SHOULD YOU ENCOURAGE your kids to support the same football team as you – when you no longer live near the ground and there are a number of closer options?
Each to their own style of dysfunctional parenting, but I’d always thought no. Let the young make their own way. I’m a Cork City fan because I grew up there. My young fella would likely follow Pat’s or Rovers, the nearest teams to where we live in Kildare.
It would be a bit of a sickener to be an accomplice to that, but I’d do it. I could be that bigger man… smiling in a dead-eyed but hopefully benevolent way as they scored a goal and everyone else threw their arms up. The more I thought about it, the less bad it seemed. This would be a new personal frontier. On the other side would be a dignified dad who put his own petty prejudices last and his child’s hassle-free development to the fore.
“Your children are not your children,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in the Prophet. “You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.” Must have faced a similar football dilemma, Kahlil.
So there we were a few years back at Tallaght watching Rovers against Damian Duff’s Shelbourne. It’s not a bad scene. Cheap parking near the ground. Access to fast food close to parking and ground. The Rovers fans are mainly sound. The older guy next to us is a gent, full of eccentricity and observations which make great sense. The seats are nice, the view decent and they are playing the ball around in a way which, let’s face it, my beloved have not always done, especially in recent years. Yeah… this could be OK.
Like fuck it could. This is bullshit.
You tell the voice in your head to pipe down. Kahlil was right. “Seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
This is a betrayal…
Relax, it’s the cycle of life.
Have you forgotten about Bishopstown in early 93-94, that jammy equalizer? And everything before and since?
Yes I have. That was then, this is now, Rovers trailing Shels by a goal at home as the clock ticks down.
Rovers find an equalizer. Can’t remember who scored but I remembered what happened next. I rose to my feet like everybody else and took in the celebrations, if not joining them. Fans in delirium after a goal is always a fine sight, unless it’s at your expense.
“They might get a winner yet here,” I said to the young lad when we sat down. “Yeah,” he said, leaning across. “I don’t care. I was secretly delighted when they were losing.”
I know what you’re thinking here. Kids are sensitive to their parents’ feelings. They pick up on things you think you have the sophistication and maturity to mask. It’s just people-pleasing being adopted at a young age, and a shame he felt the need to do it.
I know all that. And I know you’re probably going “Kahlil Gibran? This is more Philip Larkin, ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do’.”
Yeah, you can think all of that, and I won’t argue. But in that moment I felt the father-son bond in a profound way. We are City from the Cross.
***
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Looking back, it was unrealistic to think he might be impressed with Tallaght when his eyes had seen the glory. By then, he’d drank Coca-Cola in the Horse Shoe, queued for chips in the Lennox’s on Tory Top Road, gazed across the Turners Cross pitch with a backdrop of Christ the King church against the Montenotte hills.
Friday night lights: Turners Cross.
And I might have got him the odd jersey along the way. And told him it would be a cold day in hell before these Dublin teams, posturing in their Conference League status, went toe-to-toe with Bayern Munich, or the Man United-conquering Galatasaray. And did it with a goalscorer who had spent the morning working a shift and had won All-Irelands with the Cork Gaelic footballers. I wasn’t trying to indoctrinate anybody, really. Some genes just aren’t recessive. Cork soccer is something you cannot deny.
Cork football may be the thing you can’t kill, but it’s hard to define too. Dublin is easier to get a read on. You can generalise about them more readily, picturing the technical ball player, skills learned on the streets, honed in the DDSL, before they move to the professional world.
They speak the lexicon. Listen to Keith Tracey next time he’s on the radio; if ever there was a man fluent in football-ese. I find him a pleasure, he reads the game so well and explains it in a way which belies a lifetime in the sport but doesn’t baffle the audience.
The grandees of Dublin football, John Giles, Liam Brady, Ronnie Whelan, it’s hard to imagine them as anything other than players. When GAA appears in the early chapters of Giles and Brady’s books, it’s because some draconian brother was pushing it as a more wholesome alternative to the garrison game, while threatening all sorts in the event of non-compliance.
The lads, of course, weren’t having a bar of it. They were serious football people, from serious football families. Not Church nor state would get in the way of their destiny: the centre of the park.
Your Cork footballer is more elusive. They’re not sure of their best position, or even their best sport. So many of the famous Cork sportspeople could so easily have been something else.
Tomás Ó Sé in his autobiography was grappling with Cork’s Gaelic football challenges. There was a depth of talent there, he said, but as somebody who had spent years living and working in Cork, he could see that kids were being pulled in so many different directions. He was part right. There are so many different directions, but very little pulling. Instead, there’s wilful gambolling from one thing to the next.
The Corkonion spirit is not monocultural. We live in the era of the specialist and have done for some time, but Cork remains generalist. They could focus more discriminately on one thing, maybe two. But Cork people, kids and adults alike, would just get bored by that. They think they can do it all. Or at least give it a right go.
Denis Irwin didn’t mind if he played right back or left back. It was no drama. He’d have been as comfortable at left wing-forward for the Cork hurlers.
Denis Irwin gets a tackle in on Steven Gerrard. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Roy Keane went from box-to-box midfielder to the holding role without missing a beat. Centre-half was as straightforward.
Dave Barry should have been in England for years before Keane, such a pure striker of the ball and intelligent reader of either code of football.
We won’t even get into all of the dual GAA players and rugby pros with promising hurling or football careers in their past.
It’s not that Cork has a more talented population than anywhere else. They’re just madly optimistic.
A great myth about the Cork public is they don’t tolerate losers. This is a gross simplification. They won’t tolerate a losing mindset or pragmatism as a means of staying competitive. You have to go for it, be ambitious and yield to nobody; win or deplete yourself trying. Losing itself has never been an issue.
The Cork footballers leading up to 1989, Cork City before winning the title in 1993, Munster pre-2006, and the Cork hurlers now. These teams were and are adored because they channel the spirit of the place. They dared to try; to bare themselves emotionally only to fail and come back again and again.
***
Cork soccer always comes back, and it has been forced to come back more times than most. Eight different clubs have represented the city in the League of Ireland, and that number is up for debate. It depends on how far you want to go into the semantics of whether Evergreen are different to Cork Celtic, or how little, if anything, there was between your Cork Alberts and Albert Rovers.
Cork City, version 1.0, folded in the late 1930s, to be replaced by Cork United, who managed to win five League of Ireland titles in their seven-and-a-half years of existence.
They were followed by Cork Athletic, who eventually became Cork Hibs.
Someone older could tell me otherwise but I’ve always understood Cork City to have a lot of Cork Hibs and Cork Celtic about them, with the Flower Lodge roots and Turners Cross residency.
The old Shed end. Andrew Paton / INPHO
Andrew Paton / INPHO / INPHO
The ins and outs of why every club folded I couldn’t begin to understand. Yet I do know there is a pattern with soccer in Cork. The bad has its genesis in the good, and it works the other way too. Play a stormer in the Champions League semi-final, and in the process get suspended from that final – peak Cork inclination. Drag your country to the World Cup only to… we need not go into that.
It’s a law of nature at an institutional level too. The moment of great triumph, when it looks as if hegemony is assured, is followed by calamity. Bankruptcy, relegation, protest, scandal, you name it. Yet, when all seems desperate, self-destruction cedes to self-improvement and the warm air of spring.
A third relegation from the Premier League in as many attempts to establish a foothold was a downer. The slump has been more prolonged than usual, and sometimes you wonder if the financial stakes of the game have been raised to a level beyond the means of current owner Dermot Usher.
The spectre of another season in Division 1 is not great, but it does not bother me that much. I get to three or four games a year at the Cross now so am not as invested as the true fans who attend every week, many of them home and away. I’m just happy to be there, taking in the scenery I once took for granted, serene that I’m home.
Getting to the cup final was at the same wildly unexpected and no surprise at all. That’s just the way it is. City could get beaten on Sunday by a score which reflects the 42 points between themselves and Rovers. Or they could do something eccentric, in keeping with their character and history, and win.
On Sunday we will travel the short distance with a most un-Cork like perspective of just being happy to be there. We’ll take our place among the thousands at the Lansdowne Road end of the ground.
Cork City fans.
No matter what happens, it will be a glorious massing of the people who give Cork football its defiance, humour, bite, madness and irresistible life force. The ones who have kept it steadfastly these past five years are the most deserving of their day in the flare smoke and din.
They’ll be joined by the rest of us who left but never really did, who learned long ago that the most telling thing on the badge which has been used down through the decades by Cork City, Hibs, Athletic and more besides was not the ships, or the towers, or any slogan, but the tide which rises and falls. It’s there in the flow of the water, all of our yesterdays and the surge of tomorrow.
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Often down, but never out: The mad and irresistible appeal of Cork soccer
SHOULD YOU ENCOURAGE your kids to support the same football team as you – when you no longer live near the ground and there are a number of closer options?
Each to their own style of dysfunctional parenting, but I’d always thought no. Let the young make their own way. I’m a Cork City fan because I grew up there. My young fella would likely follow Pat’s or Rovers, the nearest teams to where we live in Kildare.
It would be a bit of a sickener to be an accomplice to that, but I’d do it. I could be that bigger man… smiling in a dead-eyed but hopefully benevolent way as they scored a goal and everyone else threw their arms up. The more I thought about it, the less bad it seemed. This would be a new personal frontier. On the other side would be a dignified dad who put his own petty prejudices last and his child’s hassle-free development to the fore.
“Your children are not your children,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in the Prophet. “You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts.” Must have faced a similar football dilemma, Kahlil.
So there we were a few years back at Tallaght watching Rovers against Damian Duff’s Shelbourne. It’s not a bad scene. Cheap parking near the ground. Access to fast food close to parking and ground. The Rovers fans are mainly sound. The older guy next to us is a gent, full of eccentricity and observations which make great sense. The seats are nice, the view decent and they are playing the ball around in a way which, let’s face it, my beloved have not always done, especially in recent years. Yeah… this could be OK.
Like fuck it could. This is bullshit.
You tell the voice in your head to pipe down. Kahlil was right. “Seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.”
This is a betrayal…
Relax, it’s the cycle of life.
Have you forgotten about Bishopstown in early 93-94, that jammy equalizer? And everything before and since?
Yes I have. That was then, this is now, Rovers trailing Shels by a goal at home as the clock ticks down.
Rovers find an equalizer. Can’t remember who scored but I remembered what happened next. I rose to my feet like everybody else and took in the celebrations, if not joining them. Fans in delirium after a goal is always a fine sight, unless it’s at your expense.
“They might get a winner yet here,” I said to the young lad when we sat down. “Yeah,” he said, leaning across. “I don’t care. I was secretly delighted when they were losing.”
I know what you’re thinking here. Kids are sensitive to their parents’ feelings. They pick up on things you think you have the sophistication and maturity to mask. It’s just people-pleasing being adopted at a young age, and a shame he felt the need to do it.
I know all that. And I know you’re probably going “Kahlil Gibran? This is more Philip Larkin, ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to but they do’.”
Yeah, you can think all of that, and I won’t argue. But in that moment I felt the father-son bond in a profound way. We are City from the Cross.
***
Looking back, it was unrealistic to think he might be impressed with Tallaght when his eyes had seen the glory. By then, he’d drank Coca-Cola in the Horse Shoe, queued for chips in the Lennox’s on Tory Top Road, gazed across the Turners Cross pitch with a backdrop of Christ the King church against the Montenotte hills.
And I might have got him the odd jersey along the way. And told him it would be a cold day in hell before these Dublin teams, posturing in their Conference League status, went toe-to-toe with Bayern Munich, or the Man United-conquering Galatasaray. And did it with a goalscorer who had spent the morning working a shift and had won All-Irelands with the Cork Gaelic footballers. I wasn’t trying to indoctrinate anybody, really. Some genes just aren’t recessive. Cork soccer is something you cannot deny.
Cork football may be the thing you can’t kill, but it’s hard to define too. Dublin is easier to get a read on. You can generalise about them more readily, picturing the technical ball player, skills learned on the streets, honed in the DDSL, before they move to the professional world.
They speak the lexicon. Listen to Keith Tracey next time he’s on the radio; if ever there was a man fluent in football-ese. I find him a pleasure, he reads the game so well and explains it in a way which belies a lifetime in the sport but doesn’t baffle the audience.
The grandees of Dublin football, John Giles, Liam Brady, Ronnie Whelan, it’s hard to imagine them as anything other than players. When GAA appears in the early chapters of Giles and Brady’s books, it’s because some draconian brother was pushing it as a more wholesome alternative to the garrison game, while threatening all sorts in the event of non-compliance.
The lads, of course, weren’t having a bar of it. They were serious football people, from serious football families. Not Church nor state would get in the way of their destiny: the centre of the park.
Your Cork footballer is more elusive. They’re not sure of their best position, or even their best sport. So many of the famous Cork sportspeople could so easily have been something else.
Tomás Ó Sé in his autobiography was grappling with Cork’s Gaelic football challenges. There was a depth of talent there, he said, but as somebody who had spent years living and working in Cork, he could see that kids were being pulled in so many different directions. He was part right. There are so many different directions, but very little pulling. Instead, there’s wilful gambolling from one thing to the next.
The Corkonion spirit is not monocultural. We live in the era of the specialist and have done for some time, but Cork remains generalist. They could focus more discriminately on one thing, maybe two. But Cork people, kids and adults alike, would just get bored by that. They think they can do it all. Or at least give it a right go.
Denis Irwin didn’t mind if he played right back or left back. It was no drama. He’d have been as comfortable at left wing-forward for the Cork hurlers.
Roy Keane went from box-to-box midfielder to the holding role without missing a beat. Centre-half was as straightforward.
Dave Barry should have been in England for years before Keane, such a pure striker of the ball and intelligent reader of either code of football.
We won’t even get into all of the dual GAA players and rugby pros with promising hurling or football careers in their past.
It’s not that Cork has a more talented population than anywhere else. They’re just madly optimistic.
A great myth about the Cork public is they don’t tolerate losers. This is a gross simplification. They won’t tolerate a losing mindset or pragmatism as a means of staying competitive. You have to go for it, be ambitious and yield to nobody; win or deplete yourself trying. Losing itself has never been an issue.
The Cork footballers leading up to 1989, Cork City before winning the title in 1993, Munster pre-2006, and the Cork hurlers now. These teams were and are adored because they channel the spirit of the place. They dared to try; to bare themselves emotionally only to fail and come back again and again.
***
Cork soccer always comes back, and it has been forced to come back more times than most. Eight different clubs have represented the city in the League of Ireland, and that number is up for debate. It depends on how far you want to go into the semantics of whether Evergreen are different to Cork Celtic, or how little, if anything, there was between your Cork Alberts and Albert Rovers.
Cork City, version 1.0, folded in the late 1930s, to be replaced by Cork United, who managed to win five League of Ireland titles in their seven-and-a-half years of existence.
They were followed by Cork Athletic, who eventually became Cork Hibs.
Someone older could tell me otherwise but I’ve always understood Cork City to have a lot of Cork Hibs and Cork Celtic about them, with the Flower Lodge roots and Turners Cross residency.
The ins and outs of why every club folded I couldn’t begin to understand. Yet I do know there is a pattern with soccer in Cork. The bad has its genesis in the good, and it works the other way too. Play a stormer in the Champions League semi-final, and in the process get suspended from that final – peak Cork inclination. Drag your country to the World Cup only to… we need not go into that.
It’s a law of nature at an institutional level too. The moment of great triumph, when it looks as if hegemony is assured, is followed by calamity. Bankruptcy, relegation, protest, scandal, you name it. Yet, when all seems desperate, self-destruction cedes to self-improvement and the warm air of spring.
A third relegation from the Premier League in as many attempts to establish a foothold was a downer. The slump has been more prolonged than usual, and sometimes you wonder if the financial stakes of the game have been raised to a level beyond the means of current owner Dermot Usher.
The spectre of another season in Division 1 is not great, but it does not bother me that much. I get to three or four games a year at the Cross now so am not as invested as the true fans who attend every week, many of them home and away. I’m just happy to be there, taking in the scenery I once took for granted, serene that I’m home.
Getting to the cup final was at the same wildly unexpected and no surprise at all. That’s just the way it is. City could get beaten on Sunday by a score which reflects the 42 points between themselves and Rovers. Or they could do something eccentric, in keeping with their character and history, and win.
On Sunday we will travel the short distance with a most un-Cork like perspective of just being happy to be there. We’ll take our place among the thousands at the Lansdowne Road end of the ground.
No matter what happens, it will be a glorious massing of the people who give Cork football its defiance, humour, bite, madness and irresistible life force. The ones who have kept it steadfastly these past five years are the most deserving of their day in the flare smoke and din.
They’ll be joined by the rest of us who left but never really did, who learned long ago that the most telling thing on the badge which has been used down through the decades by Cork City, Hibs, Athletic and more besides was not the ships, or the towers, or any slogan, but the tide which rises and falls. It’s there in the flow of the water, all of our yesterdays and the surge of tomorrow.
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column League of Ireland Soccer Cork City