Viva!: Ireland Goes to Italy, 1990 by Eoghan Corry

Written before Ireland reached the world cup quarter-finals in 1990, VIVA tells the story of the first sixty years of world cup football for Irish soccer. It tells how the game’s arrival from Scotland crucially affected the demographics of the sport and the way it developed over the next century, how soccer when the country was partitioned, not over politics, but over the venue for a cup replay, how two Irish teams were allowed to field largely the same players for forty years as one looked to FIFA and the other to Britain for international outlets, how Ireland missed qualification for one world cup finals by 0.134 of a goal and turned down an invitation to play in another world cup because the players were on holidays, and how soccer eventually shook itself free of minority sport status after both national teams enjoyed successes in the 1980s.