It's not the biggest trophy ever won by an Irish football club, but the Vienna Cup has long been the focus of a massive debate among rival fans about what Glentoran did or didn't do to carry it off 107 years ago.
lenmen proudly boast that its acquisition means they're the only Irish League club to triumph in a European competition, but other, perhaps envious, supporters say the cup was nothing more than a trinket presented to the east Belfast club after just a couple of matches.
However, a remarkable new book has finally revealed the full story behind how Glentoran Football Club waltzed off with the Vienna Cup just weeks before the First World War kicked off in a troubled part of Europe from which they had to flee back to their own country which was in the grip of the Home Rule crisis.
The Austrian silverware has pride of place in the trophy cabinet in the atmospheric Oval boardroom, and while the Glens' fans have long eulogised about their success, none of them have had any real idea about how they achieved it. Until now.
And that's all thanks to fanatical Glenman and local historian Sam Robinson, who produced a Hercule Poirot act to find out how in 1914, 13 part-time footballers - whose day jobs were in Belfast shipyards, then still reeling from the Titanic disaster - scored big time on the European stage, where their hosts thought they were world beaters and put them up in five star hotels.
The voyage of discovery for 56-year-old Sam about the Glens' epic adventure across Europe has unearthed the minutest of details about the journey via buses, boats and trains for the Glens' players, who included an All-Ireland GAA football winner and a Scot who lived just four doors away from where Van Morrison would later grow up in Hyndford Street in east Belfast.
The book is packed with stories of heroes, hardships, hilarity - not to mention hard drinking and hangovers - during a 3,500 mile, 17 day odyssey through eight major cities in nine different countries, playing six games in five different stadia, most of them in the old historical region known as Bohemia.
The Glens' tour saw them win three matches, draw one and lose two, scoring 16 goals and conceding 13.
But Sam's book, One Saturday Before the War, might never have been written if it hadn't been for the coronavirus and Fifa President, Gianni Infantino.
Football's most powerful man was fascinated by the Vienna Cup when he took time out of a Fifa conference at the Culloden Hotel in February last year to take in a Glentoran game at The Oval.
Sam recalls: "Mr Infantino said it would be great to bring the Vienna Cup - and the story behind it - to an exhibition at the World Football Museum in Zurich about the history of club tournaments."
Glentoran officials decided that the club needed to flesh out the bare bones of how the cup was won and reckoned Sam was the man for the job.
The pandemic was to sound the final whistle on the plans for the Swiss exhibition, but lockdown gave Sam the extra time he needed to ferret out the background to the Euro adventure.
"All we knew about the Vienna Cup were the results and where the games were played," explains Sam, whose hopes of carrying out his own research in person on the continent were shown the red card by Covid-19. So he turned to the internet instead.
"I threw a speculative request out onto the internet to see if anyone knew anything about the Vienna Cup," he says. "And, astonishingly, I came across a Spanish football statistician, Javier Garcia, who had chronicled every British and Irish football team who had ever played in Europe between 1890 and 1939.
"He told me all the information I needed was in newspapers in the Austrian and German national libraries and he helped me gain access to them. Suddenly, all this fantastic stuff started tumbling out of the ether and I was up and running."
Not only was the material difficult to read in the old-style Germanic Fraktur font, it was also, naturally enough, in German, which was double deutsche to Sam, but he struck lucky after he eventually made contact with a German football historian who translated all the relevant stories in the archives for him.
"After that, it was just like knocking down skittles," says Sam. "I was able to find links to most of the clubs that the Glens played on their visit to Bohemia.
"I also got myself a copy of Bradshaw's continental rail guide so that I was able to work out the journey the party undertook."
However, the club missed not the boat but rather the train on one occasion. Says Sam: "It appears that the Glens players had gone on the razzle in Leipzig and missed their connection to the next part of the tour to Prague, where their hosts had to wait seven hours for them to arrive."
Newspapers also reported on how ill the players later looked after they arrived in Vienna too and, though the journalists didn't know it at the time, the demon drink was also deemed responsible.
Sam says the Bohemian rhapsody started with an invite to The Oval from football bosses in the Austro-Hungarian FA, who had noted that Ireland had just won the British Home Championship for the first time and assumed the Irish Cup winners, Glentoran, must be in the same league.
"They thought the Glens were one of the top sides on the planet," says Sam, who adds that, even though there were concerns among Glentoran officials over rising tensions in central Europe, the money on the table went some way to calming the fears.
The Glens began their tour in Prague, where they lost 4-3 to DFC Prag, but in Germany they recorded an impressive 4-1 win over Hertha Berlin.
Next stop was Austria, where the Glens drew 1-1 with a Vienna Select side but, in what was billed as a 'revenge' match a few days later, the Oval team triumphed 5-0 against the same opposition and the specially struck silverware was handed over to them.
The Vienna Cup wasn't the only trophy up for grabs during the Maytime tour. The Budapest Cup was crafted in Hungary for the winners of another 'cup final' between Celtic and Burnley, who had also been invited to Europe, but the game ended in chaos and the trophy was never presented.
From Vienna, the Glens travelled by boat up the Danube to Pressburg - now Bratislava in Slovakia - where they beat the local side 3-0, and from there they went to Budapest, where they lost 7-0 to a Hungarian select side which comprised mainly stars from Ferencvaros.
But the result was the least of the Glens' worries.
Budapest was only 200 miles away from Sarajevo where, just a few weeks later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, killings which sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War 1.
"The whole area was a powderkeg," says Sam. "And I was told by a relative of one of the Glentoran players that the team had to flee for their lives to get out of Hungary as quickly as they could because the situation was so bad. They jumped on any trains or boats they could to return to Belfast."
Back on home turf, tensions were also soaring over the Home Rule crisis, and the eventual outbreak of war saw a number of the Vienna Cup winners enlisting for service and probably fighting on the battlefield against some of the very opponents they'd faced on the football field during their tour.
Intriguingly, it was discovered many years later that two of the Glentoran players, brothers Roly and Davy Lyner, met a near namesake Wilhelm Graf zu Lynar during their 1914 travels and he was executed during the Second World War for plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
The Glens had vowed to return to Austria to defend the Vienna Cup but the Great War gave that a bye-ball. However, the trophy was the only Glentoran artefact to survive the Second World War after The Oval was destroyed during the blitz because a club official had been keeping it in his home.
"I reckon there's a film to be made about the story of the Vienna Cup," says Sam, who tracked down descendants and the final resting places of most of the players who were involved in the Glens' Viennese whirl.
For more details about the book by Sam Robinson, go to www.facebook.com/OneSaturdayBeforeTheWar.
