The news came through on a Friday afternoon that Argentinean troops had landed on the Falklands. Nobody knew it then but over the 10 weeks or so that followed almost a thousand people would die in the conflict the invasion prompted but that afternoon, some 8,000 miles away in Dublin, the timing briefly seemed like a welcome break in one small quarter of Irish football.

John Givens had been involved with organising one of the early annual awards evenings run by the Professional Footballers’ Association of Ireland a couple of weeks earlier in the Gresham Hotel on Dublin O’Connell Street. Twink was supposed to provide the entertainment but the whole thing ran terribly late and eventually, it seems, she decided she had had enough and left.

Now, the Sunday tabloids were ringing looking for a reaction to the charge that the entire affair had been a drunken mess and Givens, while rejecting the suggestion, was telling the reporters who called that the easiest way to check was to talk to the football journalists from the same papers who had actually been there. A couple of hours later, one of them called him back: “No need to worry about that now,” he chuckled, “there’s a war on”.

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That was April 2nd and, technically speaking, war was still several weeks away but little that happened subsequently gave much cause for optimism that it would be avoided. None of which seemed to the outside world to have any consequences at all for Irish football until César Menotti, the manager of Argentina's team which was about to head to Spain to defend its World Cup title, casually announced in the press conference that followed his side's 1-1 draw with the Soviet Union on April 14th that he would have another chance to fine tune his preparations when Ireland came to town on May 18th.

Suddenly the FAI was big news with the declaration by then association president Dr Brendan Menton that "we are keeping our options open," sharing The Irish Times front page with Olivia O'Leary's account of the United States- led attempt at mediation and an ad from what billed itself as "The Biggest Little bank in Ireland (Anglo Irish) offering 19 per cent interest on deposits.

Already speculating

Inside, the football correspondent, Peter Byrne, was already speculating that if the game went ahead English clubs would react so badly that the best Eoin Hand could hope for was to bring a squad drawn from the League of Ireland.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that had happened. Louis Kilcoyne’s connections in South America, particularly with then Fifa president João Havelange had provided the opportunity for Merrion Square to send teams on a number of fairly lucrative tours of the continent over the previous years and not every squad was quite what had been anticipated by the hosts as Limerick’s Johnny Walsh, who would travel again in 1982, recalls of a previous trip: “We’d arrived and there were journalists everywhere looking for Brady but the only one we’d brought was Austin (who played for Bohemians).

The Argentineans were wise to the possibility on this occasion and had stressed the importance of recognisable names from what had been a highly respectable crack at qualifying from a very tough group (Ireland missed out on the second spot at the finals to France on goal difference with Belgium first and the Netherlands back in fourth place).

There was another problem too. The association was simultaneously negotiating for a League of Ireland team to go to New Zealand where it would play a series of games against the national team which was itself preparing for the World Cup. If locally-based players were to make up the squad going to South America while the New Zealand trip was still on, it would be the League’s second string.

The threat of that coming to pass, though, was very real. Hand made the first of two trips to England to sound out English club managers about the availability of their players. At Manchester United Ron Atkinson, when asked about Ashley Grimes, Kevin Moran and Frank Stapleton, said the FAI could "f**k off". "I told him I needed his official response," recalls Hand, "and he said: "F**k off, that's my official response."

Tottenham boss Keith Burkinshaw was more polite in relation to Chris Hughton and the as yet uncapped Tony Galvin but the message was the same. “The rest I did by phone but the word was out; “Ireland are playing Argentina!” In the English game we were a laughing stock. Everyone was asking: ‘What are your people thinking of?’

Each day's newspaper brought stories of new withdrawals. Liverpool made it clear Mark Lawrenson and Ronnie Whelan were out and Arsenal followed suit in relation to Dave O'Leary and John Devine. Hand made another attempt to persuade FAI general secretary Peadar "Big Dinner" O'Driscoll that the game had to be abandoned if the rest of the tour – games against Chile and Brazil – was to be salvaged but he was told to get on with it. The idea of including rugby international Tony Ward, an accomplished footballer who had just won the FAI Cup with Limerick United, as a way of placating the hosts was floated but things were clearly falling apart and behind the scenes the association, desperate not to incur a heavy loss on the trip, was looking around for alternatives to the Argentina game.

A week before it was due to take place, just four days before the squad was supposed to depart, they relented and pulled out. It was announced that a game against Peru had been secured instead. A week later the Peruvians denied any such arrangement had been made and Honduras were mentioned as possible opponents but they subsequently said that the FAI was looking for too much money and at the last minute a deal was struck to visit Trinidad and Tobago.

This, though, was still unknown to Hand as he frantically rang around again trying to see who might come now that the Argentina game had been abandoned. The problem now was that the cup final, which affected the Tottenham players and QPR’s Gary Waddock, had gone to a replay while United and Arsenal had included their Irish players in post-season tours. Others had simply made holiday arrangements and didn’t want to let family members down.

“Those two days were the intense ones,” says Hand. “People were saying right, at least Argentina gone but I was still looking, trying to figure out who we could get because it had gone very late for a lot of those lads. My finger was sore from dialling, it was before the push button phones and my finger was red-raw.

Several players were in and out of the squad more than once in the days leading up to its departure. In the end Fulham’s Seán O’Driscoll along with Everton’s Mike Walsh and a few others, got barely a day’s notice of their inclusion.

Been on standby

Two League of Ireland players, Dundalk striker Mick Fairclough and Limerick’s Walsh, were called in having been on standby. Fairclough had missed the trip to New Zealand due to a now passed work commitment, Walsh because he was “acting the maggot” during the celebrations of Limerick’s cup final defeat of Bohemians and gone badly over on his ankle.

There were some more established internationals on board with Séamus McDonagh, Mick Martin and Tony Grealish amongst those to travel plus some decent pros like John Anderson, Gerry Daly, Gerry Ryan, Brendan and Kevin O'Callaghan but the best news Hand and the association got was Brady, who had not played a friendly of any description in a couple of years, agreed to travel.

“Well, yeah, I was in a difficult situation,” recalls the former Arsenal star. “I was told by Juventus that I wasn’t going to be staying on and my wife found out that we were going to have a baby and it was like whoa, I don’t know whether I should go because I had my future very much up in the air.

“I could have turned around to Eoin and said I needed to sort out where I was going to be playing out the following season but I wanted to play at the Maracanã.”

On Wednesday, may 19th a mixture of players and association officials left Dublin for Heathrow where the rest of the squad joined up and boarded a flight for Madrid from where they would proceed to Santiago for the Chile game via . . . Buenos Aires.

“I remember saying to Peadar O’Driscoll: ‘Loads of our lads have English passports, how can they be going into Argentina with English passports when there’s a war going on? They could be arrested as spies or something like that.’ It was comical but I think it was the original route so they let it stand; it was probably tied into the costs of the travel,” says Hand.

Several British journalists had been arrested and some of the players were nervous on the way over. “We were held up in Buenos Aires for a long, long time,” says Hand. “We weren’t allowed out of the airport while they were checking that we were what we said we were; an international football team. It was awful.”

The game in Chile was narrowly lost to a first-minute goal but the team played well and everyone felt they might well have won. Santiago was bleak, though, with the oppression of the population by General Pinochet’s regime evident everywhere; in the soldiers on the street and the locals too frightened to answer questions about their daily lives.

They squad was happy to leave for Brazil which, though also a military dictatorship, was nicer and by then starting to move towards democracy. On the way, though, the players were told that the game would not be in the Maracanã after all but in a place, Uberlândia, more than 500 kilometres from the already remote Belo Horizonte, which none of them had ever heard of. In the meantime, they would stay in Rio at the Hotel California, just off the Copacabana.

The atmosphere there was generally good. Eamonn Deacy palled around with the League of Ireland lads but everyone got on with each other and the schedule was enjoyable; light training most days, a bit of tourism and the odd official engagement to fulfil.

In the lead up to the game, though, there was anger over the fact that the game in Trinidad had still not been confirmed and a dispute over money, with Hand having to threaten to resign at one stage over the non-payment of the $1,080 fee for the trip that each player had been promised. Only €180 had been paid and some of the players were running out of cash.

Another row followed when the players, fresh from a 7-0 hammering at the hands of a team (the greatest never to win a World Cup, it is often said) that included Falcão, Zico, and Sócrates, were told of the travel arrangements to Trinidad.

“They didn’t make it easy,” recalls Martin. “We were given the flight arrangements and it was something stupid like Rio to Bogota to Ecuador then from Ecuador to Miami and then from there to Trinidad and I was thinking that there must be a quicker way of doing this but that was obviously the cheap route which would have suited the FAI . . . without being disrespectful to them.” The Dubliner got hotel reception to check with a travel agent and Hand presented an alternative, more direct, route to the blazers which, reluctantly, they agreed to adopt.

Scale of beating

By then, though, Brady just wanted to go home. All of the players were desperately disappointed by the scale of the beating they had taken at the hands of one of the World Cup favourites in front of 80,000 spectators but the game, which he had looked forward to so much, felt like a particular humiliation to Brady who knew several of the Brazilians who played in Italy.

He felt badly let down by an association whose latest cock-up had been to cancel a flight booked so that Hughton could join up with the squad. Nobody told the Spurs defender who, ticket in hand, was paged in Heathrow to be told “a woman from Dublin” had been on to say he wasn’t to travel.

“It was organised so that the FAI could make some money which we all understood,” says Brady now, “but it was going to lose a lot of the prestige that we had brought to the country over the previous couple of years and that didn’t seem to matter to them.

“I had gone on the tour to play against Brazil – I hadn’t played against Brazil ever – and that’s what I did. There were other lads in the squad who were capable of playing against Trinidad so I didn’t want to go to Trinidad; no.”

The flight back from Uberlândia, which the Irish shared with the high-spirited, World Cup bound Brazilians, can’t have helped his mood. Fairclough remembers the squad’s all leading members, especially Brady, being very down. Walsh, meanwhile, was marvelling at it all: “With the language barrier there wouldn’t have been much interaction but they weren’t rude or nasty to any of us. Socrates sticks out in my mind; he was only a couple of rows behind me smoking his fags. He was the best footballer I’d ever seen and he was sitting there smoking f**king cigarettes and holding court while the rest of them were singing.”

Brady declined to fly with the rest of the squad to Trinidad a couple of days later and tried to pay his own way home. He couldn’t get flights, though, and Hand’s assistant, Terry Conroy, who had been left in Rio with the midfielder to see him off or talk him around, eventually persuaded him that they might as well follow the rest of the team and travel home together.

Such was the general lack of enthusiasm for the tour’s concluding leg, however, and there is considerable disagreement over who Ireland even played and when. Officially, Hand’s side lost 2-1 to Trinidad and Tobago barely 24 hours after arriving; they then played a local club side, ASL, and won 3-1.

Martin remembers only one game, which was won. Hand, like Walsh, insists Ireland lost to the club side in a warm-up game for the international, with the former manager suggesting that the locals then switched the results. “Nah, I think we played Trinidad and got beat,” observes Brady.

By the time they got home, the players’ outlook on it all tended to be shaped by their experience at club level, with Fairclough, whose career in England had been ended early by a knee injury, admitting: “I saw it referred to as ‘the ill-fated tour’, but to me it felt like a second coming.”

Martin enjoyed it for all its flaws; Walsh cherished the opportunity it provided to live for a couple of weeks like the full-time pro he had always wanted to be and Brady describes it as “shabby”.

The association did their best to put a brave face on it all, with O’Driscoll observing at the airport upon his return that: “We have discovered on the trip three very useful players who can do a lot for us in the future in Everton full-back Mick Walsh, Fulham midfielder Seán O’Driscoll and Limerick’s own Johnny Walsh. They were great.”

None ever played for Ireland again.