Dangerous spectators don’t give peace a sporting chance
The actual game he then didn't appear in, a friendly against Cyprus on Wednesday night, has been hardly mentioned since. But the Lennon affair has made headlines as a sign of just how sick society is in Northern Ireland.
Jim Boyce, the president of the Irish Football Association, was eloquent in his denunciation of what had happened.
"Life in Northern Ireland must overcome these setbacks," he said. "We mustn't give in to these thugs. It's unfortunately a reflection of what we're seeing every night in the streets of Northern Ireland."
People must learn to live and play together. But in the North, they are becoming more segregated.
"The moron or the morons who made that telephone call" were threatening the whole soccer team, according to Boyce. In fact, their threat was against society.
Yet what happened was not all that new. People will remember the frightening hatred on show in Belfast in 1993 when the Republic qualified for the World Cup finals in the USA. And a particularly ugly incident took place at Windsor Park in December 1957.
Northern Ireland was due to play Italy in a vital qualification game, but the Hungarian referee got fog bound in London. Instead of warning the public beforehand, the spectators were only informed at the pitch. The Italians were already there, so they agreed to play "a friendly" with a local referee officiating.
The crowd was cranky at not having been informed earlier of the downgrading of the game. The friendly turned into a most unfriendly affair. At the end of the game the crowd invaded the pitch and a riot ensued in which some of the Italians were struck.
If this happened now, Northern Ireland would probably be kicked out of the tournament, or they would at least have had to play their next game behind closed doors.
But there was no sanction against them then. The game was re-fixed for the following month and the North won, thereby qualifying for the finals in Sweden.
The LVF has denounced the threat against Lennon and denied involvement. Why and by whom was his life threatened? Martin O'Neill, the captain of the Northern Ireland side that did so well at 1982 World Cup finals in Spain, was a Catholic. So it seems unlikely that Lennon was picked on just because of his religion.
About 18 months ago he was booed unmercifully when he played for Northern Ireland against Norway, after he was transferred from Leicester to Glasgow Celtic. Death threats appeared against him at that time on walls both in Belfast and in his home town of Lurgan.
It was probably the fact that he was a Celtic player which provoked the ire of the crowd. It would be nice to think that this was strictly a Northern aberration, but there was a relatively similar incident in Dublin this year when a former Rangers player was booed every time he came near the ball while playing for Denmark. Was a Northern element in the crowd responsible, or were we in the South aping the same sectarianism?
Back in the '50s when Northern teams first began challenging seriously for an all-Ireland title, they and their fans added a great deal of colour and fervour to GAA. In 1953 it was estimated that over 91,000 people crammed into Croke Park for the Kerry-Armagh final. There was no accurate tally because the gate at the canal end was pushed in and thousands got in free.
The crush at that end of the field was so great the fence collapsed and people at the front were pushed onto the field. The incident had all the ingredients of the Hillsborough disaster, except that the weak fencing in Croke Park had collapsed before anybody was seriously injured. Incidentally, the official record attendance at Croke Park was set in 1961 when 90,556 paid to see Down play Offaly.
While people welcomed the excitement Northern teams brought to Croke Park, the late Michael O'Hehir used to lament their supporters' habit of booing as an unwelcome element in the game. They were a breed apart, and some of those coming down here were compared to haemorrhoids. "They are all right when they come down and go right back up, but can be a right pain in the arse when they stay down," it was said.
If anybody we in the Republic would ever take a game so seriously as to threaten anybody's safety, perhaps they should think again.
This month in Kerry, where many take their football more seriously than their religion, referee Tom McCarthy was threatened for having the courage to send off the captain of the Kerry team in a county championship football game a couple of weeks ago.
Incensed at the move, the Radio Kerry commentary team at the game became hysterical with fury, shouting incessantly how outrageous his decision was. At half-time, one of them even went running onto the pitch towards the referee. Luckily, Seán Walsh, chairman of the Kerry County Board, (who had already been out to say his own piece to McCarthy) intercepted the enraged radioman before he could do any harm.
The Kerry County Board has miraculously managed to turn that red card into a yellow card, so that Darragh O'Shea is eligible to play tomorrow(correct).
It is supposed to be a sport in which people play by certain rules, but Kerry County Board chairman Sean Walsh seems to think he can make up his own.
He admitted he spoke to the referee at half time. "I said to him that under the circumstances he might have been better giving a yellow card and asking for him (Ó Sé) to be taken off," Walsh explained.
The chairman acknowledged that his remarks were probably unhelpful, which is a monumental understatement. Does he really think he should be allowed to make special rules for county players by telling the referee he should have broken the rules by merely inviting Ó Sé team to take him off so he would not be suspended for tomorrow's game?
Any other player would have been sent off and their team have to play a man short. Or was he suggesting Ó Sé should have been taken off and not replaced? The only people who have been fooled by that are those on the county board who have contempt for the intelligence of everybody else.
Some people have been excusing the behaviour of the Kerry County Board on the grounds that Galway got away with a similar flouting of the rules last year before going on to win the all-Ireland title. They also say Cork got away with a rule violation by introducing an extra player in this year's Munster final replay, but nobody suggests that this was done to gain an unfair advantage. As one wag said, the Cork officials can't count, and the Kerry officials are colour blind.
It's being treated as a joke, but the threats against Tom McCarthy were about as funny as those against Neil Lennon.
The commentators involved at Radio Kerry made a full and sincere apology, and rightly so. Their broadcast broadside against McCarthy was over the top, and perhaps dangerous. The Kerry County Board did nothing to support him either.
It has not just hung him out to dry it has shamelessly betrayed all referees and brought a wonderful game into disrepute.
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