VIDEO: Football Tennis is a real sport, Ireland has a team and it looks bloody fantastic

The Irish team is off to the European Championships in Slovakia this week.

The eyes of all Irish football fans will of course be on events in Zenica for the first leg of the Euro 2016 play-off with Bosnia on Friday night, but there will also be another important Irish sporting event taking place elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

But you already knew that the Irish Football Tennis team would be taking part in their first game in the Futnet European Championships in Slovakia, right? Right?

We’ll forgive if you didn’t know that, or if you didn’t even know that football tennis existed as a legitimate sport because to be honest about it, we weren’t really sure ourselves until today.

That was until we were contacted by Jamie Mulrooney, a member of the Irish team heading for Slovakia on Wednesday to compete as one of 12 teams in the Championships, a preamble to next year’s World Cup in the Czech Republic.

Here they are training hard in the build-up…

https://youtu.be/Yr55RFqDdrI

Jamie and the Irish team have been competing for years, having stumbled upon the game in NUI Maynooth in 2010 when all the astroturf pitches were full.

Having first played it for a laugh, Jamie and his teammates then blagged their way into a World Cup in Turkey after pretending to the World Governing Body that they had played the sport for years.

Novices they may have been, but they still managed to defeat India and Georgia in the World Cup. How many of you can put that on your CV? Better yet, they even made a documentary about it.

Football Tennis Ireland Istanbul Documentary Chapter 1 The Birth of FTI from fionn rogers on Vimeo.

Since then, they’ve represented Ireland in tournaments in Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Northern Cyprus and England and will do so again in Slovakia this week.

They travel more in hope than expectation considering opposition provided by the likes of the hosts and the Czech Republic, where there are approximately 10,000 registered players between the two countries.

This is footage from their meeting in the final of the last Futnet World Championships in the Czech Republic in 2012 and as you can see, the standard is quite high (skip to 5:00 in the video below).

Clip via FutnetTV

The Championships are going to be televised and will be worth watching for the South Korean team alone, given some of the stuff they’re capable of.