Liam Mackey: A tale of ‘Mad Dog’ and Irishmen looks back at League of Ireland players' time in Libya
The name of the programme is In League With Gaddafi but In League With The Devil might have served just as well. Or, perhaps, even something along the lines of ‘Mad Dog and Irishmen…’
This coming Monday night, a terrific documentary on RTÉ television will recount the fascinating, madcap tale of how a team of League of Ireland players, drawn from St Patrick’s Athletic and Bohemians, and co-managed by Brian Kerr and Billy Young, ended up representing Ireland in a football match played in Benghazi in 1989, watched by somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 in the stadium — estimates vary but, on the Irish side, all agree the place was “absolutely jammers” — and millions more tuning in to live TV coverage.
While the Libyans appeared to be under the misapprehension that they were actually welcoming the celebrated national side which only one year before had made history by qualifying for Euro ’88, the only reason they were able to play host to a team wearing green shirts was because Pats and Bohs had shared the indignity of being knocked out of that season’s FAI Cup in the first round, meaning both clubs were facing the grim prospect of three weekends without a fixture and no income. Then came the surprise invite to play in Libya, an offer too good for the cash-strapped clubs to refuse, even if it came trailing clouds of controversy.
Because, suddenly, just a few months after the horror of the Lockerbie bombing had reinforced Libya’s status as international pariah, boots were about to step in where, previously, beef and bullets had dominated Irish-Libyan relations, as footballers prepared to follow all those cattle on the hoof by heading off into the belly of the beast, a “rogue nation” which, under the leadership of the man Ronald Reagan dubbed the ‘Mad Dog of the Middle East’, shipped massive quantities of arms to the IRA.
That inevitably brought criticism of the trip at home but while Brian Kerr concedes that the venture might not have been brightest idea anyone ever had in football, he also tells the documentary: “I don’t think the people who were critical at the time were particularly informed about the circumstances we were in. They weren’t very informed about the realities of League of Ireland football. They weren’t exactly fans. They weren’t ensuring that the government was donating large grants to the survival of the league at that time.
“We were offered a fee which was quite attractive because it was going to pay a couple of weeks’ wages which was really important to us. But it also gave the players the opportunity to get some international experience in a totally different environment.
“By going and playing there, did we suggest to some of the Libyan people that we supported the regime who supported the armed struggle as it was referred to in Ireland at that time? I don’t think so. I think we went there purely as a football team.”
The documentary’s director Kevin Brannigan, a Bohs supporter who was born a year before the 1989 game, previously helmed Kerr’s Kids, his acclaimed revisiting of the glorious successes of the Irish underage sides of the late 1990s.
One of his biggest challenges in making In League With Gaddafi was trying to track down footage of the game itself. The Irish players recalled that they had been given VHS copies of the match at the airport before they left Libya but, all these years later, none could be found. That was until, rummaging in his attic one day, Pat Fenlon, who was starring for Pat’s in 1989, came across his copy and saved the day.
“Without the footage of the match,” Brannigan told me this week, “the documentary wouldn’t have happened.”
The anecdotes are a joy throughout. I don’t want to put in too many spoilers but, suffice to say, they include a scary brush with imprisonment for flouting the alcohol laws, a dinner at a zoo (“We understood it was Colonel Gaddafi’s favourite restaurant,” says Kerr) and, from his own trip to Libya, journalist Eamonn McCann recalling in astonished amusement how, while he waited to interview Gaddafi in a tent in the desert, a member of the Revolutionary Guard leaned in close to ask: “How is Leeson Street?” Turned out that, in a previous life, he’d been a student in UCD during which time he had obviously cultivated a taste for what passed for Dublin nightlife in those days.
Though it doesn’t make it into the finished documentary, Brannigan says the Irish players told him how, upon landing in Libya, they found themselves having to repeatedly stonewall local journalists who were all eager to talk to Ronnie Whelan, on foot of the Liverpool star’s spectacular goal against Russia the previous summer. And in the programme itself, interviews with a couple of the Libyan players suggest that, to this day, at least some of their team believe that they did indeed do battle with Jack Charlton’s side back in 1989, leaving Brannigan to agonise over sending the finished product back to North Africa.
“I felt a bit bad for them because you don’t want to burst the bubble 30 years on,” he says. “Because maybe they’ve been dining off it as well: ‘I marked Ronnie Whelan out of it’ or whatever.”
That said, the documentary reveals that notable confusion still persists on the Irish side too, not least in the enduring notion that the game’s protracted and extravagant build-up — a three-hour long national celebration/political rally which included men on camels and war veterans in wheelchairs parading around the running track to the deafening accompaniment of shots being fired into the air — concluded with Muammar Gaddafi himself entering the arena on a white horse before taking his place on a throne. In fact, it has been established that the main man was a definite no-show, the Governor of Benghazi replacing him as the leading VIP in attendance.
On which subject, Ali, the hosts’ skipper on the day, articulates a view in the documentary which, it’s fair to surmise, he would have been rather slower to express back in the day. “Gaddafi was against footballers becoming famous,” he says. “He didn’t want anyone to be a star like him.”
“It became like a test in memory,” says Kevin Brannigan of all the reeling in the years which his interviews with the participants entailed. “A few of the lads were under the impression that Gaddafi was there and (former Bohs and Pats man) Joe Lawless was adamant that he was. But then Brian says he didn’t show up. That’s why I have a kind of disclaimer in it, with players saying that the stories of the trip have grown legs over the years.”
Thanks to Pat Fenlon’s sleuthing, there can be no uncertainty about what happened when the football finally took centre-stage, as the ‘Irish Select’ and leading Libyan side Al Ahly got the action under way in what Johnny McDonnell remembers as “a cauldron of noise”. The TV footage reveals that, despite being played on an atrocious pitch — in places patched up with bits of frayed green carpet held together by “sticky tape”, according to Kerr, an improvisation which left slide-tackling players suffering “carpet burns” — the match was a pretty competitive affair in which, to huge fanfare, the Libyan side took the lead.
The boys in green might not have been the real boys in green but, nonetheless, the visitors’ equaliser came straight out of Big Jack’s Route One playbook: a booming kick-out and a header forward finished to the back of the net by Derek Swan, with the Irish celebrations which followed in muted contrast to the bedlam which had greeted the hosts’ goal. But then, as John Byrne, a team-mate of Swan’s at Bohemians at the time, recalls: “When Swanny scored, the lads were, like, ‘what are ya doin’? We have to go home.”
And so it ended, diplomatically for all concerned, in a 1-1 draw, bringing to a close an exotic trip which, both on the pitch and off, had taken a bunch of League of Ireland players a long, long way from the familiar surroundings of Dalymount and Richmond and left them with memories — some of them even true — to last a lifetime.
“The main thing for me,” said Kevin Brannigan, “is the fact that most of these lads had working-class jobs but that didn’t stop them from experiencing amazing things like this in their lives. Through football and Brian’s sense of adventure, they were able to see the world.”
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