s first World Cup was not completely devoid of expectations. To the amazement of ignorant commentators who had assumed that the Ireland cricketing community was comprised exclusively of expats, several thousand Irish made the trip to the Caribbean. And Zimbabwe offered easily Ireland’s most realistic prospect of a victory, with games against Pakistan and the West Indies to come.
The Ireland players seemed badly afflicted by nerves. Porterfield edged behind before the side had even scored their first run. His team-mates played a series of sloppy strokes, with only Jeremy Bray – like Johnston, born in Sydney before settling in Ireland – passing 28. Had DRS been in use Bray would have been out for 18; instead, his 115 not out lifted Ireland to 221/9.
It was the
sort of score that could be defended, but would require outstanding fielding. Instead Ireland missed three simple catches and a run-out and fielded shoddily.
Johnston was getting increasingly agitated. He had taken a particularly circuitous route to the Caribbean. He had been playing club cricket in Ireland since 1995 and, when he failed to make the grade as a cricketer for New South Wales and started dating an Irish woman who would become his wife, decided to move there for good.
The cricket journalist Jarrod Kimber brilliantly described Johnston’s actions as he saw Ireland throw away the game against Zimbabwe, ‘He was not trying to gee them up, he was literally trying to scream them into action. His eyes were wild.’
But Johnston’s histrionics weren’t working. Zimbabwe reached 203/5, needing 19 to win from 38 balls with five wickets in hand. Rather condescending ‘Plucky Irish’ headlines were being perfected.
If a coin toss sparked Ireland’s win over Pakistan, then McCallan’s fingertips sparked their tie with Zimbabwe. He diverted a straight drive back on to the stumps at the non-striker’s end to run out Brendan Taylor. Ordinarily it would not have mattered, but Zimbabwe were a side begging for an invitation to self-destruct. Now they had it.
Panic in a cricket team is infectious. When it takes hold it can acquire a life of its own. And so it did with this Zimbabwean side. Johnston and Andre Botha bowled immaculately, but both had bowled out with Zimbabwe needing nine runs from their last 12 balls and still having three wickets in hand.
Johnston entrusted the ball to Kevin O’Brien, whose only previous over had gone for eight runs. He bowled a rank full toss first ball. It was slapped to cover. A panic-stricken run-out followed from O’Brien’s final delivery: two wickets and a maiden from the 49th over had transformed the game.
Zimbabwe needed nine runs from the final over with only one wicket in hand. Johnston had two problems. The first was that Stuart Matsikenyeri, who had made a high-class half-century, was unbeaten and on strike. The second was that his most reliable bowlers had bowled out. Matsikenyeri was cruising against the rest of Ireland’s seamers and had hit McCallan for five fours and a six already.
So Andrew White, an off-spinner who had only bowled two previous overs in the innings, was entrusted with the last over. Three runs were needed from the final two deliveries when Matsikenyeri attempted to seal the win. His ungainly hoick teased and tantalised Johnston, who was by now fielding at third man. He ran with gusto to the ball and it looked like his outstretched left hand had secured a two-run win for Ireland. The ball spilled out. It would have been an extraordinary catch, yet Johnston looked ashamed of himself for missing it. And for a moment this uber-bloke looked as if he wanted to cry.
From the final ball, Matsikenyeri needed a single for victory. White held his nerve and fired in a quicker delivery. Matsikenyeri missed the ball but Niall O’Brien did not. Matsikenyeri was stumped and Ireland had tied their first World Cup game. ‘We should have lost that game but came through with the spirit and the fight and the tenacity and the resilience that was a cornerstone of that team,’ Birrell recalled. ‘That gave us the belief that we could cause another upset.’
In the bedlam that followed, few appreciated the true significance of the result. With Pakistan having lost their first game to the West Indies, Ireland’s match with them 36 hours later effectively became a knockout to determine progression to the Super 8s.
The stage was thus set for Niall O’Brien – and for Johnston to finish Pakistan off. ‘I think the biggest individual characteristic of a captain has to be someone who leads by example, who is prepared to do and others follow and Trent Johnston is a leader in the true sense of the word,’ McCallan reflected. ‘It was fitting that he hit the six that beat Pakistan.’
That moment was vindication for Birrell. In 2005 he had taken the controversial decision to sack Jason Mollins. While Mollins was a fine opening batsman, Birrell did not want Ireland’s captain to be a man with a full-time job in the City of London who flew home to play club cricket every weekend. His replacement was Johnston. ‘He was a great inspiration to the whole team the way he prepared, his fitness and his fight on the field,’ Birrell remembered. ‘He had that typical Aussie fight.’
After a roundabout journey, Johnston had made good on his talent. The same was becoming true of Irish cricket as a whole. They thrashed Bangladesh in the Super 8s to show their success was no St Patrick’s Day freak. Ireland took some hard beatings too: they made 77 against Sri Lanka, which was 53 more than Birrell had envisaged in a nightmare he had before the match.
Adopted Irishmen like Johnston, Botha and Bray were all central to Ireland’s development, performing crucial roles in the Caribbean. And those who immigrated during the days of the Celtic Tiger also helped to lift up the standard of domestic cricket in Ireland, to the benefit of future generations. ‘They brought high standards with them,’ Torrens said. ‘They were the leading lights in the clubs and that was a massive help to cricket in the South. There’s no doubt now that, because of that, cricket in the Dublin area is much stronger than it used to be.’
Yet the risk was that their presence would lead people to devalue Ireland’s achievements: it did not help the perception of Irish cricket that their inspirational skipper spoke with such a pronounced Aussie twang. The 2008 Wisden’s review of the World Cup, for instance, referred sneeringly to Ireland’s ‘reliance on several players born or raised in more traditional cricketing lands’, seemingly ignoring the presence of Kevin Pietersen and Ed Joyce in the England side. Gary Ballance, Chris Jordan, Craig Kieswetter and Jonathan Trott – not to mention Eoin Morgan and Boyd Rankin – were yet to come.
The underlying amateurism of Cricket Ireland was not conducive to developing a structure to nurture and develop young Irish talent. And the side’s sterling deeds in the World Cup barely yielded financial rewards, either. Research by the journalist Richard Gillis has found that Ireland received just $56,000 in prize money for their performance in the Caribbean. Zimbabwe, who tied with Ireland and lost their other two matches and exited in the group stages, received an $11m share of the tournament’s media rights. As it had always been, cricket was a private members’ club with no time for those outside it.
Players’ expectations had risen after the World Cup but Ireland’s administration still lagged behind. Two months after returning from the Caribbean, Jeremy Bray complained, ‘The reality is that it costs me money to play for Ireland’ and branded Irish cricket ‘a joke’.
In July 2007 the Ireland team even boycotted the press in protest at a lack of payment and cricket equipment from the board. It made for an unedifying backdrop to the start of Warren Deutrom’s reign as chief executive of Cricket Ireland.
When he began his job in December 2006, the only person Deutrom had for company in a rudimentary office was a part-time PA who worked four mornings a week. Cricket Ireland had no server so Deutrom had to use his personal e-mail account. Men less ambitious than Deutrom might have despaired at it all.
After the success in the World Cup, he began to develop a structure that would allow leading cricketers in Ireland to turn professional. It helped that he had worked for the ICC and was well versed in the politicking of cricket administration. He convinced South Africa and India to play an ODI series in Ireland after the World Cup.
This terrified the England Cricket Board, who did not want Ireland setting itself up as a rival for marquee televised fixtures, fearing that this would undermine the value of its broadcasting deal with Sky. In return for not scheduling ODIs at the same time as England fixtures, Ireland signed a contract to receive a six-figure sum from the ECB every year – and the guarantee of an ODI every two years.
Deutrom was also successful in lobbying the ICC for extra funding, and his palpable vision for Irish cricket, and desire for Ireland to be seen as the ‘19th county’ no longer, also attracted sponsorship. The upshot was the introduction of the first set of professional contracts in 2009, though these were initially only awarde
d to six players.
No wonder that Birrell’s ‘only regret’ of his time as Ireland coach was that he did not get to work with Deutrom for longer, ‘He was the one guy who could move them all into a professional era. I needed him at the time and I didn’t have him.’
Still, Deutrom could not help being frustrated by the ICC’s lack of support in helping Ireland to reach the next level. Ireland won three consecutive Intercontinental Cups from 2004 to 2008 but there was no mention of how this first-class success could lead to Test cricket.
Deutrom’s frustrations boiled over before the World Twenty20 competition in 2009. ‘What is the point of associate cricket?’ he asked. ‘We are bumping up against a glass ceiling. What does the ICC want us to do? How do we get from the High Performance Programme to the higher echelons of the world game? There is no road map for us. The issue brings to question the whole mission statement of the ICC High Performance Programme: what is it preparing teams for?’
He predicted, ‘Three or four years from now there will be no new entrants in to the cosy club of full Test members.’ Of course, Deutrom was right. And his complaint about Ireland’s exclusion from the Future Tours Programme – ‘currently, we don’t know what next year’s fixtures are going to be’ – applies equally today.
Deutrom was speaking after Ireland had again suffered from the loss of their best player to England just before a world event. Eoin Morgan, whose fusion of clinical accumulation and chutzpah were perfectly suited to limited-overs cricket, was called up by England just before the World Twenty20 in 2009. He told Ireland’s coach Phil Simmons of his selection in the middle of the World Cup qualifiers in April 2009, prompting a blazing row, though he remains good friends with many Ireland players. ‘I love the fact that Eoin Morgan has become a superstar,’ John Mooney said. ‘He potentially wouldn’t have done that if he’d stayed with Ireland.’