The match could scarcely have had a more dramatic start.

The reason for the long interval since the last Home International fixture was, of course, the First World War. The conflict forced the wholesale abandonment of organised sports events across Europe - including the 1916 Olympic Games, which had been earmarked for Berlin. It also resulted in the slaughter of many top-class athletes.

The Windsor Park occasion did not mark the first time international football had been played since Armistice Day. The British home nations had taken part in friendly, so-called "Victory" internationals. Indeed, England had beaten Wales in Stoke in one such encounter just the week before.

The Interallied Games staged in Paris in June and July had featured an eight-team football tournament. The sport was also included at the 1919 Far Eastern Games. And the latest South American Championship had been staged in Rio de Janeiro in May. This had originally been set for 1918, but a flu epidemic delayed it.

If the re-establishment of peace had permitted sport to resume its pre-war place in society in many European countries, it was bitterly ironic that the guns had not been silenced on the island where this first post-war Home International was to take place.

By October 1919, the Anglo-Irish war that would lead to partition and eventual formation of the Irish Free State was well under way.

On the day of the match - October 25 - alone, an Orangeman called the Reverend Edward Foy was shot and seriously wounded and six Sinn Féin prisoners made a daring tea-time escape from Strangeways prison in Manchester. Two of the six were elected members of the Parliament in Westminster at the time.

In the sports sphere, meanwhile, a match between Leinster and Ulster in Dublin had to be stopped seven minutes from the end following a violent pitch invasion, with Ulster five goals to the good.

Even today, the team-sheets for the landmark Windsor Park clash make interesting reading. Not to put too fine a point on it, the home 11 looks far stronger. 

This is not as surprising as you might think: Ireland, after all, were reigning Home International champions, having claimed the title outright in 1913-1914. Their 1919 team, moreover, included two well-known figures who had not featured, for differing reasons, in their Championship year.

Patsy Gallagher, one of the leading goalscorers in the history of Glasgow Celtic, had already won five of his six Scottish titles at the age of 28. He had been born in Donegal, but moved to Scotland when he was just three. While the Scottish First Division continued to be contested throughout the War, international football did not. Largely because of this, Gallagher would be one of no fewer than 15 players in the two teams who would be winning their first international caps at Windsor Park.

Newcastle United’s Bill McCracken had made his international debut as long ago as 1902 and was probably the pre-eminent defender of the early 20th century, having elevated the art of springing the offside trap to a state of maddening perfection. In 1913-1914, however, he was in the middle of a long period of exclusion from the national team, imposed over a dispute about pay.

Now finally, at the age of 36, he was back in favour. As author Neal Garnham put it in his 2004 book Association Football and Society in Pre-partition Ireland: "The man widely accepted as having invented, or at least perfected, the offside trap, and later remembered as ‘the grand old man of football’, effectively served a twelve-year exile from Irish football for asserting his rights and status as a professional”.

The real advantage of this Ireland side was thought to lie at half-back, however. Whereas England’s trio could muster two pre-war caps between them, for the home team, Billy Lacey, who notched two of the goals in the Championship side’s famous 3-0 drubbing of England at Middlesbrough in 1914, would be joined by Mickey Hamill - once of Manchester United, later of Manchester City - and Billy Emerson, a rising star from Glentoran.

An important absentee was Elisha Scott, one of the best goalkeepers ever to represent Liverpool. He was no more than a spectator, having recently endured a second operation for varicocele. The Irish Weekly Record reported that he looked "a bit shaken".

England’s former Liverpool goalkeeper, Sam Hardy, would be playing, in spite of recently turning 37, and was to be acclaimed universally as man of the match.

Apart from Hardy, this English side was both rather old - the average age was 29.4, although this would rise to above 30 for the see-sawing 5-4 win over Scotland the following April - and extraordinarily inexperienced. The 10 outfield players would represent their country on the sum total of 21 occasions over their entire careers.

With the Football League season already well under way, press commentators had been quick to note that standards had dropped since pre-war years. But newspapermen did not have to reflect too hard in order to identify the reason. None put it more succinctly than the Irish Weekly Record’s Jas McAnerney. "The trenches had their toll of the 'stars' we used to meet," he wrote.

The visitors were captained by an Olympic gold medallist, in the shape of left-back Arthur Knight. The Portsmouth man had been ever-present in the Great Britain team that returned victorious from the 1912 Games in Stockholm, scoring 15 goals and conceding only two in their three matches.

Knight would also play in the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, in a GB team that rather underlined how standards had fallen, being eliminated by Norway in the first round.

The last Home International at Windsor Park, in 1914, had been deluged with wintry rain. This one was bathed in sunshine. A journalist signed "Celt", writing in the Irish News and Belfast Morning News, waxed positively rhapsodic.

It was "the 12th of July set down near the end of October," he wrote. "The hedgerows, what’s left of them, were dust-covered and so every Ford in Ulster was called into action.

"Brakes, char-a-bancs, every kind of vehicle down to a fish-cart, which I saw come down York Street at noon, emptied sporting Ulster into the city. The morning trains were packed. It was the biggest invasion of country sports in the history of Irish football."

Something like 40,000 spectators jammed into the ground, where the pre-match entertainment consisted of the Royal Irish Constabulary band playing "a choice selection of music". Immediately after kick-off, they were dumb-struck.

The visitors’ centre-forward that day, Jack Cock, was the first Cornishman to play football for England. He would go on to be a prolific goal-scorer for Chelsea, Everton and Plymouth Argyle, as well as something of a music-hall star. But he was viewed as a bit of an individualist and would win only one more full cap.

Just 15 seconds into the first Home International of a chastened new age, Cock brought down a cross from the right and fired a speculative long-range shot towards the Irish goal. It smashed against the crossbar and came down behind William O’Hagan, the home team’s debutant goalkeeper. O’Hagan duly caught the ball and cleared it, but it was deemed to have crossed the line. Only the great Tommy Lawton has scored a faster goal for England.

But was it a goal? The contemporary English press reports I have read, including the authoritative and detailed Athletic News, admit of no doubt. But in Irish newspapers, it is a different story.

"Did England actually score?" asked the Irish Weekly Record in a headline the following Saturday. The body of the text, by "Marathon", acknowledges that “from the press-box the ball looked through”. But it adds: “All those in a line, including Mr Norris, a well-known Manchester sport, now resident locally, are most emphatic that the ball was not over the line.”

The same gentleman is mentioned in an Irish News report that is in places rather similar, but was published just two days after the match.

“Since Saturday much controversy over England’s goal,” the newspaper relates. “Was it over the line? Those in the vicinity are most emphatic that O’Hagan was out of his goal at least a yard and so the ball was not over the line when he caught it behind him and threw clear. Mr Norris…an Englishman, who was in a straight line with the goal tells me that the ball was not over the line, and confirms the statement that O’Hagan was well out of his posts at the time."

In the absence of television, let alone VAR, we shall, of course, never know for sure.

What we do know is that Ireland dominated possession for the remaining 89 minutes of the match, forced an equaliser in the second- half, but, thwarted repeatedly by Hardy’s brilliance, were unable to fashion a winner. The game finished a draw.

The title ended up with Wales, thanks largely to a 2-1 win over England in London. That match marked a triumphant finale to the international career of Welsh winger Billy Meredith, who was well on the way to his 46th birthday at the time. 

In terms of the skills on display and the calibre of the players, this first Home International Championship after the First World War left plenty to be desired. But with Cock’s explosive start and Meredith’s big finish, it had its share of good stories. Most of all, it was back.