Michael O'Flanagan, who has died aged 92, was the surviving member of a family partnership which captivated fans at a time when the amateur ethos in international sport had not yet been diminished by the pressures of professionalism.
He won just two international caps, but taken singly or collectively they represented significant achievements as big-time sport began to reestablish itself after the disruption of the second World War.
On September 30th, 1946, Michael joined his older brother Kevin in the Ireland (FAI) team which faced England in a game that signalled the end of the long cold war between football authorities in London and Dublin that followed Partition in 1921.
Then, two years later, he suspended his football career long enough to share in Ireland’s first rugby grand slam in what was a momentous year for Irish sport. In so doing he emulated the achievement of his brother, capped against Australia during the same season, in attaining international status in both disciplines, the first and so far the only set of brothers to represent their country in football and rugby.
Like so many of their contemporaries in Europe, the gifted O'Flanagan brothers overcame the deprivations of war to brighten the mundane lives of millions on both sides of the Irish sea. Kevin, a national sprint champion who had a realistic hope of selection for the aborted 1940 Olympic Games, moved to London in 1945 after graduating in medicine at University College Dublin.
Like his sibling, he managed to straddle the divides of football and rugby with consummate ease, combining spells as a valued member of the London Irish team in the 15-a-side game with a brief but colourful spell in the celebrated red and white of Arsenal. Known as the Flying Doc by the Highbury faithful, he was among the last amateurs to play for the club, scoring three goals in 13 games during the 1946-47 season before moving to Brentford.
Long-time teammates at Bohemians, the brothers were reunited briefly in football when a reversal of policy by the Football Association in London took England’s national team to Dublin for the first time since 1912.
Football had been partitioned in Ireland just weeks before the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, when London had sided with Belfast in an attempt to bring recalcitrant members from the south back on board.
Free lunch
That was until the FA, against all expectations, accepted in 1946 an invitation to send a team to Dublin. The taoiseach Éamon de Valera, a divisive figure in the eyes of many Britons because of Ireland’s neutrality in the recent war, was so moved by the gesture that he organised an official pre-match lunch reception for the England party, the first time any visiting team had been facilitated in such a manner.
The FA authorities can scarcely have been unaware that the lunch invitation was seen by many as naked opportunism by de Valera in the cause of bridge-building, but they nevertheless took on the daunting challenge of playing a second fixture within 48 hours after meeting and beating Northern Ireland 7-2 at Windsor Park in Belfast.
It later emerged that the main reason for the visit taking place was not politicking at the highest level but because top officials at the Lancaster Gate headquarters of the FA and, presumably, the players themselves, were attracted to the Irish capital chiefly by the quality of the food on offer.
Wartime rationing was still in operation in Britain at the time. Much later, the legendary England goalkeeper Frank Swift, who died in the Munich air disaster that claimed the lives of so many Manchester United players and the sports writers accompanying them in 1958, wrote in his autobiography of the “sheer joy of sitting down to a five-course meal in Dublin’s swanky Gresham Hotel”.
Sleepless night
The preparations of the O’Flanagan brothers for the game portrayed the wonderful informality of it all. Kevin, then working as an intern, was operating the late shift at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and, after a sleepless night and an early morning flight to Dublin, he did not meet up with his Ireland colleagues until they assembled for lunch, some five hours before the 5.30pm kick-off.
At that point, Michael was busy in the family’s licensed premises on Marlboro Street in central Dublin. only to receive a telephone call informing him that he had chosen to replace Dave Walsh in the team after the West Brom centre forward had failed a late fitness test.
On hearing this, he ushered astonished customers, pints in hand, to the door, closed the premises, cycled five miles to his home in Terenure to collect his football boots and then made an even longer cross-city journey to the match venue at Dalymount Park in Phibsboro.
Pitted against an English forward line made up of Tom Finney, Raich Carter, Tommy Lawton, Wilf Mannion and Bobby Langton, things did not look good for the restructured Irish and sadly, this marathon of commitment by the O’Flanagan brothers went unrewarded.
Confronted by the intimidating figure of Neil Franklin at the centre of England’s defence, Michael experienced little joy on the biggest day of his football career.
Finney goal
Kevin, who had scored twice on his international debut in a World Cup game in Norway nine years earlier, fared only marginally better in his duel with George Hardwick and after surviving perilously on a couple of occasions, England secured the win almost everybody expected when Finney, in only his second appearance in the national team, ended the stalemate seven minutes from the end.
In every other respect, however, the occasion had proved a marvellous success for the Irish. A capacity crowd of 42,000 gave the English team a reception they could scarcely have anticipated and the visitors were so impressed by it all that they invited their hosts to play in Liverpool three years later. Sadly, the bonhomie on that scale did not reap the benefits the FA might have expected and Johnny Carey’s players became the first foreign team to beat England on home terrain in, winning 2-0 at Goodison Park.
Kevin O’Flanagan’s disappointment in missing out on the aborted Olympics in 1940 was assuaged in part when he was assigned a role in Britain’s medical team for the 1948 Games in London. Later he was elevated to a place on the International Olympic Committee on foot of his reputation as one of the leading practitioners in sports medicine in Europe.
Nor was there any Olympian joy for his younger sibling, who was left out of Ireland’s football team for the 1948 Games in London after he confirmed his intention to concentrate on rugby with Lansdowne.
Back to Bohs
Inevitably, however, his love of Bohemians lured him back to Dalymount Park and his football career encompassed one more major achievement when, guesting for the now defunct
Belfast Celtic
club, he participated in a surprising 2-0 win over the full Scotland national team in the course of their American tour in 1950.
On the back of that performance, O’Flanagan was offered a lucrative contract to join Glasgow Celtic, but in keeping with the philosophy of a family who prized the Corinthian ideal above all else, the man who had earlier spurned the advances of several leading English clubs stayed true to his amateur status. Kevin O’Flanagan died in 2006. Michael O’Flanagan is survived by his widow, Carine, and brother Charlie.