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THE MATCHES
THE GREATEST DAYS
LANSDOWNE
THE STADIUM
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Gerard Siggins & Malachy Clerkin
R AD
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Gerard Siggins was born in Dublin in 1962 and has lived almost all his life in the shadow of the old East Stand at Lansdowne Road. His earliest memory of the ground is at age seven, when he was flattened by Ken Kennedy when the Ulster hooker crashed into the touchline seats. He has written on sport in the Sunday Tribune since 1985, where he was sports editor from 1989-94 and is now assistant editor. This is his fourth book.
Malachy Clerkin is the chief sportswriter of the Sunday Tribune
where he has worked since winning a sportswriting competition organised and overseen by his co-author Gerard Siggins in 1999. He has been assured by his co-author that there was more than one entrant, but has yet to see documentary proof that this was the case. He has covered every conceivable sporting event for the Tribune, from Olympic Games to World Cups in soccer and rugby. This is his first book.
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Dedication
To Paul Howard, who couldn’t be orsed
Acknowledgements GERARD SIGGINS wishes to thank everyone who helped him in putting together his chapters. Especial thanks to Deryck and the late Billy Vincent for the magnificent rugby collection. Thanks also to Malachy Logan, Gavin Cummiskey and Irene Stevenson of The Irish Times, Frank Greally of the Irish Runner, Gerard Whelan of the RDS Library, Ned Van Esbeck, Frederic Humbert of www.rugby-pioneers.com, Brian Siggins, Peter Dunne, Bohemians FC and Old Wesley RFC for their help and kindness. I am grateful to the staffs of the National and Gilbert Libraries for their guidance and patience, and to my colleagues at the Sunday Tribune for their help and advice. Thanks to Michael O’Brien for believing in the project and cajoling us along, and to Helen Carr for seeing us home with fantastic skill and fortitude. I also thank the many people who chipped in with stories and leads over the years, and apologise for not having room to list you all. Special thanks to the many who have stood and sat alongside me as we roared Ireland on over the last forty years at Lansdowne Road. May we get the chance to roar on many more victories in the new stadium. And thanks to all my family and friends who have indulged my passion for sport and its history, especially my dad who first lifted me over the turnstiles. He wouldn’t do it now. And to Martha, Jack, Lucy and Billy, who make every day as joyful as all the tries and goals ever scored.
MALACHY CLERKIN wishes to say thanks to everyone who answered a phone, chased up a photo and found a phone number. A special word of gratitude to the indefatigable Jim O’Brien of Boston for turning what might have been just a passing reference into a fullyformed chapter. To the staff of the Pearse Street Library in Dublin not only for their archives, but for their glorious workspace too. To P.J. Cunningham at the Sunday Tribune for making it a job, but never work. To Rachel Collins, Eimear Lowe, Pat Nugent and Emma Somers for pep talks and patience. To the family for all that and more. And to Olivia Doyle for the best time of my life.
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Introduction
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Timeline
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1. The 1870s: Dunlop’s Dream
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2. 1875-1884: The Champion Rises, and Falls
21
3. 1876: Rugby Takes Root By The River
32
4. 1878: The First Rugby International
35
5. 1875-1925: A Sporting Zoological Gardens
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6. 1887: Long Time Coming
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7. 1888: ‘Not Very Black’
64
8. 1894 & 1899: The First Triple Crowns
72
9. 1900: Soccer Takes A Bow
82
10. 1905: The Originals of the Species
91
11. 1914: Irish Rugby’s Fallen Volunteers
100
12. 1924-1935: Between the Wars
110
13. 1927: The First Home Soccer Tie For The New State
119
14. 1928: The Fatal Scrum
128
15. 1922-1939: The Bateman Cup Creates Club Legends
133
16. 1948: The Golden Age of Kyle & Mullen
138
17. 1947-1957: Morton’s Enchanted Evenings
149
18. 1958: No Warm Welcome for Wallabies
158
19. 1969-1970: ‘A Real Ordeal’ for the Springboks
163
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21. 1973: ‘At Least We Turn Up’ 22. 1973: United Irishmen 23. 1982: Ollie for Taoiseach! 24. 1985: Giving It A Lash! 25. 1986: ‘Go Home Union Jack’ 26. 1988: A Whole New Ball Game 27. 1991: So Near, and Yet... 28. 1993: Beautiful, Beautiful Munsters 29. 1995: Riot Acts 30. 1999: Ulster Says Yes! 31. 2001: Dutch Gold 32. 2003: Red Carpet, Red Faces 33. 2004: Elation Once Again 34. 2006: The Donnybrook in Dublin 4 35. 1873-2010: Evolutionary Road
Bibliography
CONTENTS
20. 1968-1971: Soccer Returns
174
183 192 201
212
224
233
243
253
263
274
282
291
300
310
319
326
Appendix 1 International Rugby Results
330
Appendix 2 International Soccer Results
335
Appendix 3 Lansdowne Road International Records
338
Index
346
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Cigarette cards and stickers featuring Irish sportsmen.
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INTRODUCTION
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t eight o’clock on the Sunday morning of New Year’s Eve 2006, John Kelly arrived at Lansdowne Road for a final day’s work. His book of numbered stickers in his hand, he headed off around the stadium. He passed the bins under the North Terrace that were half-filled with water, rounded the radio station people who were stitching up their promotional banner near where the East Stand met the South Terrace and carried on his careful, precise way along the front few rows of Lower West Stand. All in all, his circuit of the stadium took just over an hour to complete. His job? Checking each seat to make sure its number hadn’t been washed off by the Saturday night rain. This was Lansdowne Road on its last legs.We spent the day there to see out the last game the old place would host before the diggers moved in. With a nice tip of the hat to history, the final match replicated the first ever rugby fixture – Leinster versus Ulster. But to be there to witness it was to know that ‘replicated’ was the wrong word entirely.The place was different, the rugby itself was different, the world was unimaginably different. Just about the only similarities, in fact, were the team names. Within hours of the DART ferrying the last of the crowds into the Dublin night after Leinster’s 20-12 victory, Setanta Sports footage of Brian O’Driscoll’s stunning pass to himself in the second half was up on YouTube and had begun its journey to well over three-quarters of a million hits. No part of that sentence would have made sense to Henry Wallace Dunlop back in 1872. And despite all the changes, nobody was in any doubt that still more change was needed and needed badly. Just after 11 am, we went right up to the top of the Upper East Stand and sat for a while to take the place in.There was no getting away from it – what you could see from up there was a stadium that nobody in their right mind could have imagined had they started with a blank sheet of paper. Down to the left was the South Terrace where the schoolboys stood for the internationals. Its back wall started off high, but began to slope away around its midpoint, as if slumping its shoulders in apology to those in the houses on Lansdowne Road behind for obstructing their view.
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A 1977 leaflet for the Lansdowne Road Development Fund
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Pushed over to the side of the terrace nearest the West Stand was the security centre – a solid, square concrete box with a ladder up to it.Then on around to another box, this time one with a wide window through which on big match days you could see an RTÉ panel fulminating amongst themselves in studio light. By the time you reached the end of the terrace, these constructions had encroached right into the standing space so that it finished at a point, as if pinched by a giant thumb and forefinger. We looked across and saw the West Stand, separated from the North Terrace by a lone floodlight pole and the Wanderers pavilion that had stood there since 1912, as if a twee old cottage in the middle of an international sports stadium was the most natural thing in the world. On then to the Lower West Stand, pockmarked with plastic seating of all different colours and shades, the legacy of wear and tear and one dark night of riots in 1995.And the Upper West Stand looking for all the world like the old Hogan Stand in Croke Park – all brown wooden benches covered by the same dun roof that had peeked out over it for fifty-one years. The upper stand had the press box in the centre, built in a time before Wi-Fi, before ISDN, before the uniform use of three-point plugs even. (Presumably also before the size of the average press buttock grew beyond that of, say, an Olympic gymnast – but we digress). Underneath was the lower stand where the dignitaries sat and below that again the tunnel from which players would emerge for games. The venerable RTÉ floor manager Tadhg de Brún has the best story about that tunnel.When the newly-elected President Mary Robinson arrived for her first official engagement at a Five Nations match in
LANSDOWNE ROAD
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1991, she and her husband took tea in the holding area while the players filed onto the pitch and lined up ready to meet her. But between that tunnel and the pitch there was a big, iron, sliding door and as the band prepared to play the presidential salute, that door stayed shut.‘Have they forgotten about me?’ the new president wondered aloud as she stood there ready to take the pitch. Suddenly, an almighty racket arose as someone on the outside of the iron door started kicking at it noisily and repeatedly.The official on the inside of the door, clearly unaware that he was the one holding the whole show up, heaved it across in a rage and upbraided the chap who was doing the kicking. ‘Would you stop that please – what’s the matter with you?’ he asked. And the official on the outside, oblivious to just how close an tUachtarán standing, gave him his answer. ‘Would you leave the door open, the fuckin’ president has to come out!’ De Brún reports that ne’er a flinch came from anyone in the presidential party, least of all the lady herself. But back to NewYear’s Eve 2006; we looked on down to the end of the West Stand and the Havelock Square end.They came to call it ‘Currow Corner’, after the small Kerry parish that gave the world Mick Doyle, Moss Keane and Mick Galwey, all of whom scored tries for Ireland on that patch of grass. Just behind the corner flag was the Lansdowne Pavilion, formerly a place for players to change before and after matches, latterly a press conference room where Ireland soccer managers went to squirm and occasionally wish the DART rumbling overhead had room for one more. The back wall of the North Terrace was similar to its southern equivalent, starting off high and proud but gradually draining away as it met the corner with the East Stand. Opened in 1984, the East Stand was by far the most modern-looking section of the stadium. It had seats rather than benches throughout and the PA system didn’t crackle as much over there as it did in the West Stand. Down below, catering vans powered with the low hum of out-the-back generators sold burgers and pizza slices
Above and opposite: Tickets from Lansdowne Road matches: Ireland v England, 1949 and Ireland XV v Barbarians, 2000
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for a fiver and tea and coffee for €2.50.The East Stand might have been an improvement on the rest of the place, but the notion of a purpose-built concession stand in the ground was laughable. And yet, here’s the thing. Lansdowne Road was full that day, full to bursting. Fathers brought kids and fathers brought fathers, whole battalions of families and friends turned out to be part of what the marketing people called ‘The Last Stand’.As a slogan, they’d argue it did its job – a footfall of forty-eight thousand adds up to some serious unit-shifting after all – but inside the ground it felt like it had struck the wrong note. This was no defiant action. Nobody was chaining themselves to turnstiles and declaring theirs the dead body over which the diggers would need to roll. There was a general, shrugging acceptance that the old place had to go.The sooner the better, most of us reckoned. But people loved it like they loved a pair of torn and faded old jeans. They loved the peculiar microclimate that would cause a visiting kicker to see his first penalty carried one way on the wind and his second go quite the other.They loved that the stands loomed over the pitch to such an extent that the players’ voices carried into the upper tiers on quiet nights.They loved the idea of the Lansdowne Roar and asking aloud in groups of drinkers after a game where it had gone to at all, at all. It was a kip of a place, but it was our kip of a place. That’s why those forty-eight thousand people were there on a freezing final day. To grab one last thread of a garment that had been part of us since shortly after the Famine. No, of course nobody with a blank sheet of paper would ever have built a stadium like it, but building stadiums all in one go is a wholly modern enterprise. People didn’t build the great stadiums of the past, history did. Stage by stage and decade by decade, brick by brick and quirk by quirk. Lansdowne Road was crumbling long before it was felled, but the memories and the stories and the days it gave the nation were great indeed and were always going to be sturdy enough to last long after the 10
LANSDOWNE ROAD
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rain washed the last of John Kelly’s stickers away. But just to make sure the stories live on, we’ve tried to fit 134 years of the place between two covers. Some of the days are as familiar to your average rugby or soccer fan as the weekend just gone, some won’t register in the slightest. From the initial efforts of Henry Wallace Dunlop to create a sports complex by the Dodder in the late nineteenth century to the first All Blacks in 1905, from early soccer internationals to athletics meetings in the forties and fifties and American football in the eighties. Days like the one where England turned up to play rugby at the height of the troubles, keeping the real world at bay while we watched some sport. And nights when sport took a back seat, most obviously when soccer fans tore the place to bits in 1995. Some stories sag with tragedy, others make you giggle and indeed goggle at the Ireland of the day.The thing with a stadium that becomes the focal point of a country a few times each year is that what goes on within its walls must reflect something of the state of the nation beyond them. And so we’ve set each day in its context and framed the hours between the touchlines as they affected the times. The old Lansdowne Road is gone and in its place an impressive venue of shimmering glass adorns the skyline on Dublin’s southside, visible and identifiable to all from Pearse Street to Ringsend, from Ballsbridge to Sandymount. The past wasn’t a better place, just a different one and in time the new stadium will tell its own stories and host its own great days. For now, however, you’ll have to make do with these. Enjoy.
Opposite and below: Ticket from Ireland v Albania, 1992 and Ireland v San Marino, 2006, both in Lansdowne Road
Gerard Siggins and Malachy Clerkin, March 2010
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