AND SO THE wheel cranks around again, with Shamrock Rovers in a position to once again assert their status as Ireland’s most eminent football team.
The FAI Cup holders and now the new League champions, Rovers can today win their first double since 1987 against the opponents adjacent to the last day before their demise.
That ’87 FAI Cup win secured Rovers their third-straight double, sealed with a 3-0 win against Dundalk in the final at Dalymount Park.
This stream of success didn’t look like it was going to find arid ground anytime soon: Charlie Stuart concluded his Cup final match report for the Irish Press by quoting a bookmaker’s odds of 10/1 on Rovers winning the double again the following season.
“I would get my money on quick, such is the quality and determination of [player-manager] Dermot Keely’s team. This current Hoops team are the best in Ireland for the past three decades.”
“That team was capable of winning another two or three Leagues”, says Keely today, from his new home in Lanzarote.
But the pacing of many final acts in football is similar to how it proved in The Sopranos: nobody recognises the end until it’s over.
In truth, this end was foreshadowed by an on-pitch protest midway through the prior semi-final win over Sligo, summed up by a banner unfurled on the pitch reading “Fuck Tolka.”
That season was Rovers’ last at Glenmalure Park, with the Cup semi-final the last game played at Milltown before the ground was sold to property developers by the club’s directors in spite of the fans’ staunch opposition.
“Milltown without Rovers will be like the bed of a river that has dried up forever”, wrote Con Houlihan.
The club crossed the Liffey to share Tolka Park with Home Farm, but few of their supporters followed them.
Elements of the Keep Rovers At Milltown campaign became a kind of Wenger Out meme for the ’80s – Maureen O’Hara and Colm Meaney came out in support; Bono was marketed as a Rovers fan; and there was an attempt to go to the Vatican and get the Pope to sign a petition – but it was undergirded by a steely fan resistance.
Supporters effectively boycotted the games at Tolka Park and picketed outside the ground, with Rovers quickly falling from their heights. In the years that followed, they were relegated as often as they won the Premier Division until they finally found a permanent home at Tallaght in 2009.
“Moving to Tolka was a disaster”, says Keely. “It was such a shame for a really fantastic team to end all of a sudden. It was like someone coming in and shooting you: one minute you’re alive and kicking and the next you’re dead.”
Keely resigned at the end of that season, caught in the crossfire having not picked a side with the supporters.
“Rovers fans don’t like me for my stance on it, and I’ve apologised since”, says Keely.
“I felt that team was capable of winning another two or three Leagues no matter where we played, and I said at the time if we played on Dollymount Beach we would still have won the League.
“I’ve accepted this now, as you get older you realise how much it means to the fans. Footballers play and move from one club to another, but for the fans, it’s their life. I didn’t understand the fans’ reactions at the time.
“It was very selfish of me but you have to be selfish to win. I was a young manager, starting off. I’d won a double in my first year and was thinking ‘What’s next”?’
“‘I am going to win another double and another double and I’ll be feted as one of the best managers in the League of Ireland’, that’s what I was thinking. That’s the selfish part of being a manager, though maybe it’s just the way I think. A lot of people tell me I’m mad anyway.”
It took Dundalk to show Keely how he misunderstood the Rovers situation.
The only club for whom Keely played more often than Rovers was Dundalk, and he returned to manage them between 1993 and 1996. He later settled in the town, and went to Oriel Park every second Friday as a fan.
“Oriel Park is a kip, it must be one of the worst League of Ireland grounds in the country. There was talk a couple of years ago of a plot of land owned by the college, and that they could build a new stadium on that. But I couldn’t get my head around it. Oriel Park is the home of football in Dundalk.
“I am sure the players would have gone a mile down the road to play in a new stadium and loved it. But I had then become a fan, and I was saying, ‘I want to come to Oriel Park as I can walk up, go into the pub and have a pint with my friends, go up to the game, and have a couple of pints after the game and then ramble off home.
“I would have missed that as the other pitch was going to be a bit out of the town. It wasn’t too far, but at the same time I wouldn’t have been walking and wouldn’t have been able to get a drink and all that. So it’s only then I knew what the Rovers fans felt. It was that late when I realised: that’s what they felt. I know the managers and players would have been like me at Rovers, ‘Well I don’t care where we play, we just want to win the League.’ It’s such a short career you want to win as many leagues and cups as you can, that’s your goal.
“That’s what you have to do as a player. But if you grew up as a fan of Shamrock Rovers, your trip to Milltown would have been like that. It wasn’t just going to see a match, there’s a tribal element to it and it’s the experience of meeting your friends and talking to people about the past and so on.
“But you don’t realise that until you retire, and it’s too late.”
Keely will be supporting Dundalk later today because he fell in love with the place.
“When we won the double in ’79, I stayed in Dundalk for a week and never went home.
“The year we won the last double when I was player/manager with Shamrock Rovers, I had the Cup in the boot of my car for two, three, four weeks, I don’t know. We’d won so much, it was expected that you would win it. You don’t get that in a town. The football club isn’t in the town; the football club is the town. So when the football club is going well, the whole town is going well. It’s the very fulcrum of the town.”
Keely is living in Lanzarote now, sanguine about Covid forcing him to give up the bar he had leased and looking forward to a Christmas with the sun on his back. He’s been watching the League of Ireland’s streaming service closely, though, and says today’s Cup final may be remembered as a day two clubs travelling in opposite directions meet.
You’re looking at the changing of the guard this year, with Rovers taking over. And I don’t know what will happen with Dundalk. I don’t know the view of the owners and I don’t know how good their manager is: there is a whole load of imponderables about Dundalk. There isn’t about Shamrock Rovers. They are steady: they have an Academy and lots of sponsorship, they are well-run and have a really good side that will only get better.
Keely is critical of Dundalk’s decision-makers – he describes the fact 18 players are out of contract next week as “gross mismanagement” – and sceptical of Filippo Giovagnoli.
“I don’t think the manager is good enough to manage Dundalk”, says Keely.
Giovagnoli doesn’t have a Uefa Pro Licence and didn’t even have experience of coaching an adult side when he answered a call from Dundalk to replace Vinny Perth earlier this year, but has since secured European football next season, qualified for the Europa League group stages, and returned Dundalk to a sixth-straight FAI Cup final.
Regardless of the merits of his appointment, is Giovagnoli’s not an impressive record?
“I think the group of players are running themselves at the moment.
“First of all, I don’t know what team he is going to pick. If you were asked the Rovers team for the Cup final you could name it off. You might get one wrong, but you can name the team.
“Ask the same about Dundalk, you don’t know. He’s playing a back three now but he never has the same three. Sean Gannon is the best right-back in the country and he isn’t playing right-back.
“I just don’t think he’s clued-in. I might be making a huge mistake as I don’t know the man, but from what I see, when he makes substitutions, I don’t get it.
“When Stephen Bradley makes substitutions I look at it and say, ‘Okay, I can understand that.’ When yer man makes substitutions I say, ‘What the fuck?’ I can’t understand it. I think he is out of his depth. I don’t believe that running summer camps in America entitles you to run what I would consider potentially the best team in Ireland.
“There’s no logic in abject performances followed by really good performances.”
Keely makes Rovers favourites for the final, though says there may be something of a last stand from a Dundalk squad recently deposed as champions.
“As a group the players are strong enough, I think they’ll say, ‘This is our last hurrah, and we’ll go out and really, really give it our best shot.’
“Despite everything, I hope Dundalk win, but I have the utmost regard for Rovers. My heart says Dundalk, but my brain says Rovers and if that’s the case, they would be deserving winners.”
FAI Cup final on TV: RTE Two; KO 6.40pm
