First and foremost: Light years ahead

Celebrating landmark achievements and curious quirks in the history of Ireland’s Oldest Football Club, cliftonvillefc.net today continues a new mini series reflecting on some of the trailblazing enterprises where Cliftonville have led the way.

Every week throughout the summer break, ‘First and Foremost’ will shine a spotlight on startling statistics, tall tales and magical milestones that saw the Reds play a pioneering role in the story – with Ireland’s first ever floodlit football match under today’s spotlight.

Though Distillery’s Grosvenor Park home is widely reported to have staged the maiden football match under floodlights anywhere in Ireland when they faced Burnley in December 1952, the truth is that Cliftonville had actually beaten them to it an astonishing six decades earlier.

The Whites were, coincidentally, the opposition when Solitude hosted the breakthrough occasion in April 1891.

Though electric lighting was still very much a novelty towards the end of the 19th century, Cliftonville custodians were keen to showcase Belfast as a technologically advanced city and so, shortly after the Club had officially moved into its new home, an historic 8pm friendly with Distillery was slated.

In a week where overhead cables appeared to play a key role in England’s World Cup quarter-final victory over Norway, supporters will doubtless be interested to learn that a similar operation was employed at Solitude where, as opposed to the pylons more commonly associated with the modern game, the lights were effectively hung upon wires that were hoisted high above the pitch.

Two games were played in such conditions, with the Reds losing 4-2 to Distillery before contesting a 2-2 draw with Black Watch a few days later – however the experiment was not deemed a success on either occasion.

For, in addition to the electric lamps not being bright enough to illuminate the entire playing area once darkness struck, there was a certain comic inevitability about the weighted lights slowly but surely slinking down each cable, away from their original fixed positions, meaning that only the centre of the pitch could be seen – indeed, a contemporary report noted that “the players seemed to have all the fun in the middle”.

Spectators are understood to have found it difficult to follow the action, while the era’s dark leather footballs were often impossible to see against the night sky.

“It had been a bold experience,” continued the report, “but not a highly successful one with the public skeptical, almost contemptuous, of this enterprising project.”

Though the experiment was abandoned, it nevertheless remains yet another of Cliftonville’s key contributions to football’s development, with floodlit matches having been practically unheard of across Ireland, England or Scotland at the time, outside of a sprinkling of isolated demonstrations.

Floodlights at football grounds did not become commonplace until after World War II, with installation at many Clubs coming as late as the 1950s – shining a further light on the innovative foresight that had been shown by those in charge of the Reds some 60 years earlier.