The Abandoned Cup Final

Every couple of months I visit my mother's house to see if I can leverage a better deal for myself on the will. The triangular patch of grass at the front of the park opposite our house stirs memories of epic matches won and lost in fading light on the most geometrically impractical football pitch you could imagine (corner kicks at the apex were particularly eventful). The 'triangle' is empty save the worryingly mature looking trees that I clearly remember being planted as leafless saplings in protective cages.

We were perhaps the last generation who can honestly say ''we played football all day, every day''. We used the new trees as goalposts, and soon wore away a bald patch between the two most suitable young sycamores. To the Park-keeper's undoubted satisfaction this arid goalmouth has since made a recovery of growth surpassed only by the Lazarine follicles of Wayne Rooney's crown. It also betrays the fact that the kids are otherwise occupying their time.

Very often there was only two of us playing ball; the kid up the road was from a long line of Bohemians patrons, players, members, fanatics. One of us stood between the trees, the other took shots. This simple game developed a more competitive edge when a commentary from the shooting player was introduced. After blasting the ball in to the goal I would occasionally wheel away towards the non-existent adoring fans and in a nasal-drone owing much to Brian Moore's commentaries on ITV's 'The Match' enthusiastically rejoice “And Mark Ennis has surely put red and white ribbons on the FAI Cup.....it's heartbreak for Bohemians, glory for St Patricks...oh the magic of the cup!”

These forays in to fantasy were all too frequently overheard by roaming sorts not so interested in football. The requisite punishment for being imaginative was exacted with committed zeal. If they only knew the hooliganism opportunities that the 80's game offered I'm sure they would have been far more amenable to the sport.

The commentary would resume, flawlessly, once the beating had ended and the savages moved on to find kittens to crucify. “That unpleasantness seems to have abated, order has been restored, lets get back to the game”.

The 'after the fact' commentary was objected to by the goalkeeper. He noticed the pattern that every save he made was described as a Bohs shot, saved by the Pats keeper, and every goal I scored was credited as testimony to the majestic supremacy St Pats enjoyed over their city rivals. Complain as he did, it should be noted that his commentaries too were about as balanced as a North Korean 'State of the Nation' address.

These games we played until either the rain or the beatings got too heavy.

We'd then retreat indoors, to the fledgling world of computer-football. In the era of Pro-Evolution Soccer and FIFA 2012 games, it is difficult to comprehend how we got so much entertainment from primitive efforts as Kick-Off 2, Microprose Soccer and Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.

The physics of the games were not of this world – a player jumping to head the ball could cover about 20% of the pitch in his leap, centre-halves casually broke the world long jump record with each boinking clearance from their squarely pixelated and unfeasibly large heads. Players moved at extraordinary speed, and the computer controlled goalkeepers seemed to be programmed by an anarcho-absurdist art movement. The controlling joysticks owned no vocabulary beyond ‘point’ and ‘shoot’, yet invented nuance added infinite layers of meaning to all the clunkiness the 64kB of RAM could muster.

Again we provided our own commentary. High stakes Pats v Bohs games, multi-legged affairs depending on whether I was winning or not. These games with all their quirks of pseudo lunar gravity conditions were contested with a fervour that I genuinely think exceeded that of the real players week to week. Victories were gracelessly indulged, defeats an unbearable torment.

Noting that the ‘learning tool’ the shop spivs had sold them was being used for nothing other than video games by their kids, there would occasionally be a stuffy parental directive that the computer was turned off and we turn our attention to something more worthwhile.

Enter Subbuteo.

Marketed as table-top football, I expect there were few outside the Anglo-Irish gentry who possessed a table large enough to adequately host the vast cloth pitch. Consequently we played table-top football on the floor, on our knees, scurrying about the edges of the pitch to flick our players in to position.

Accidents were frequent.

Players met the most gruesome of injuries, full-backs were routinely sheared at the ankles when crushed by a careless knee leaning over the pitch. The snap was sickening. The severed plastic player would often still be stuck to the knee when the clumsy culprit rose; a tragic base with lonely boots filled now with utterly detached feet and mournful socks remained on the pitch. A once feared international footballer now a pathetic abandoned stump, an Ozymandias of the beautiful game.

Sometimes an urgent attacking initiative might result in a human player rising to his feet and leaping across the pitch to switch wings. I saw one West German midfielder horribly decapitated in consequence of such reckless enthusiasm. We lowered to half-mast the Crayola flag of the fatherland on a lollipop stick which we had blu-tacked to the top of the scoreboard for subsequent games in that tournament.

Medical techniques were rudimentary at best. Many a seemingly ruined stump of a man was blu-tacked back to his base and sent back to the pitch to man his post. It’s not like nowadays lad.

My friend had the genuine official Subbuteo Bohemian FC team. I had some budget team decked all in red which I, erm, ‘customized’ with Tip-ex to give a touch of whiteness to the sleeves and make a more realistic St Pats kit, who also doubled as Arsenal when the need arose. I must take this opportunity to apologize to John McDonnell and Eddie Gormley who suffered horrific eye-injuries on account of my unsurgeonlike hand in administering the Tip-ex to the red jerseys.

One rainy summer holiday afternoon, with RTE showing nothing but a caption for hours on end apologizing that rain had stopped play at Wimbledon, we ran an FAI Cup tournament from the quarter-final stages. We played out each of the ties between ourselves, broadly fiddling the thing to ensure that Bohs and Pats met in the final through what you might call collusive goalkeeping and officiating.

The final was to be deadly serious however.

We ironed the pitch in preparation. We lined the players up in a team group before the game, and took real photos with a borrowed camera which back in those days needed to be brought to a shopping centre to get developed. We had a tin foil wrapped egg cup for the winner. Honest to god, we sang Amhran Na bhFiann. We then lined up our formations and got the 2 x 10 minute halves underway.

The play was clam tight. Half time 0-0. Chances in the second half were few and far between again. My sweeper system was impenetrable. Dave Tilson had been in prodigious form in the quarter final and the semi, but I had his number, big sellotaped together lump that he was.

With time running out and extra time on its way I broke rapidly out of defence. The ball moved quickly down the left flank then bounced off a Bohs winger before touching the hand of my opponent which was resting on the pitch. Handball. Blatant. Free-kick.

He set his wall: four men. He flicked two defenders to get tighter to the two midfielders I had sent in to the box, but this was a shooting opportunity and we both knew it. He held the stem of his goalkeeper stick in one hand, and held the goal itself in its place with the other. Moving the goal frame from its spot was a penalty offence and could cost the cup. I was known to be more than a little ruthless in working these technical transgressions to my advantage, so things were pretty tense.

Pat Kelch was my free taker. He too was blu-tacked. Heavily blu-tacked in fact. One of the greatest properties of the adaptable adhesive was the extra ballast it gave to players. They could hit the ball extra hard with the added weight. For Kelch I used way more blu-tack than was needed. He was more adhesive than plastic if the truth be known but in keeping with the realities of the game, he hit the ball harder than any player I’ve ever seen.

I lined up the crucial free-’flick’ with immense concentration. I ok’d it with my opponent that I was now about to strike the free. He confirmed that he was ready. I loaded up my index finger, pulled it tight as a catapult, then snapped it out with all the force, intent and hurt I could summon from my being. 

The connection was sweet, Kelch propelled in to the air after impact with the ball and soared across the room. The ball burst through the wall sending the Gypo defenders spinning about the beautifully uncrinkled pitch like bowling pins. It tore past the helpless Bohs keeper, over the line, and smacked off the back stanchion of the goal frame before rolling back on to the 6 yard box.
  
“And Kelch has won it for St Pats!!!!....the very gods are held spellbound by what they have just witnessed here at Lansdowne Road....a strike worthy of a world cup final has won the FAI Cup....the hurt is over....the Saints are back in heaven”

But. There were protests.

“I saved it”

“You didn’t save it”

“I saved it, look at where the ball is”

“It hit the back of the goal and came back out. It’s a goal, I win, you lose, Pats win the cup.”

“No they don’t”

“Yeah they do”

“You’re a fucking spa....”

...and the conversation went badly downhill from there.

There may have been arm twisting. There might have been finger bending. It’s possible there were remarks about mothers. If we knew how to waterboard, we’d have done it. Some hitherto intact players were visited by a vengefulness so cruel and wanton that they were literally crushed by their feuding overlords and sent to the blu-tack ward. It wasn’t pretty. Match abandoned.

Decades on, this is the first time I have been able to address the hurt of the abandoned cup final. Morally St Pats were the winners, but in true League of Ireland tradition, our Subbuteo record books show only an asterisk and a lengthy explanation of injustices and the damage done.

I believe we may have stuck to European club tournaments thereafter .