Tribune Article 03 09 06

[sonofstan]

Anyone read Eoghan Rice's piece in the review section of the Tribune on the glory hunting tendencies of the Irish football fan? nothing startlingly new, and very hoop- centric, but pretty much preaching the foot.ie party line on glory hunting, on how English people find themselves able to support their local teams and so on; plus it's a page and a half and not on the sports pages.

Also, he mentions a crowd of 21,000 at Rovers V Cork Hibs in 1971 in Dalymount for League decider; is this true? and why was a Rovers league match being palyed in Dalyer?

[Billy Lord]

It was a play-off for the league, and the official attendance was actually 28,000. Hibs won 3-1.

[dcfcsteve]

Any chance someone could post it up ?

[sonofstan]

Tried to paste it up here but it's too long - you can get it on www.tribune.ie - you need to subscribe but it's free for a trial period

[ciaraa]

Decent article though nothing new there really. Liked the comparison with lower league english teams and the attendances that they get.

[pineapple stu]

It's typed up on the Drogheda forum - http://www.irishfootienetwork.com/viewtopic.php?t=4753.

[BohsFans]

"I've been a Leeds fan since I was six years old, " he says. "I'm 43 now, so that's quite a lot of time. I don't really know why I started following Leeds, I was just a kid and I picked them.

Sickening isn't it!


Also:

The Ennis-based United fans make four trips to Old Trafford every year, although this year they are struggling to organise their trips. The club usually guarantees them tickets for four fixtures, but no guarantee has been given this year. Gibbons blames United's increasing popularity for the ticket troubles. Real fans can't get tickets anymore, he says, but he denies that this has been the situation for Manchester-based fans for years as increasing numbers of foreign supporters' clubs snap up tickets.

"The majority of people in Manchester follow Manchester City, " he says. "United's fans don't come from Manchester.

and they got the name of his local el club wrong. It's Limerick FC not Limerick City!

[Partizan]

You'll never beat the Irish huh!

[pete]

From www.tribune.ie in Review section:

Ireland is a nation obsessedwith soccer . . . too bad the objects of most fans' affections are grossly over-hyped cross-channel clubs, while games in the domestic Eircom League are played out in front of largely empty terraces, writes Eoghan Rice

YOU CAN see them every Saturday morning. Queuing up for planes, queing up for boats, each one destined for England.

They mingle with other passengers, but they stick out from the crowd; their earlymorning red eyes usually accompanied by red scarves and red jersies. But not always . . .

sometimes the scarves are white, others are blue, some are claret.

These are Ireland's football fans . . . thousands of them shelling out hundreds of euro each week to follow their favourite clubs.

They come from all corners of Ireland, but their sporting allegiences do not. Their accents may say Dublin or Cork, but their clubs are Liverpool or Manchester United.

Ireland is a country obsessed with the magic of the round ball.

Go into any pub and they'll be talking about football; flick through any newspaper and it will be filled with pages and pages devoted to the beautiful game. The football Ireland is obsessed with, however, isn't our own, it is that of our nearest neighbour.

The Premiership is as popular in Ireland as it is in its country of birth. But why has Ireland latched onto English football?

And why do the stadiums of Irish clubs lie half empty in this football-obsessed country?

Adrian Kierns is chairman of the second-largest Leeds United Supporters Club (LUSC) in the world. He is not from Leeds, however, nor are any of his members. They are all from Dublin. With 350 signed-up members, the Dublin branch of the LUSC is larger than any supporters' club actually based in Leeds. Only Scandinavia boasts a larger Leeds United supporters club. "But they have three countries to get members from, we're only Dublin, " Kierns protests.

Kierns' story of how he fell for a club in England is typical of so many Irish supporters of the English game . . . there is no real reason why he fell in love with Leeds, he just did.

"I've been a Leeds fan since I was six years old, " he says. "I'm 43 now, so that's quite a lot of time. I don't really know why I started following Leeds, I was just a kid and I picked them.

Johnny Giles was playing for them at the time, so there was an Irish link there."

Football was always big in the Kierns household, but since there was no geographical basis for their support, each family member had a different club: "There was a Manchester United fan, an Arsenal fan, a Liverpool fan, an Aston Villa fan and a Celtic fan . . . so I decided to follow Leeds."

At any Leeds United home game, there will be an average of 15 members of the Dublin supporters club in attendance.

Kierns makes it to "10 or 12" games a season.

Kierns began following Leeds United in the early 1970s. His decision to adopt a club in the north of English coincided with the most seismic shock to ever hit Irish football . . . the introduction of televised matches from England. The effect that the introduction of a weekly highlights programme . . .

showing all the best bits of a game condensed into a twominute package . . . had on the Irish game was immediate.

Prior to the early 1970s, crowds of up to 20,000 would have attended League of Ireland matches. However, when televised highlights came in, the crowds all but disappeared overnight. In 1971, 21,000 people packed into Dalymount Park to watch a top-of-the-table league clash between Shamrock Rovers and Cork Hibs. By 1973, just a couple of hundred souls could be found on those same terraces.

It was as if the country simply gave up on the domestic game once they were offered snippets of a superior product. From then on, children playing football in the street were not mimicking the local heroes, they were trying to be Charlie George or Kevin Keegan.

English football had always been popular in Ireland . . . the exploits of George Best and Manchester United in the 1960s were legendary . . . but Irish people generally had two clubs: their local one that they would watch live and their English one that they would listen to on the radio. Once the English club appeared on television, the Irish club was left to fend for itself.

Today, with the massive influence of Sky television, football is rarely off our football screens . . . three live games on Saturday, two live games on Sunday, a live game on Monday, Champions League on Tuesday and Wednesday, Uefa cup on Thursday and then a break for a day on Friday. The blanket coverage means that it has never been easier to adopt a club in England and follow their progress.

Eddie Gibbons has been following Manchester United for 30 years and is head of the Ennis branch of the United supporters' club. He says that membership of United supporters' clubs in Ireland . . . of which there are well over 100 . . .

surged in the l990s when the club enjoyed a spell of huge success. He says Irish interest has moved to clubs like Chelsea over recent years, but interest in United remains high.

"I'm not sure why I started following United, I just did, " he says. "There has always been a general trend for Irish people to follow United, for some reason.

I'm not really sure why because traditionally it isn't considered to be an Irish club."

The Ennis-based United fans make four trips to Old Trafford every year, although this year they are struggling to organise their trips. The club usually guarantees them tickets for four fixtures, but no guarantee has been given this year. Gibbons blames United's increasing popularity for the ticket troubles. Real fans can't get tickets anymore, he says, but he denies that this has been the situation for Manchester-based fans for years as increasing numbers of foreign supporters' clubs snap up tickets.

"The majority of people in Manchester follow Manchester City, " he says. "United's fans don't come from Manchester.

They don't depend on local support, they depend on foreign support."

Being from Clare, the closest Eircom League side to Gibbons is Limerick City. However, he hasn't taken in a domestic game "in a very long time".

"GAA is the most popular sport in Clare, but the majority of GAA people would have a Premiership side too, " he says.

"Very few people pay attention to the League of Ireland. There is no appeal in the local clubs.

There's very little exposure and so there are no household names. There's no appeal if you don't know the players. Even when games are on television, I don't know anybody who watches them."

Gibbons' experience of televised Eircom League games does not back up official figures.

Last season, a television crowd of 355,000 watched Cork City take on Derry City in a league fixture in Turner's Cross.

However, despite high viewing figures, RTE shows only occasional live matches. It is left to RTE's commercial competitor, TV3, to screen an Eircom League highlights programme.

Sky television remains hugely popular, also. According to a spokesman for Sky, there are no certain figures for how many Irish households subscribe to Sky Sports, but the "majority" of Sky Digital customers do so.

There are 427,000 Sky Digital customers in Ireland.

John Craddock, of the National League Supporters Association (NLSA), questions what impact television has had on people's perceived notions of what being a football supporter is. A regular at Belfield Park to watch UCD in the Eircom League, he wonders to what degree many football fans in Ireland are actually supporters of the game and to what degree they are merely absorbing a form of entertainment.

"People follow clubs in England because of the amount of exposure they get to the Premiership, " he says. "I think you have to differentiate between a fan and a supporter. A fan may like a certain team and follow their results, but they are not supporting the club. By watching games on television, they are just buying a product.

It's the same as watching anything else on television. If people want to watch football on television, that is their right. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they have any interest in the game of football."

Craddock points to Scotland as an example of a country exposed to huge amounts of the English Premiership but which has retained a large following for the domestic game. While many Irish people blame poor stadiums for their lack of interest in the domestic game, Craddock dismisses this as an excuse.

"Stadiums like Dalymount or Tolka Park are just as good as most rugby or GAA grounds in Ireland, " he says. "If people are willing to stand on terraces and watch rugby or hurling, there is no reason why they shouldn't do so for football. The only difference is that they don't want to attend domestic football games. Aside from Croke Park, there isn't a good stadium in Ireland."

The first Liverpool FC game Tony O'Neill attended was in Waterford. The mighty Reds of Anfield came to southeast Ireland to take on Waterford United, beating the local side 2-1.

That was 18 years ago . . . today, O'Neill is secretary of the Waterford Liverpool Supporters Club.

Unlike many Premiership fans, O'Neill's background is in the League of Ireland. He was a referee for years and, as well as his two or three trips to Liverpool each season, he is still a regular at the RSC to watch Waterford United.

"There has been saturation coverage of the Premiership over the last 10 years, " he says. "You can't turn the television on without seeing a game these days. It's inevitable that Irish people are going to follow English clubs . . . any Irish person in their 20s has grown up with Roy Keane and Manchester United."

[pete]

Although a devotee of the red half of Merseyside, O'Neill argues that blanket media coverage of the Premiership has not been good for Ireland.

"The saturation probably isn't a good thing, " he says. "It has made it too easy to be an armchair fan. Too many people just watch games on television, they never attend any.

People don't bother with their local clubs because it is easier to sit in your sittingroom and watch the Premiership on television than it is to put your coat on and go out and actually watch a game."

The lack of financial backers in Ireland will always curtail the development of the sport here, he says. With no government investment and business so reluctant to put their hands in their pockets to help Irish football, it is only natural that fans will drift away and look elsewhere for their football fix.

Indeed, government inaction has been a telling feature of domestic football. While the government continues to pour hundreds of millions of euro into GAA, horse-racing and greyhound-racing, domestic football clubs have been starved off any investment. The one real government attempt to help the Eircom League . . .

the construction of a stadium in Tallaght, primarily for Shamrock Rovers but also earmarked for one other club . . . has been disgracefully held up by objections from the GAA.

When he was a child, Dominic Hammond's local club was Nottingham Forest and so when he moved to Ireland at the age of 10 his sporting allegience came with him.

Hammond is now involved in the Irish Nottingham Forest Supporters' Club.

Over 120 Irish football fans are paidup members of the club.

"Most of our members would be in their late 20s or early 30s, " he says.

"They would have been kids during the Brian Clough years, when Forest were the top club in England."

Clough's success as a manager . . . not to mention his notorious off-field reputation . . . led to a surge of interest in Forest. Today, the Irish supporters club travels to Nottingham on five official trips a season, with other members making independent journeys at other times.

Hammond says that very few Irish Forest fans would take any interest in the Eircom League. He argues that the quality of football on offer in Ireland would put supporters off, although he concedes that many Eircom League clubs would today be able to match Forest, who lie in lowly League One.

Much of Ireland's fascination with football dates back to the summer of 1990, when the sporting landscape of Ireland shifted. Jackie's Army went to Italy and the dizzy heights of the World Cup finals went to our heads.

Ever since that glorious summer when Ireland scraped four draws and a loss playing long-ball football in a team made up primarily of Englishmen, Irish people have felt that international success is our right.

Amongst the football nations of Europe, however, Ireland is the only country that boasts no football academies for young players and cannot support a professional league due to lack of public interest. Blame Brian Kerr all you like, but it is surely no wonder why international success has alluded us.

That Irish clubs cannot hope to match the standard of the Premiership is not in doubt. However, the refusal of many fans to look outside what is one of the top three leagues in the world is perhaps a telling sign of the television age we live in. Supporters have become so accustomed to seeing the best of the best play on their television screens that they refuse to entertain anything else. Out of the hundreds of millions of people who play football around the world, only 400 or so can make it to the Premiership. Does that mean that nobody else is worth watching?

Conversely, while Ireland is basking in the glory of the Premiership, many English fans are turning off. High ticket prices, millionaire footballers and soulless stadiums have, for many English fans, distorted the game.

Attendances at Premiership matches are falling, as more and more supporters turn to the lower leagues for their football.

Last week, an email arrived in the inbox of Shamrock Rovers. It was sent by an Everton fan from Liverpool who was in Dublin for a holiday and wandered up to Tolka Park to see Rovers take on Bohemians.

"As Evertonians and having a team that plays in the English Premiership, we're spoilt really, " it read. "What struck me about your club's support was the way in which they got behind the team. Plus, the way there was a particular bond between fans and players. Everton have a good support, home and away, but there is a detachment from the team as the players are overpaid, etc. Me and my mate said we would definitely come to watch Shamrock again as it is a good chance to watch football how it should be played . . . away from Sky cameras and prima donna players."

The lower leagues in England have always boasted healthy attendances, something that stems from football being ingrained into English culture.

Last weekend in League Two, for example, 4,600 people watched Walsall take on Darlington, 4,500 watched Mansfield take on Lincoln, while 3,000 people turned up to see Accrington Stanley against Rochdale.

That attendances in the fourth division of English football remain higher than attendances in the top flight of Eircom League . . . an undoubtedly higher standard . . . speaks volumes about the culture of the two countries.

John Craddock of the NLSA argues that Irish people are more obsessed with big events than they are with sport. He points to Munster rugby as the most recent example. While there was barely a man, woman or child left in Cork or Limerick when Munster played in the European Rugby Cup Final in Cardiff, people forget that Munster's average home crowd this season was just 6,000, barely enough to half fill Thomond Park.

"You used to be able to buy a season ticket for Leinster rugby for £5 because nobody went to the games, " he says. "Now, you couldn't even buy a ticket for some of their matches they are so popular. It's the same in the GAA . . . everybody goes to the big championship games but nobody bothers with the league fixtures. I go to all the big championship games too, so maybe I'm just as bad. But at least I go and watch UCD every week."

[BohDiddley]

The original. Registration required.
Well done Sunday Tribune!

[A face]

The original. Registration required.
Well done Sunday Tribune!

Does Eoghan Rice write for them all the time ??

[hoopy]

He does. He did the book 'We Are Rovers' recently which was excellent

[dcfcsteve]

Decent article. Doesn't matter if there's "nothing new" in there - it's stuff that needs to be said. Time and time again.

A few good quotes from John in there as well.

Subtle writing to make the Leeds, Manchester and Forest supporting goons look stupid. Leeds and United fans had absolutely no idea why they'd spent large chunks of their lives and money supporting their particular teams, whilst the Forest gimp said Irish football was of a bad standard before agreeing it was no worse than his own team.....! Tragic.....

[gspain]

a few points.

I don't like the facts being wrong eg missing the fact that Rovers v Cork Hibs was a league playoff.

I don't think Liverpool have ever played in Waterford. I could be wrong but certainly can't recall it.

He seemed to claim the dropoff happened from 1971 to 1973 and then claimed that our interest in football started at Italia 90.

Getting our name wrong doesn't help.

He does make good points all right. I've no doubt that our top clubs would beat Nottm Forest but nobody from Nottingham is coming over to watch Derry or Shels. Our bottom clubs would probably beat the current Leeds team.

I'm glad somebody in the Tribune realises there is domestic football in this country.

Good points though on the support for cross channel football. It is staggering. Apparently 4,000 fans at any Man Utd home game are from Ireland (not the same 4,000). Most clubs would love that for a home game here. some clubs would be happy with that crowd for a season.

[DmanDmythDledge]

Excellent article.

How would the sales of The Sunday Tribune compare to the Sunday Independent?

[Poor Student]

Excellent article.

How would the sales of The Sunday Tribune compare to the Sunday Independent?

The Independent would outsell the Tribune by at least a 1:4 ratio.

[pete]

The lad who travels to the UK 10-12 times a season is clearly a football fan so how can eL clubs get this type of person to their grounds?

I believe in the UK many people support the local small club but also have a Premiership side?

However i just a little bit sad that someone might support a League One or League two side & suggest the eL sh!te.

[Soper]

I believe in the UK many people support the local small club but also have a Premiership side?

Well, it's probably true in England, but I know here people will primarily support a Premiership team, and also claim an interest in Cardiff City (especially at the moment when they are doing so well).

[dcfcsteve]

I believe in the UK many people support the local small club but also have a Premiership side?

Remember that the UK is more than just England !

In England, it's part of their footballing culture to support their local team. If they're a bit rubbish and/or playing at a low level, most people won't be active supporters, and will probably have a premiership (or other more successful local team) who they follow as well. But they will still want their local team to do well, and keep an eye out for them. However, as their local team's performances/standing improves, more will convert from passive to active support. But the concept of people actively turning their back on their local teams in large numbers and talking them down, as happens in Ireland, would seem completely alien to most English club football supporters.

Scotland used to be similar, but with the almost total dominance of the Old Firm over the last 10+ years, the culture for a lot of people has chnaged to supporting one or other of Celtic or Rangers regardless of where they are from. There is still a very large number of people who followed a team before this dynamic kicked-in - hence Hibs could get 40,000 fans out for their Cup Final with Livi a few seasons ago, whilst Hearts can get 30,000 odd for Europen games, and Aberdeen up to 15,000 for league games. But it does seem that large numbers of the younger generation in Scotland are beign lured to the Old Firm rather than their local team.

Wales is different again, and quite similar to Ireland. In North Wales, there is very strong support for English football : primarily Liverpool and Everton, given their geogrpahical closeness/links, but also Man U as well. The footballing culture in South Wales is different however. There they've had strong teams like Cardiff and Swansea to follow, and the support for local football is better there. However, it is still not as strong as in Scotland - probably because the dispersal of football teams around Wales makes it nigh on impossible to support a local side unless you go for the League of Wales. Which practically no Welsh football fans do.

And then there's one otehr constituent member of the UK, but we know enough about football there already....