Paul Rouse: every club is unique. What makes one great?
Lansdowne FC: A history, by Ivar McGrath.
It is true that every club is unique. What makes each unique, of course, is the people who walk through its doors and wear its jersey and watch its matches and do all the many jobs that allow a club to function year after year and, of course, socialise together.
It is these things that create the meaning of a club and allow that club to continue across the generations.
This season Lansdowne Football Club is 150 years old. It continued its commemorations last weekend with a dinner organised by the club President, Mick Dawson, who will be known to many as the former CEO of Leinster Rugby.
At the dinner, there were several hundred people who were in some way connected to the club. They are the latest generation of people to make the club. There are 150 years of people for whom Lansdowne club has been a focal of their lives – maybe even the focal point. This really matters.
And in the case of Lansdowne, it is a club that has also been home to many country people living in Dublin. Perhaps the most famous of these is Moss Keane. His great friend and teammate, Mick Quinn, said of Moss: “Mossy was just so lovable. Everybody adored him. He was one of those iconic characters that people were drawn to in a room. Mossy was one of these big, imposing men, totally unassuming, self-deprecating. He was always telling stories against himself, describing how he would be more likely 'to push in the lineout and jump in the scrum'. When he got out on the pitch he took the game very seriously. He was an extremely hard trainer. He had a super-human engine. He could keep going forever. He had that natural endurance.”
In every club, it is about what happens off the field as much as what happens on it. At its best, a club allows people make lifelong friendships and provides a place for them to share with their families – or to escape them – to travel near and far, and on the better days to drink and sing.
It’s very hard to work out how to create the proper atmosphere or environment in a club. It’s even very hard to describe it. But you always notice it when it’s not there, when a club is withering or stagnating.
Across the ebbs and flow of a thriving club’s history, the networks of its members’ lives run through the place. A great club has people of all generations coming together.
This is true for every significant sporting club. The role of the sports club in modern society is readily apparent. In such clubs, people love and fight and do all the things that people do whenever they come together. The connections that people make in sport can sustain them in life: for some people sport is what makes school bearable and work possible.
Even for those who may have stopped playing when still very young and drifted away for years, there is still a connection. It’s a reminder of being young and able. Or at least young and having the possibility of being able.
And this remembrance allows us to lie about how great we once were when we were still playing. It may be that a person’s playing career peaks when they reach their late 60s. By that time, other people cannot really remember them playing in any detailed way, so a well-burnished story before you lose all power of recall is eminently usable.
Lansdowne Football Club is a unique club because its history puts it right at the centre of the story of Irish rugby. This prominence was centred on the activities of the rugby club but also on Lansdowne Road as a venue. It is not too much to say that over the decades the name Lansdowne became synonymous with Irish rugby in a global sense.
That matters on one level – but it also doesn’t matter at all on another. And it certainly doesn’t matter as much as the club being remade every day as a place where people do things together.
This essential truth is clear in the excellent history of the club published recently by Ivar McGrath, entitled ‘Lansdowne FC: A History’. The story of the club as presented by McGrath is endlessly fascinating, ranging from the club’s founder HWD Dunlop (who recounted in the 1920s how he had founded the club in 1872) through to Gordan D’Arcy (one of the many internationals whose name is listed on the clubhouse walls) who has written in powerful support of club rugby in his media work.
Some 150 years ago, Dunlop acquired a lease from the Earl of Pembroke on a piece of land near Lansdowne Road railway station and developed a ground with facilities for athletics, including a cinder track, as well as catering for tennis, cricket, croquet, archery and rugby. Its patrons included the Lord Chancellor, assorted members of the nobility, members of parliament and several British Army officers.
It was from this piece of land that Lansdowne Football Club emerged as the centrepiece of the sporting life of the area. What Dunlop initiated is something that has been taken on year after year by his successors.
At the end of his book, Ivar McGrath writes: “Without people, there is no history. And without people, there is no club.” This gets right to the heart of the story of Lansdowne Football Club and they are words that capture a truth that will be familiar to anyone who has enjoyed a meaningful connection with any club in any sport.
It is interesting that there is a fine trophy cabinet in the Lansdowne clubhouse. It is filled with cups and with caps. The club has won every honour for which it can compete; its distinguished record stretches across the decades back to the very start of organised rugby in Ireland. The fact that it has won 28 Leinster Senior Cups illustrates that point with clarity.
And there is no point in arguing that success does not matter. Competitive sport is organised around rules that allow for the emergence of winners and losers. It can be said that the whole point of sporting contests are to separate one from the other in this way.
But, of course, any proper understanding of sport – whether personal or collective – makes it abundantly clear that reducing everything to counting scores and ultimately counting trophies is not at the core of what matters the most.
This is often something that becomes clear only later in life, when you wish you could still play. It is not then about the medals, but about the memories and the friendships. The memories can be better if they are tied to success, but not necessarily so. Sometimes the cost of victory was too great, the sacrifices too many, the regret very real.
There will be people who scorn that sentiment, but a person is not defined by their medals. Perhaps they should be most defined by their contribution to the clubs to which they belong. And that contribution goes way beyond a reckoning with victory or defeat.
