News Article on Joe Lapira - former LA high school player who earned Ireland cap

LINK

It's a really good read. I always wondered what happened to this guy. He was an outstanding player - won LA HS player of the year, won the Herman Award while playing for Notre Dame, then tried to earn a spot on Ireland's national team. He has family from there and was granted dual citizenship. It once looked like he would earn a spot on the Rangers but he ended up with a bad injury (ankle?) in trials. After that, he was offered a spot on Toronto FC's team, but he wanted to play in Europe, but only managed to play for a couple seasons with a second division Norwegian team.

I always felt that he could have done more, been bigger. I would have loved to see what he could have done on our U.S. team. If there's any player's style that I'd compare him to, it's Messi. That's not to say he was as good as him, but Messi is the first person to come to mind.

Anyway, here are some highlights from the article:

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It was the summer of 2007, and Joe Lapira – a scrappy 20-year-old collegiate soccer star – found himself flying from the Deep South of the United States of America to join up with Steve Staunton’s Irish team in New Jersey.

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The Irish-American from Lake Charles, Louisiana - who is now back home selling medical supplies - had been invited into the squad for the week-long American summer trip off the back of a stellar season for his college, Notre Dame, which saw him win the National Player of the Year award.

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Lapira was the first amateur footballer to play for Ireland since 1964, and his international cameo raised a question for Irish football fans everywhere: What would it be like to spend a week with the Boys in Green? “I thought I was just going to be training with the guys,” Lapira says. “I think I might have tried to fly around the Ireland training session like a maniac but then we did a drill when I went in the middle and I was nutmegged like 45 times in a row. “Kevin Kilbane was there. I was like 'holy God, I watched you on TV the other day'. There were loads of guys there that I watched on a weekly basis and others like Shane Long. It is crazy that I was in the same team as them for a short amount of time.”

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“The day before the match I asked if I needed to get a ticket so I could sit in the stand for the game,” Lapira says. “They said, 'no you're going to be in the squad'. I just thought, 'holy s**t, I'm going to get an Ireland jersey, I'm going to get to wear it and I'm going to get to sit on the bench. This is phenomenal!’.”

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“They told everyone to go and warm-up and we had been doing that for most of the game,” Lapira says. “I was juggling the ball on the sideline in front of the Irish fans, and I had about 20 friends in the crowd, so I thought that was all amazing. I remembered they called down for a sub, and one of the lads ran over and then came back to where I was and told me that they were calling for me.

“I didn't know if my legs were even working right then. My friends chanted ‘Notre Dame’ from the Irish section when I came on. I couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the game. I can't remember what happened. Next thing I knew it was after the game and I had a cap for Ireland.”

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That session was the crescendo of the most memorable week of his football career, but the luck Lapira had in winning a cap deserted him in the immediate aftermath. He had trials with Rangers and Derby County that summer but picked up injuries that denied him the chance to impress.

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About a year ago, the 30-year-old checked his voice messages to see an Irish number had tried to get in touch. Cathal O’Reilly, a fan from Dunshaughlin, Meath, had been trying to track Lapira down along with his friends. “About five years ago, around 15 of us started The Joe Lapira FIFA Tournament, we play it twice a year,” O’Reilly says. “Joe Lapira was a cult hero in our group because of his status as a one-cap Irish player who came in and came out and was gone into the smoke before you knew what had happened.

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“We always looked up to him in that sense because it was our boyhood dreams to play for Ireland and he got to achieve it. We were amateur footballers with dreams of playing and that's what he did." To find Lapira, O’Reilly and his friends set up a Twitter account, scoured the internet and got in touch with journalists to try and find him. Nothing worked until eventually they discovered a mobile number for a ‘Joseph Lapira’ on an American company website. “I got a couple of calls from an Irish number that wasn't from my family,” Lapira says. “I had two voicemails and it was one of the guys like, 'Hey Joe, I just wanted to tell you that we're all big fans and we have a FIFA Tournament, and a Twitter handle and a trophy. It's a real tournament! Anyway, here's the lads, and here's a song' and then they started singing 'There's only one Joe Lapira'. It was a really long voicemail and I didn't know what was happening. Then there was a second voicemail that was more like, 'We just wanted to say, we're not crazy, we aren't maniacs!'.”

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His long hair is now gone, but the image of Lapira taking part in his only Irish cap adorned a gigantic flag at Euro 2016. He doesn’t really know what to make of his popularity among a cohort of fans, but is delighted to look back and know that he exceeded his modest expectations for his football career, becoming a small footnote in the history of Irish football in the process.

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