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 .

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.