Piece by Eamon Sweeney from the back of the Indo sport
Eamonn Sweeney
.....
I used to hate Shamrock Rovers. And I wasn't alone in this. In every town with a League of Ireland club Shams were public enemy number one. Long before ABUs were heard of, most followers of domestic soccer were ABSRs.
They were the team you loved to beat, largely because they were the team which usually beat you. In the 1960s, the great Hoops team of the time played my club Sligo Rovers.
Sligo missed an open goal in the first minute, Shams went on to win 7-0. After the game Liam Touhy, who I think had scored a hat-trick, was asked if the game might have turned out differently had Sligo scored that first chance. "It would have," he's reputed to have said, "we would have won 7-1." We chafed under their domination, resented what we saw as their arrogance.
So why am I not delighted this morning? Shams have been relegated for the first time in their history after losing a play-off to Dublin City.
I should have leaped from my bed and sang, "Can you hear the Shams boys sing? We can't hear a f***ing thing." But I didn't. Because the relegation of the one time kingpins of Irish soccer is just one more step in the horrible decline of a great club. We are all diminished by their failure.
Incidentally I must apologise for my use of the word 'Shams', which I know bugs the life out of the club's fans. But it's part of my culture, as far as I'm concerned there's only one Rovers. After all, who's the Premier Division club here? Sorry, a brief reversion to type there.
I was there the day the Hoops began their slide into oblivion. An outsider wouldn't have seen the doom clouds gathering on the horizon, the club were chasing a League and Cup double at the time, an assignment they successfully completed. But those of us who were at the FAI Cup semi-final between Sligo Rovers and Shamrock Rovers did have a feeling that a mighty era was coming to an end.
That was the day when Glenmalure Park, Milltown finally closed for business. Within a couple of years there were houses on what had been one of the great Irish sporting venues and Shamrock Rovers were forced to become football refugees, flitting from place to place like disinherited White Russians fleeing the October Revolution.
The heart and soul was ripped out of Shamrock Rovers that day and, though there have been moments of revival, it has been largely downhill since. The Hoops became just one more struggling League of Ireland team until, on Friday night, the extent of their decline was made horribly obvious.
The irony is that the team which played in that 1-1 draw back in 1986 was one of the finest to represent the club, one of the best the League has seen. Pat Byrne, Noel Larkin, Mick Byrne, Peter Eccles, Mick Neville, they were names to conjure with on the local scene. They had been brought to the club by the great Jim McLaughlin but, in that final season, they were managed by Dermot Keely, a fearsome centre-back in the Chopper Harris mould transformed into a boss of considerable substance.
That it was Keely who was at the helm of the Dublin City team which relegated Rovers (OK, I give in) is perhaps the unkindest cut of all. Keely was only at Dublin City because of his outrage at what happened last season when his old club poached Roddy Collins, then manager of City.
It was short-termism, it was cheap and it was nasty and Rovers did it in the name of staying in the top flight. How silly that reasoning looks now. Collins wasn't even in the dug-out for the play-off games; the club had suspended him.
Someone like Keely would have kept them up but Rovers are ace marksmen when it comes to shooting themselves in the foot. (They would have been safe had they not been deducted eight points for off the field irregularities, something which would normally elicit sympathy had it not seemed like just one more episode in the sorry saga.)
To see the Hoops ending up like this is akin to seeing a hero of your youth reduced to panhandling in a bus station. Because when they were good, no-one matched them for glamour and accomplishment in this country.
The six-in-a-row Cup-winning team of 60s set a record which will never be beaten. That team, of Touhy, Frank O'Neill, Johnny Fullam, Paddy Mulligan, Mick Leech and David Pugh, was good enough to come within a few minutes of a place in the Cup Winners Cup semi-final before a late Gerd Muller goal for Bayern Munich denied them.
The Johnny Giles experiment of the late 70s was not successful, but it's impossible to think of him at any other League of Ireland club. No-one else had the cachet.
It would be tempting to turn the decline and fall of the club into some kind of moral tale embodying a similar weakening of the league at large. But what must be most galling is that as Rovers have waned, other clubs have risen.
Once poor relations, Shelbourne and St Pat's, have made the opposite journey to their former superiors. But, try as they might, Shelbourne will never have the same magic about them as Shamrock Rovers. Money can't buy tradition. Tradition can, however, be tarnished by incompetence.
The spectre which has always haunted the big Dublin clubs is that of Drumcondra, the giant felled for good in the 60s. Shams look increasingly like Drums as the years go by (and not just because they're regularly beaten).
It took a considerable anti-talent to reduce them to their current state but the root cause of all their troubles is the move from Milltown. It's been sad to see them move from ground to ground, perpetual nomads.
You can almost hear that old Ewan McColl song about Travellers playing, the one with the chorus of, 'Get along, move along, go, move, shift.' It has been no way for a club to try and get by.
I remember back in 1994 when Sligo played Shams in a big cup tie in the RDS, the visiting fans eliciting a great deal of ire from the ostensible home support by singing, "You're **** and you have no ground."
The first part of the chant was unfair, the second undeniable. Whatever happens to Sligo, they always have The Showgrounds, as Dundalk have Oriel Park and Bohs have Dalymount. Pats spent a few years in exile in Harold's Cross but returned revitalised to Richmond Park.
But, nearly 20 years after being put out on the road, the one time kings are still wandering the highways and byways.
There are clubs which the Premier Division can do without, the likes of UCD, Bray Wanderers, Dublin City and Longford Town, who draw from the same pool of Dublin players and have little organic local support.
But it can't do without Shamrock Rovers. A home game against Shams was the biggest league match every season for Sligo, we've been robbed of that big day for the moment and so have the other clubs. That's a pity.
There may be tougher times to come for the faded aristocrats. Division One can be a bit like a crack habit, easy enough to fall into but pure hell to get out of. Next season, every club will be looking to take a scalp they can never have expected to be on offer, and it will take a good manager to motivate players for those trips to Kilkenny, Cobh and Monaghan.
Limerick and Athlone know just how hard it is to get out of the dead zone and the debilitating effect of a prolonged stay. The Premier Division won't be the same without those lads in the green and white jerseys strutting on to the pitch as if they were doing everyone else a favour by turning up.
Jimmy Dunne wore that jersey, so did Paddy Coad, Paddy Ambrose, Alan Campbell, Liam Buckley, Jacko McDonagh, Ray Treacy, it wasn't designed for trips to Monaghan and Cobh.
Rovers are at rock bottom now and the options are recovery or death.
I hope they recover. It amazes me, but I really do.
Particulary love the bit about us being the only rovers, after all we are the premier division team:)
