Given the prevalence of turn-of-the-century nostalgia these are likely to be 12 months when we spend as much time looking back as we do peering into the future. But amidst all the navel-gazing there is at least one anniversary which will genuinely be worth reflecting on. Later this year it will be 50 years since the last time an all-Ireland soccer team, with players drawn from both sides of the Border, took the field in a full international. And last weekend another connection with that side which drew 0-0 with Wales in Wrexham back in 1950 was severed with the death in England of Tommy "Bud" Aherne.
Aherne was 80 when he died and in many ways was a powerful symbol of the century of confused sporting identity that we have just left behind. He was born and grew up in Limerick where he became a professional footballer at the end of the 1930s. After serving in the Irish Army he moved North at the end of the second World War when he was signed by Belfast Celtic.
Playing at left back, Aherne won an Irish League medal with Belfast Celtic in 1947-8. He then played in the game against Linfield on December 27th, 1948 which was eventually to precipitate Celtic's withdrawal from the League following the crowd violence and assault on Celtic striker Jimmy Jones. Aherne himself was one of the many players treated for injuries.
When Celtic left the Irish League at the end of that season Aherne was on the move again. After playing in the club's swan-song summer visit to the US, a tour that included the legendary 2-0 win over Scotland, he moved to Luton Town for a transfer fee of £6,000. In 10 seasons with the English club he played 267 matches, before retiring in 1960.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bud Aherne from this modern standpoint is his international career. In these more stable times, it is easy to forget the uncertainty and confusion that surrounded international football on this island half a century ago. While there were new political structures gradually bedding down, some semblance of football order was considerably slower in arriving. Teams representing the Irish FA and the FAI were co-existing uneasily and there was a considerable degree of overlap between the two.
Aherne found himself in the eye of this football storm and his international record reflects that. During his career he collected 16 Republic of Ireland caps but also won four with Northern Ireland. It is a statistic that serves as a metaphor of sorts for our mixed-up sporting times. As well as that last "Ireland" international against Wales 50 years ago, Aherne played his part in some of the most celebrated games of the time. The highpoint was a 2-0 win over England at Goodison Park in 1949, the first time England had lost at home to "foreign" opposition.
Just as Bud Aherne's career was ending, the era of the dual-international was also coming to a close. The precise reasons for that remain lost in a fog of recrimination and counter-recrimination but it does seem clear that there was pressure from both the IFA and the FAI on players to declare for one association or the other.
Both the IFA and the FAI have been diminished as a result of the divisions that became entrenched during that period. Over the last 50 years there have been good days for both associations but in the main those have been outweighed by the bad and the downright dismal. The split may have made administrative sense at the time but it has been a football calamity.
The early losers were the FAI, who could only stand by and watch as the newly-constituted Northern Ireland team qualified first for the World Cup finals in Sweden in 1958 and then for Spain in 1982 and Mexico in 1986. The 1958 team in particular was a team of all the talents and qualified for the second phase of those finals.
The highpoint in 1982 was of course the 1-0 win over Spain in Valencia. But then, as that Northern Ireland team ebbed away, the Republic picked up the baton in the 1990s and qualified for two World Cup finals and one European Championship finals. With a conveyor belt of young talent, that ascendancy seems certain to continue into this decade as Northern Ireland sink into an ever-deepening trough of poor results and disastrously-low self-confidence.
Perhaps the saddest thing is the way great players from both sides of the Border were denied a stage befitting their talents simply because of geographical accident. So there is no footage of George Best in a green shirt from the 1970 World Cup. And an abiding image of Liam Brady is that shoddy substitution by Jack Charlton after half an hour at Lansdowne Road when it could be a drop of the shoulder in a group game from the 1986 finals in Mexico. They are years laced with lost opportunities.
From this distance the notion of an all-Ireland football team in the near future is little more than a pipe dream. For every lost chance or wasted career over the past 50 years there have been 10 layers of self-serving bureaucracy added to the administrative structures of the FAI and the IFA. Both now have their international football kingdoms of nice foreign jaunts and seats on this UEFA board or that FIFA subcommittee to protect and they are unlikely to give all of that up in pursuit of a little bit of football unity.
In the last few months the FAI has upped the ante in relations between the two bodies by accepting players born in the North into their under-age ranks. There had been something of an unspoken rule that place of birth was to be the only determining factor but the Republic's progressive and imaginative youth policies have consigned this to history. There were predictable howls of protest from the IFA, but the most significant impact of the row was to cast a spotlight on the moribund under-age structures here in the North.
What Bud Aherne would have made of all this is anyone's guess. Boundaries and borders clearly meant little to the Limerick man who spent his best playing years in Belfast and who played for both Northern Ireland and the Republic without fear or favour before settling in England. Within recent living memory a football team made up of six men born in the South and five in the North represented this country in a 2-2 draw with England at Goodison Park. That game was played at Goodison Park in November 1947 but it feels like 500 years ago rather than 50.
