The 2011 Nations Cup was a non-event.
Under-supported and ill-fated from the moment it was conceived. England, perhaps wisely, chose not to take part. Which left us (Northern Ireland), the Republic of Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
It took place in the newly-revamped Aviva Stadium in Dublin and was a complete farce to be honest. We got tanked by every team we played, and didn’t score a single goal in our three matches.
One thing notable about it, however, was that after just over an hour of our final match the boss, Nigel Worthington, called off Craig Cathcart and replaced him with a slight 20 year-old Crusaders player called Stuart Dallas.
He’d been making a bit of a name for himself over the past year or so in the Irish League. At that time Crusaders, like most other sides in the Irish league, were a part-time outfit and Dallas was holding down a job on a Belfast building site alongside his football. Only five years later, he was on the teamsheet for Northern Ireland’s opening match against Poland in Nice at Euro 2016.
“If you’d told me then [in 2011] I would be playing at Euro 2016, I would have said you were mad,” he admitted. “It makes me appreciate life more because I’ve come from a working background with a normal job."
We lost that game 2-0 on his debut against the Welsh in Dublin, and Dallas wasn’t seen again for years. He drifted back into the under-21 set-up and we thought he’d had his chance. Especially when Worthington stepped down and the new gaffer, Michael O’Neill, didn’t call him up in any of his first few squads.
Until a cold Wednesday night in Glasgow against Scotland four years later.
On the face of it, it was just another predictable 1-0 friendly defeat for us. We were missing a few big names, either through injury or club commitments, and some less familiar faces were drafted in to plug the gaps. And three of those late call-ups were the ones who sent us back to the late-night ferry with a faint glow of positivity from an otherwise forgettable game.
Michael McGovern, standing in for the injured Roy Carroll, was solid as a rock between the sticks and Carroll was never first choice for us again. An up-and-coming Manchester United midfielder called Paddy McNair made his debut and, despite looking a touch nervous at times, played the full match.
But the major highlight was the sight of Stuart Dallas, now in full-time football as a Brentford player, throwing caution to the wind and taking on the Scottish full backs down the wing in a way that we hadn’t seen since the days of Keith Gillespie.
Michael O’Neill, looking back on that night in an episode of Colin Murray’s At Home With… podcast released last week, knew straight away he had something special on his hands.
“I remember playing him [Dallas] at Hampden against Scotland. He came on in the qualifier against Finland about 3 or 4 days later and did well again, and I thought ‘He’s never gonna come out of the team’,” said O’Neill. “I can’t think of a game [since then] where Stuart has not started.”
And in many of those matches since, he’s been the one making the magic happen, like when he left Daley Blind on his backside and stuck a cross on a postage stamp for Josh Magennis to head home against the Dutch in Rotterdam or when he bagged an injury time winner in Azerbaijan to snatch arguably the most crucial three points in our rollercoaster journey to the playoffs for World Cup 2018 (where we were put out by the worst refereeing decision in history, but I’ll maybe leave that story for another day).
The trajectory of Dallas’ career for club and country has been nothing short of spectacular.
As a keen follower of the Irish League, I witness on a weekly basis how players need the ability to graft and take a bit of rough and tumble as well as having one or two tricks up their sleeves. And it’s this unglamorous foundation that almost everything Dallas contributes today has been built upon.
Never one to turn up just to make up the numbers, he’s the definition of a hundred and ten percent. He’s willing to get physically stuck in. He can take a shoulder barge, and give back as good as he gets. Yes he’s skilful and can whip in superb deliveries, but he’s a workhorse. You give him a patch of grass to operate on, and he’ll sweat buckets for you wherever he finds himself.
If you asked a hundred Leeds United or Northern Ireland fans to sum up Dallas in one word, you’d probably get the same word back at you every time. Versatile. It sometimes feels like he can play in about two hundred different positions.
Honestly, even in our Euro 2020 (or should that now be 2021?) qualifying campaign, there were times when Michael O’Neill played Dallas in four different positions in the one match.
In our exceptional draw at home last November against Holland, which we could and should have won but for Steve Davis’ missed penalty, Dallas played at right back, left wing, right wing and left back over the course of the ninety minutes. Against world class opposition. And was brilliant in every one of them.
It was whilst at Brentford under the management of Uwe Rösler that Dallas was called back into the international fold, interestingly the same manager who then brought Dallas to Elland Road in 2015 during his brief 12-match stint of charge of the Whites. Back in the Massimo Cellino days when managers were disappearing quicker than chocolate cake at a Weight Watchers meeting.
Yes, Rösler only won two games out of those twelve, but he was responsible for bringing Dallas to Leeds United. And in doing so, gave the Elland Road faithful a club stalwart who has now played well over 150 times in the white shirt and contributed in countless different ways.
The man from Cookstown in County Tyrone signed a new four-year deal in September 2019, and openly states that Leeds now feels like “home” for his family and he has no intention to move away in the near future.
As he approaches his late twenties, he understands that his style of play may need to adapt as he gets older and loses some of that trademark turn of speed.
“I think the game is changing now, and I think my days as a winger are probably over,” he said in an interview recently, but describes this season where he’s been focusing on more defensive duties for Leeds as “probably the best football I’ve played in my whole career.”
Marcelo Bielsa knows he has a gem in Stuart Dallas. The Argentinian is acutely aware that if any key players pick up knocks across the midfield, Dallas can more than do a job in replacing them. And from talking to Leeds fans this season, the feeling in the stands seems to be that he’s now one of the very first names on the teamsheet as a result of his workrate, consistency and astute decision-making.
As things stand, with Leeds poised for promotion, next season could be when the Cookstown Cafu finally gets the chance to make his mark on the Premier League.
From making ends meet on a building site to playing on the greatest stage of all.
And no-one could deserve it more.
Stephen Collins
@tourdegawa
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