The magic of Philip Greene

IF imitation really is the sincerest form offlattery, then Philip Greene was never short ofthe highest praise over his long life and broadcasting career.

From the 1940’s through to the 1980’s, there can hardly have been a follower of Irish football, via first the wireless and later the little box in the corner, who didn’t at some point find themselves attempting to string the passes together in an approximation of that richly distinctive, clipped, slightly nasal voice. For so many years, what Micheal O’Hehir was to gaelic, Philip Greene was to soccer — the man who brought the game into the homes of the nation.

Unfortunately for Philip, he had few enough glad tidings to report on the international front in that time, his official retirement from RTÉ in 1985 predating the unprecedented successes of the Jack Charlton era by just a couple of years.

Yet, for all that it would fall to George Hamilton to inform the whole world that “a nation holds its breath”, Philip will forever be remembered by an older generation as the man behind the mic for a moment which, arguably, rivalled David O’Leary’s penalty in Genoa for sheer, breathtaking, sudden death drama. Only this time, the story didn’t end happily ever after for the Boys in Green.

The occasion was a World Cup qualifier between Ireland and England at Dalymount Park in 1957, a game which the home side needed to win in order to go into a play-off for the ‘58 finals in Sweden. And the underdog Irish could hardly have gotten off to a better start, Alf Ringstead firing them ahead after just three minutes to send a crowd of 47,500 into raptures.

And that’s how it remained right the way through until time added-on at the very end of the game when, from a Tom Finney cross, Johnny Atyeo headed an equaliser which stunned the old ground into silence and left Greene sounding as if he’d personally taken a punch to the stomach. Yet, the professional that he was ensured the audience at home immediately knew the details of how and why it had all gone horribly wrong, The archive recording can still be sourced on the RTÉ website and, as I wrote in these pages on the occasion of the great man’s 90th birthday last October, perhaps no other piece of commentary I’ve ever heard more vividly evokes the gut-wrenching sense of deflation which attends the sudden collapse of a sporting dream.

When people talk about the shattering climax of that game in 1957, they recall a celebrated remark which Greene made later — that the silence in Dalymount Park when Atyeo scored could be heard at Nelson’s Pillar — but nothing conveys the reality of the drama quite like hearing Philip’s on the spot report.

Happily, there was no shortage of glory for Philip to report on the domestic front, and not least because it was the worst kept secret in broadcasting that, although Greene by name, he was green and white by nature.

Examples of Philip’s passion for Shamrock Rovers have passed into legend: “And it’s 1-1 here in favour of Rovers”; “The embattled Hoops are strapped to the mast as wave upon wave of Spaniard rolls over them”; and the almost certainly apocryphal but everyone claims to have heard it, “Oh f**k, Bohs have scored”.

There’s also a great yarn about a night in 1966 when Rovers were in Munich to take on Bayern in the Cup-Winners Cup. When the team arrived at the ground, they were greeted by an exotic local who announced that she was a witch and was putting a hex on the Hoops. Whereupon, Philip took it upon himself to step forward and, spreading his arms wide, declared in a loud voice that he was a warlock from Dublin and his magical powers were greater than hers.

It almost worked too — in one of the greatest European performances by a League of Ireland side, Rovers came within a whisker of knocking out the German giants, losing 3-2 on the night to a late Gerd Muller goal, having drawn the first leg 1-1 in Dublin.

Anyway, we all know the real truth, Philip Greene always worked his own magic in the box.

One hopes it’s of more than small consolation to his family and friends that their sadness at his passing will be shared by the many who never met the man but who hung on his every word.