My First World Cup: Diane Caldwell on Ireland’s journey to their maiden major tournament
As the snow continues to fall and temperatures remain close to freezing at Reading’s Bearwood Park training ground, the weather seems more late winter than early spring on this particular mid-March morning.
Diane Caldwell is used to the cold. The versatile Republic of Ireland international spent five seasons playing across Iceland and Norway as part of a career that has taken her from the east coast of Ireland to the state of New York before eventually bringing her to Berkshire last summer.
She certainly seems unfazed as she enters a makeshift interview room at the back of a building that is usually reserved for youth team players and their families.
“People say ‘you must love to travel’, but that was never my goal,” smiles Caldwell after insisting that she only ever wears shorts for training, even in conditions like these. “I just wanted to try and play at a better level with every move, and that made me go to five or six countries.
“It’s a lot of different cultures, but people are people at the end of the day and you kind of realise that the more you travel. You obviously grow as a person, you become independent and have challenges to overcome.”
Overcoming challenges has been a theme of the 34-year-old’s career. From having to turn out for boy’s teams as a football-obsessed teenager in a rural Irish town to ending Ireland’s wait to appear at a first women’s World Cup, there remains a humility about Caldwell that makes her story easy to invest in.
Smiling again as she recounts memories of watching Robbie Keane and Damien Duff at the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea on a television in her conservatory, it was never guaranteed that either Caldwell or Ireland women would ever get their turn on football’s grandest stage.
“Back then it was just men’s football. I didn’t even know that the national team existed, I just kept playing because I loved it,” she recalls. “I steadily progressed and got scouted by better teams in Dublin.”
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that the day an Irish Football Association training course arrived in her hometown of Balbriggan in the early 2000’s was career defining, it was an early insight into how far Caldwell and her family were willing to go to forge a pathway for a professional career.
“There was an FAI representative who had all of the gear on, and I remember my dad went over to him at the end of the practice…” the pre-emptive laughter reveals the re-emergence of an embarrassment that can only be brought on by the actions of a close family member.
“My dad was like, ‘Where can I bring Diane? What’s the next step? Where can she play?’. The guy then said there was county teams, representative teams and international teams. That was the first time I found out about it, it wasn’t on the TV, it wasn’t marketed, it wasn’t known.
“I got asked to international trials for the under-17’s at 14 years old and then I stayed in the underage set up all the way up to the seniors. That was the path. It was all a bit unknown at the beginning about what opportunities there were but in the timeframe that I developed a career, the game boomed and new possibilities became available.”
The defender admits that she is not yet sure if her parents will be able to make the trip to Australia and New Zealand this summer to see her play at what could be her one and only World Cup. Her partner and sister will both be there in support though, and being apart from her family has done little to halt Caldwell’s career so far.
After moving to the United States as an 18-year-old to enrol at Hofstra University to play soccer alongside a bachelor’s degree in physical education teaching, she has spent her entire playing career outside of Ireland.
“Back then options were limited to go professional,” Caldwell explains as snow continues to fall outside, covering a spattering of players from the Reading men’s team as they arrive for training. “I don’t know if there were any professional teams at all [in Ireland]. Now it’s very different, you’ve got academies and programmes that start at a much earlier age. I think that will be the future and the American route won’t be so readily used.”
Despite being based more than 3,000 miles and an entire Atlantic Ocean away from Dublin, Caldwell’s international career continued to progress during her time at Hofstra. After making her debut for the senior side a few months before moving to the States at the age of just 17, the caps continued to roll in until a college against country controversy in 2009.
Caldwell was selected to represent Ireland at the World Student Games by national team manager Noel King, but her arrangement at Hofstra meant she was only allowed to be released for senior international matches. King was less than impressed as Ireland won just a single game at the competition and made a group stage exit, blaming Caldwell for her unavailability.
She would not play again for Ireland for more than two years.
“At that point I was thinking if I could ever get back in the Ireland team,” Caldwell admits. “I missed out on a lot of games. I started out at the same point as Áine O’Gorman, we were the same age and she’s got over 100 caps and I’m on 93. You can see the discrepancy.
“Luckily, there was a change of manager. [Incoming manager] Sue Ronan knew I was out there somewhere and contacted me straight away saying ‘we want you back in, you should never have been left out’. I was really grateful to Sue for bringing me back in.”
A gasp of near disbelief is let out as Caldwell is asked about how much the experience of playing for Ireland has changed since her debut. After being forced to change in public toilets and share tracksuits with youth-team squads, she was one of a group of players who refused to report for the first day of a team training camp in April 2017.
It took just a matter of hours for the FAI to relent. They accepted the more than reasonable terms demanded by the team, and the action taken by the players acted as a catalyst for much of the success that they have enjoyed since.
“The honour [of playing for Ireland] hasn’t changed at all,” says Caldwell in a way that is clearly genuine despite sounding like a perfect line of PR. “We’re now so well looked after in terms of facilities. The staff has increased, it now makes up half of the team. The marketing level is phenomenal, RTE broadcast every game during qualifying [for the World Cup].
“Colin Bell came in [as manager in 2017] and really professionalised the whole system and instilled a different level of mentality and expectation. We now have a winning mentality. Our defensive qualities are innate in us as Irish people; we’re hard working, we defend with our lives.
“Unfortunately, he left right on the eve of the campaign for the Euros [in 2021]. I really thought that was going to be our time. We were going to qualify. It was just kind of written. In England, it couldn’t have been any better for Irish supporters. I just had a really good feeling.”
Under the management of Vera Pauw, Ireland missed out on last summer’s Euros after they lost their final two qualifiers against Ukraine and Germany, but a dramatic play-off win against Scotland last October meant they secured their place at a first ever major tournament at the next available opportunity.
Caldwell touches the wooden table in front of her when informed that she could in fact win her 100th cap at the World Cup this summer. A career as long and varied as hers has taught her to take nothing for granted.
“I don’t like to jinx that too much,” she says, breaking into a laugh once more. “Anything can happen. I need to get selected and get on the plane, that’s the first priority and then hopefully the games and the caps come after that.
“Did I think a World Cup would be the first tournament that we would qualify for? Absolutely not. It’s one of 32 teams in the world, it’s a momentous task to try and achieve that.
“You never know how these things are going to work out, but it did in the end.”
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