For the penultimate of our articles before the start of the 2018-19 season, we wondered how many times the starting XI of the senior international side was comprised entirely of players with one, or more, appearance in the Premier League.
The Premier League was launched in 1992, but it would take three years before the feat was achieved, in the 3-1 loss to Austria in September 1995. It wasn't repeated until February 2000 when the Czech Republic were beaten 3-2 in a friendly. Fans of the national side would not have to wait as long between games for a starting XI of players with Premier League experience until 2011, when the first team of current and former PL players was named 4 years and eight months after the last. More recently, the last time eleven players with Premier League appearances lined out was the 1-0 win away to Austria in November 2016.
The first game where the Irish starting XI had more than 1000 Premier League appearances between them was held, fittingly enough, at a Premier League ground when Ireland faced Holland at Anfield in December 1995 in the Euro'96 Play Off. The next two combined appearance landmarks were also in qualifiers, the 1-1 draw against Portugal in June 2001 was the first time the starting XI had more than 1500 combined PL appearances, and, almost four years later, in March 2005, eleven players with more than 2000 PL appearances lined out for Ireland for the first time in a qualifier away to Israel.
The current highest combined total in an Irish starting XI is 2284. Giovanni Trapattoni named the same XI in three of the four games played by the Boys in Green in June 2012 - the friendly against Hungary before Euro 2012 and the two group games against Croatia and Italy - and since no Premier League games were played between these the total never changed.
The combined total hasn't been higher than 2000 since the September 2015 1-0 defeat of Georgia, and there were only 234 against Mexico in June 2017, more than half of which were the 128 appearances in the top flight by James McClean.
Only 36 of the 269 games (13.3%) played by the Republic since the breakaway league was formed have had a starting XI of players with Premier League experience. The record for the longest run of consecutive games where a starting XI was named, all of whom had appeared at least once in the new top division in England, was set with the seven games between May and September 2002.
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