Gardai recover money at Harolds Cross

The advice went that if you wanted to sprout hair in a particular area of your body then the best way to stimulate the follicles was by cutting back any existing hair – scant as it may be. It's a long game. For bushy growth one must raze the hair back to the skin and endure a period of no hair where hair is most desired. I have heard tales – and they may be apocryphal, or else I might just outright deny them – of impressionable young Oasis fans in the mid-90's who shaved the lonesome wisps above the bridge of their nose in the hope of transforming a sparse tundra in to a rich forest of Gallagher mono-brow. That some of these pioneering galoots ended up looking more like Bert from Sesame Street than madferit rock'n'roll revivalists was a near inevitable side effect of tampering with Mother Nature's fuzz rationing.

The method may have been ill-judged, but I expect there are few among us who have not at one time or another sought to steer our appearance in to the slipstream of those we admire.

Now its all good and well trying to look like your favourite footballer or musician, but what I eventually came round to thinking was pretty weird was when the sportswear manufacturers pitched the garb of middle aged men to teenage boys.

Ladies and gentlemen, the manager's jacket.

They were big and warm, they staved off the biting winds and protected to a reasonable degree against the rain - your mother approved of these things. Yet she did not think it weird that you sought to carry yourself in the fashion of men of her own generation: Jack Charlton, Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger.

Me and my mate managed to sell our parents on the thermal benefits. These ill fitting boiler jackets - bought over-sized to allow for growing space of course - did the promised job of staving off the elements, but there is absolutely no doubt in my now matured mind that this benefit was completely out weighed by the fact we looked like fucking dorks.

Sadder still was that we were oblivious to this glaring truth.

What amazes me most in hindsight is that when coming home from Friday night matches around the parts of the city where being streetwise and fleet of foot were worthier assets than a warm coat, is how we weren't kicked very hard in the nuts and got our bus fare stolen more frequently than we did.

Pricey as these coats were, it one day became very clear that the premium was paid on branding rather than any breathtaking exposition of tailoring.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and Pats were playing a 'home' fixture in Harolds Cross. Finding nobody who could muster the same levels of enthusiasm as myself towards this 'Group B' fixture, I decided to take a solo venture out to the 'Theatre of Uncomfortable Flashbacks'. These were the festering laundry days of the mid-season league split, and the horrific drudgery of being in the lower tier; robbed of the big games that lightened the load of supporting a prospectless team.

The trip from Coolock to Harolds Cross was one requiring two buses and a bit of footwork between them. My pocket money just about covered the four bus fares of the round trip, a match programme, £2 admission and a few pence for a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar. The quaint naivety of it all is hard for me to reckon with - it sounds like something from a colliery town in the post-war years but that's exactly how it was in 1992. I was 13 years old and the delicious vices of distraction that preoccupy the teenage mind had yet to penetrate my love of going to watch football. I seldom missed a bad game.

On this particular day all was going swimmingly until I got to the double jobbing greyhound racing track. Approaching the turnstile I felt around my pockets for the required funds. Not that pocket...erm, not that one either, must be the inside one...no...maybe zipped in my tracksuit bottoms...hmmph, no. Nowhere.

I stepped out of the not very long turnstile queue so I could have my own fluster space. I performed the gawky chicken dance as only a teenager feverishly rummaging for misplaced money in a too large jacket can. My discomfort simmered towards a burning panic as I realised the scale of predicament unfolding. I knew absolutely nobody at the game. Even if I did, the turnstile guy was unlikely to embrace a 'lost my money heartbreak serenade' to help me out. I hadn't even got 20p to call home and get me out of this far-side-of-the-city fiasco.

The situation improved with the passing minutes as I figured out that the money had slipped through my pocket and in to the inner lining of the jacket. All was not lost, but I had coins rolling all round the seams at the back of the enormous jacket where no coins should be. I tried to chase them back through the hole from whence they came.

They were large pockets, though infuriatingly distant from the bottom of the coat. There was much space to navigate to carefully guide each coin with your fingertips. Like a Saturday night gameshow challenge the coins slipped away again and again before I could locate the hole in the pocket. I twitched my fingers, coat and body in to all combinations of contortions and convulsions desperately trying to liberate the damned four pound odd. Had I left a cap on the ground in front of me I'd easily have covered the lost coins in donations for the one boy freak show I was putting on. Oh for the small mercy of it being the days before cameraphones and youtube.

Plan A was not working, and was never likely to work. Plan B involved ripping the lining of my new – and in my mind – very dapper middle aged mans training ground attire. This I tried. And this too I failed at.

No luck. I needed someone to help me. The only face I recognised was that of an elderly one-eyed man who used to stand near the turnstiles. He was perhaps some manner of a bib-less match steward. I didn't know him whatsoever, but I always wondered what fun and games he was having before he lost the eye. To recap: I was 13, he was old and had one eye. Likely conversation partners we were not.

He had little interest in pulling apart the jacket of a pubescent boy in full view of the queueing matchgoers. In hindsight I can acknowledge he had a point.

In true Bosco storybook fashion my predicament was resolved with the aid of a member of An Garda Siochana. An apologetic improvisation on the coat lining with a nail clippers saw that - unlike many - I did not lose my money at the dog track, and bucking the trend of media reports I become one of the few League of Ireland fans who was ever assisted in to a match by our state police.

Daylight Robbery

The visiting team was robbed, I remember it clearly. My first trip to Richmond Park, and there was a controversy that is still spoken of in certain circles by uncertain squares. St Pats, then putting together a league-winning squad, won 4-1 without really breaking a sweat. The robbery’s effect on the result was nebulous. Actually, even that lowly assessment may be overstating it, for the robbery took place not on the field, but in the dressing room.

The date was 13th May 1989, the occasion was Eamonn Gregg’s Testimonial. The nine-times capped international full-back was a work-mate of my Dad’s in the ESB. To my eternal gratitude he offered me the chance to lead out the League of Ireland XI which would provide the opposition to Brian Kerr’s side.

The League of Ireland side was - looking now at the match programme - to have been managed by Billy Young. I have no recollection of Young being present. Ray Treacy was running the show. They wore a green strip, and I was given an Ireland-ish tracksuit to take in to the away dressing room with me to sport while leading the team out. This was not what you would call an official Ireland tracksuit, it was more the kind of garb you might spot in O’Carrolls or Dublin Airport duty free tantalising tourists to get another fix of merch to go with their shamrock bodhrán and shillelagh.

And so in to the dressing room. This was superstar stuff in my eyes. I was among real footballers in a real dressing room. Ray Treacy welcomed me in and gave me a spot to get changed in among the players. The language of the men was excitingly choice. My Ma would have had me out of there in a flash if she knew I’d be hearing the same kind of vulgarity that I could hear at home.

One of the more vivid memories I have of the dressing room experience was my astonishment at the huge flopping members that were being unveiled across the changing area. I was a boy of 10 years. There was much I had not yet seen in this world. Men did not get changed down to their barest when I went to watch my Da’s team play in the park. The difference between League of Ireland footballers and park players was never clearer to me before or since.

Ray Treacy began to address his men, presumably laying out the loosest of formations for what they perhaps regarded as a playful afternoon kick-about preceding a serious evening of socialising. The manager suddenly found himself without that most fundamental of 80’s management tools - a pen. “A pen. Has anyone got a pen?”, he asked the partially-dressed motley soon to take the field as the league’s elite. When the “I’ve no pen, but I’ve plenty of lead in me pencil” cracks and its ripples of banter dissipated, I shuffled towards Ray.

In the absurdly oversized faux-Eire tracksuit, the studs on my football boots were trampling the leggings about 4 inches up from the hem. I handed Ray the biro I had brought to take autographs with. Sap that I am, I may even have asked him for his autograph as I handed him the pen, like it was some kind of quid pro quo.

We took to the field with me leading the team out as planned. I could hear my Dad and my Uncle cheering me as I took the team down towards the shed end for the kickabout. I shuffled nervously around the six yard box hoping someone would give me a pass of one of the balls that were whizzing like cannonballs over my head. Dundalk keeper Alan O’Neill was between the posts and after he had impressively pulled a cross from the sky he smilingly rolled the ball out to me and invited me to take a shot.

This was my moment. If I could rocket this ball past the best goalkeeper in the League of Ireland someone would be bound to notice and it wouldn’t be long before word got to Brian Kerr and my football career would be fast-tracked from the ignominious lull it was enduring as 14th man for Priorswood U11s in the Brenfer League 11D.

In hindsight I acknowledge that I did not factor in the Size-5-ness of the ball. I was used to kicking a £1.99 ‘Cup Champion’ ball in the park, and a Size 4 along the touchline with my fellow subs for Priorswood. Kicking a Size 5 was like booting the ornamental concrete orbs on the pillars of the posher driveways in housing estates. To be honest I think I recoiled further than the ball moved forward. I went from hoping everyone saw me to hoping nobody saw me. I had also managed to hurt my ankle in this pathetic attempt to make Richmond Park swoon at my potential. I swallowed the pain like a toddler forcing the last sickening mouthful of vegetables down to qualify for dessert privileges.

The ref summoned the captains and mascots. Hands were shook, backs patted, photos taken, and I left the pitch. I went back to the dressing room and stepped out of the tracksuit. I put my own clothes back on and went out to watch Pats play the League of Ireland side off the park.

The next day my Dad got a phone call  from Eamonn asking could we arrange to get the Ireland  tracksuit back to him. “That’s no sweat Eamonn, I’ll box that off,” my Dad replied in characteristic manner.

He put the handset back on the receiver - it was the 80’s remember - and quizzed me as to the whereabouts of the Ireland tracksuit. I told him I took it off and left it in the dressing room.   

Well, there was phonecall upon phonecall, the same questions answered many times over; the same account given of going to the dressing room, taking off the tracksuit  - LEAVING IT THERE - and putting on my own clothes before returning to the stand for the match. Weeks of this stuff.

Sometimes I’d be asleep in my cell and the screws would come in and shine 1000 watt lights in my pupils, call me a lying paddy bastard and make me explain again what happened that afternoon. That I had as much use for a tracksuit that sagged inches beyond my arms as Paul Doolin has for Wash cut & blow dry discount vouchers never seemed to occur to anyone else. 

The tracksuit - to my knowldege - was never found.  But no matter how clearly and frequently I gave my account, I could never escape the stigma of being prime suspect in the Eamonn Gregg Testimonial Faux Eire Tracksuit Robbery.  


The Pats Squad: Dave Henderson, Eamonn Gregg, Pat Kelch, John McDonnell, Mick Moody, John Treacy, Pat Fenlon, Maurice O'Driscoll, Robbie Gaffney, Paul Byrne, Mark Ennis, Paul Campbell, Derek Gaugh, Damien Byrne, Conor Best

League of Ireland: Alan O'Neill, Dermot O'Neill, Harry Kenny, Kevin Brady, Martin Lawlor, Mick Neville, Paul Whelan, Brian Carey, Paul Doolin, Jim Donnelly, Eugene Lawless, Martin Murray, Derek Murray, Joe Hanrahan, Derek Swan, Dessie Gorman

The Art of Defeat

Efficiency is the hallmark of quality management, and on that front you simply have to doff the cap to the new regime at Richmond Park. A congested fixture calendar has been the rock on which many a title challenge has perished; too many games, too many injuries, insufficient recovery time, suspensions falling like Arab dictatorships. These problems, Liam Buckley has nipped in the bud, by participating in the fewest possible amount of games in the Setanta Cup.

Losing football matches may seem a somewhat counter intuitive strategy when the endgame is all about victory, the creation of legend and the construction of a hearty store of warm memories to feed our souls on cold days. But, to lose, when clearly - and I mean indisputably, undeniably - you are the better team, is not defeat. It is, readers, an exhibition of artful cunning. Avant-garde football.

Having showcased their class with an exhibition of ball retention, methodical approach play and inventive attacking sequences, St Pats really had taken enough out of the two legs against Cliftonville to assure both themselves and their support of their worth this season. Goals were nonchalantly scored - and even more nonchalantly ruled out lest anyone get carried away by winning as comfortably on the scoreboard as the passages of play would testify. The durability of the goalpost paintwork was expertly tested by John Russell, who enthusiastically conducted some further experiments on the durability of fibulae among the visiting Cliftonville midfield. His endeavour warranted reward and it was telling of the goodness of character and oh-so-keen judgement of Richie Winter to allow him to enjoy much of the second half from the comfort of the dugout.

Also laudable was the groove of improvisation which Barry Murphy brought to the game. His approach to dispatching backpasses was truly groundbreaking with all kinds of unexpected angles being explored. We were brought further to the cusp of great innovation on the Cliftonville goal when Murphy’s movements astonished all onlookers. The abstract position he was drawn to seemed to phase some of his colleagues but doubtless all are still getting know each others beat at this early stage of the season. We can surely expect a stable tempo to materialise in the defence before the curtain rises on the 2012 league campaign.