No matter how often he is shown the footage, what Ray Houghton remembers most from the day Irish football changed forever is not, as you might expect, the moment he headed past Peter Shilton. Instead it is the stifling heat from that remarkable afternoon in the Neckarstadion, Stuttgart. By the end the Ireland players were foaming at the mouth, exhausted and oblivious to the scale of what they had just achieved. “We were absolutely drained,” Houghton says 28 years later. “We put everything into it.”

England had entered the tournament with, as Bobby Robson said, their “best squad for six years” and harbouring genuine ambitions to rule the continent. The Republic of Ireland, it seemed to almost everyone including certain members of Jack Charlton’s squad, were just happy to participate.



“We’ve been preparing for two years,” Robson said on ITV before the game. In contrast, Charlton claimed: “We’ve been preparing for three weeks.”



Even now Houghton says “we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves,” admitting that, to an extent, they were making it up as they went along. “Winging it. Nobody gave us a prayer. I don’t think anybody in Ireland gave us a prayer. We were certainly the underdogs by a long way, but it was a case of making sure you went out there and did your job.”

We didn't want to embarrass ourselves. Nobody gave us a prayer Ray Houghton

If there was pressure on England to perform – much of it self-inflicted – from Ireland’s point of view the buildup was inconspicuous. Expectations were scant, their priority merely to compete with pride. A pre-tournament friendly against Poland attracted only 18,500 to Lansdowne Road, and before travelling to Germany the players recall being taken to the races and the Hill 16 pub for a pint or three by Charlton without being bothered by too many, if any, supporters. A stark contrast, then, to the barriers erected around the training pitch and a team hotel closed to the public before this year’s journey to France.

Houghton’s goal, though, would soon turn the Irish public’s apathy into ardor. The Charlton era was two years old, but 12 June 1988 marked the beginning of a golden period.

Pre-match, a troubling undercurrent of crowd trouble led to questions over England being allowed to participate. Colin Moynihan, the British sports minister, came to Stuttgart “with a heavy heart” and warned: “If we continue to get incidents like these, we will have to consider very seriously whether the English can continue in international football.”

Forty-five arrests were made on the night before and day of the game – mostly for drunkenness and vandalism. All but one were English, according to the Guardian’s reporter Ed Vulliamy. The other was from Luxembourg.



But away from melodramatic headlines of fans behaving badly, there was an unmistakeable expectation for Robson’s team to perform. Gary Lineker, Chris Waddle, John Barnes, Peter Beardsley, Bryan Robson … Glenn Hoddle only on the bench. This was a team to be feared. Yet England went out with barely a whimper, succumbing in all three games. It may look on paper like a pronounced failure but this was, in truth, a campaign beset by ill-fortune.



As Rob Smyth wrote in 2008: “The cumulative effect of their three games is incontrovertibly awful – three defeats, two goals scored, seven conceded – but there are enough mitigating circumstances to suggest that, in qualitative terms, it was nowhere near that bad.”



To give a sense of the lofty predictions, an ITV preview a couple of days before the match centred on whether England could win the tournament. Potentially losing to Ireland was not contemplated. “Any team that has Gary Lineker in the front line, who I think is the best striker in Europe, must have a chance,” Trevor Francis reckoned.



Brian Clough, sat to his right, said Ireland had reached Germany on merit but gave them no chance of beating England. “I don’t think they will cause the English lads too many problems because they know them. I don’t mean it will be a walkover, but England will triumph in this particular match.”



Then there is a delightful moment during the show when Robson and Charlton are introduced via video link from their separate Stuttgart hotels and Clough tells Charlton he expects the Irish players to be relaxed come game-time.



“Is that Brian?” Charlton asks on camera.



“It is pal,” comes the response. “You look nice and relaxed and I think you might play like that on Sunday.”



“We’re 28-1, I think, and we’re not expected to do anything in this competition. We just hope to surprise a few people.”



By Sunday night, more than a few were stunned.

It is near-unanimously agreed that Ireland were fortunate to keep a clean sheet, though they equally could have scored more than once. Packie Bonner was exceptional in goal but Lineker, who would later be diagnosed with hepatitis B, was off-colour and England spurned several good chances to equalise.

“It was one of those days where everything seemed to happen for me,” Bonner told an RTE documentary years later. The goalkeeper, a devout Catholic, had passed some rosary beads to his team-mates prior to kick-off. “Packie gave us some bands before the game saying they were blessed and holy and would bring us luck, but I don’t think too many of us believed him before,” Houghton says. “Maybe afterwards he had a point.”

Gary Lineker looks to the skies after another England chance fails to find the net. Packie Bonner, the Ireland goalkeeper, was in inspired form. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

The goal was perhaps archetypal Ireland under Charlton. Consensus suggests little subtlety existed in their play under Big Jack but it was a tad more nuanced than kick and rush. As the manager said: “We are direct but we also have some very skilful players.”



Another factor was the limpness of England’s defence without Terry Butcher, who broke a leg before the tournament. An inexperienced partnership of Mark Wright and Tony Adams started at centre-half instead.



Within six minutes they were exposed. Kevin Moran’s long free-kick down the left resulted in Wright and Trevor Stevens attacking the same ball. It broke kindly for Tony Galvin, who wasted no time in hooking it towards the box.



Kenny Sansom egregiously mis-cued his clearance, the ball spinning into the air and behind him. John Aldridge knocked it on and there was Houghton, neck muscles tensed, to drive his forehead through the iconic Adidas Tango, across goal and into the right of Shilton’s net.

The Irish fans, situated at that end of the stadium, erupted. Houghton, Aldridge and others ran jubilantly in their direction but the best reaction of all came from Charlton: the manager stood incredulous.

Almost three decades on, the footage remains brilliant, raw and stirring. Charlton’s unfancied team have just scored against his country, the team he won the World Cup with 22 years previously. He turns away from the bench and rubs the top of his head in disbelief. Has this just really happened?

That the goal came so early in the game meant a gargantuan defensive effort was required. Yet it was so hot in the stadium that Charlton, who would usually stand for the duration of games, sought shade in the dugout for a while. “We sat back and said to England: ‘OK, we’ve got one. Now you’ve got to come and get one’,” he remembered some time later. “In the last five or six minutes England were a bit unlucky actually, but we had enough people in between and competing to make sure they didn’t have any opportunity too easily.”

Ireland’s players celebrate, with their band of travelling fans in the background, after their first goal in a major tournament. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

For those on the pitch, the heat took its toll too.



“It’s much easier when you have the ball,” Houghton adds. “When you haven’t got it and chasing the ball from side to side you do get tired very quickly and that was certainly the case. We gave it everything we had to keep England at bay.



“There was some fortune involved but we defended well. Packie Bonner made some good saves but in reality they missed some golden opportunities that on another day they wouldn’t have done.”



But Ronnie Whelan was also a couple of inches from making it 2-0 with an hour played. Another direct ball forward was headed down by Frank Stapleton, the Ireland captain, and England could only half clear. Whelan arrived on the edge of the area and connected sweetly only for his shot to cannon off the bar.



The remaining half an hour saw several England chances come and go, Bonner a match for everything that came his way. Robson, left to ponder what might have been, said: “As they were always in the lead they had the spirit to keep it going. Had the equalising goal come, I feel that they would have perhaps lost their nerve a little bit and collapsed but we will never know.”

By the time Siegfried Kirschen blew the final whistle, those in green were exhausted and in something of a daze.



The moments of celebration that immediately followed are what Houghton remembers most evocatively. “There’s a great picture – it’s something I remember vividly – from after the game where Mick Byrne, our physio, went behind the goal where all the Irish fans were and was blessing himself on his knees. But next to him was Kevin Moran and he had this white stuff around his lips because he was so dehydrated.



“For all the things I remember, that’s the one that sticks out for me: looking at Kevin and thinking ‘My goodness, look at him’. As I said, we put everything into it.”



That image made it onto the front of newspapers around the world. As Peter Byrne, the Irish Times’ correspondent, said: “I could visualise Ireland beating England and I could even visualise Ireland winning the Championship. But in my wildest dreams I could never have pictured Mick Byrne following the Pope, General De Gaulle and Ronald Reagan onto the front page of The Daily Telegraph.”

England would lose 3-1 to a Marco van Basten-inspired Holland and by the same scoreline against Soviet Union, but Ireland were left to ruminate on what might have been. In their second game Whelan put Charlton’s team ahead in the first half but the Soviet Union equalised 16 minutes from the end through Oleh Protasov. Holland scraped past Ireland 1-0, but, as Houghton asserts, if luck was not against them in the second game, a result would not have been needed against the eventual winners to progress.

Ray Houghton and Ronnie Whelan celebrate in Stuttgart but, looking back now, there is an element of frustration that they did not progress beyond the group stage. Photograph: Colorsport/Rex/Shutterstock

Looking back on the tournament now, there is a certain element of frustration. Holland defeated the Soviet Union 2-0 in the final but such was the lack of expectation among the Ireland squad a sense of what might have been did not register at the time.



“There wasn’t frustration when we were knocked out, but a few years later I think that was there,” Houghton admits. “When we look back, you think after making one competition you were going to make another one and another one. It’s only later on in life … I remember sitting down with a few of the lads, and it came down to ‘Wow, what an opportunity that was and how close we were’.



“In truth, the Holland game shouldn’t have really mattered because in the game against USSR in Hannover we played so well that coming away from it I still can’t believe to this day that we didn’t win. If England were unlucky against us, we were even more unlucky against Russia. We had two or three penalty claims that were absolutely stonewall. I still can’t believe the referee didn’t give it to us.”



While Ireland made their World Cup bow in Italy two years later and also reached the USA in 1994, another European Championship appearance would take 24 years to come about. Reflecting upon 1988, it seems odd to view them as apparent no hopers with no chance. Certainly if their clubs are to serve as a gauge of capability, there should have been greater expectations on the 1988 group compared to the current incarnation, who face far more intense focus and criticism.



It was only years later that we thought: ‘Wow, what an opportunity that was and how close we were' Ray Houghton

The top two in English football that year, Liverpool and Manchester United, made up 30% of the squad. Everton, fourth in the league that season, provided Kevin Sheedy and there were only three of the 20-man group playing in the second division or lower.



Of the 23 heading to France this summer, the highest-placed finisher was Shane Long at sixth-placed Southampton and just 12 ended last season with Premier League clubs. Three of those were in teams relegated to the Championship, and two others are second-choice goalkeepers.



While lacking in experience, Charlton’s squad were more talented than they would have you believe. Still, their achievement elevated football in Ireland to a new level and for that they will be remembered with immense fondness.

In the space of a few days they captured the imagination, a cocktail of accessibility, likeability and (relative to the time) success.

On the flight home there were, as Houghton puts it, “high-jinks”. Some players’ shirts had collars clipped off while they slept. Others found Mickey Mouse drawn on their clothing. And there was, of course, alcohol flowing. As the plane began its descent into Dublin airport they were told some dignitaries would be waiting to greet them.



Not quite. A breathtaking mass of supporters had turned out. Thousands were at the airport – a significant amount even made it onto the terminal roof – to cheer as they disembarked the aircraft. A throng continued from outside the grey, brutalist building and they headed into town on an open-top bus.



“If you look at the footage of us coming off the plane,” Houghton recalls, “we had Aer Lingus T-shirts on with ties. The scene when we got there was amazing – it was quite humbling to see so many there to welcome us back. We had no idea of the impact we made.”



An impact that would affect Irish football to this very day.