By Glenmalure Park I sat down and wept

EVER opened up a book and felt like you were looking in a mirror? Your correspondent had that experience this week and, no, before you ask, it wasn’t The Great Gatsby. Or even the latest Harry Potter.

The book is ‘We Are Rovers’, a just published oral history of Shamrock Rovers, by Eoghan Rice.

For this reader, the biggest shock of recognition came on page 87 when one fan, John Byrne, recalls the league play-off between Rovers and Cork Hibs at Dalymount Park in 1971, which saw Hibs lift the title with a 3-1 win.

Says Byrne: “The moment I knew I was Rovers was when we lost that play-off. I was only 11 and I made up a little placard saying ‘Up Rovers’, which I still have at home. But we lost the game and I cried my eyes out on the way home. I was so upset. A play-off for the league, 28,000 people at Dalymount, I was just sick. When you feel the pain, that’s when you know you’re Rovers; it has pierced all exteriors and it is right inside you.”

As our American friends might say, I can feel his pain, since I too was a young Hoop in Dalyer that day, proudly wearing my green and white scarf, and distraught to see my hero Mick Leech eclipsed, at least for one game, by Cork great Miah Dennehy.

‘We Are Rovers’ is full of first-hand memories like this, as players and fans of all generations illuminate the club’s history; the staggering rise to prominence in the 1920s; the legends surrounding great players down all the years like ‘Sacky’ Glen, Bob Fullam, Jimmy Dunne, Paddy Moore, Paddy Coad, Liam Tuohy, Mick Leech, Frank O’ Neill and Pat Byrne; the emergence in the ’50s of ‘Coad’s Colts’, the young side many regard as the best team ever in League of Ireland history; the fabled six-in-a-row Cup winning sides of the ’60s; the great European nights at home and abroad; the visionary but failed Giles experiment at professionalism; the four-in-a-row League titles of the ’80s; the calamitous sale of Milltown in 1987; and all the way through to the present day, where we find the fans who have taken over the embattled club - the aforementioned John Byrne now among them - striving to secure the future of a great Irish sporting institution.

For those whose commitment to Rovers is of more recent vintage, there are extraordinary pen pictures here of a time when the League of Ireland was genuinely glamorous.

Sonny O’Reilly recalls a typical scene from the 1940s: “I remember being at a Rovers v Shels game in Tolka on a Wednesday afternoon and there were 15,000 people at it. That’s 15,000 people who should have been in work. After the games you’d go back into town and wait outside the Irish Press offices for them to put up the results of the other games.”

While the point is often made that gaelic football is much more firmly rooted in a sense of place and community than soccer, there are voices here which make it clear that the distinction is not entirely accurate. Mick Meagan: “I was born in Dundrum. Everyone in that area - Dundrum, Donnybrook, Ranelagh, Harold’s Cross, Windy Arbour, Churchtown - we were all Rovers.”

Many words and columns have been devoted to why League of Ireland football lost so much of its crowd-pulling appeal in the early ’70s. Mick Leech, who helped Rovers to their fifth successive FAI Cup win when they beat Waterford 3-0 in front of an estimated 45,000 at Dalymount in 1968 - gets close to the brutal, mundane truth: “Lifestyles changed, the world became smaller and people began to see the bigger picture. All of a sudden people knew who was playing for Real Madrid and Manchester United and could contrast that with the local league. One of the reasons why gaelic football has retained its greatness is because there is nothing else to compare it with. You can’t compare your local side with a side in Spain or England. Gaelic football in Ireland is the best gaelic football in the world! When people could compare League of Ireland to English football, the lukewarm people drifted off.”

Of course, despite further success on the field, worse was to follow for Shamrock Rovers, culminating in the shameful closure of Milltown in 1987, a decision whose legacy of bitterness and sadness still burns off the pages of ‘We Are Rovers’, wherein there is much talk of people weeping on the derelict site and taxi-drivers who, to this day, refuse to take a fare up the Milltown Road.

One little cameo, among many, will suffice. Recalling the last game at Glenmalure Park, against Sligo Rovers, Macdara Ferris says: “I dug up a bit of the pitch, as many people were doing, and I stuck it in a crisp bag. I kept it in a Chinese takeaway dish for around three years. I used to water it regularly so it was still growing and I put little Subbuteo men on it. Unfortunately, one day I dropped something and it hit the shelf that I kept the grass on and a part of Glenmalure Park flew across the room and fell into countless bits. I tried putting it back together but it was gone.”

To those who have ever felt passionately about a football club, and also to those who are completely mystified by such passion, I wholeheartedly recommend ‘We Are Rovers’.