‘How someone wasn’t killed that night, I don’t know’

Alan Kelly has one sincere wish for Ireland’s game against England at Wembley tomorrow night.

“I’m hoping that, on this occasion, the anthems are respected, and everybody thinks, well, ‘Come on, it’s a game of football’. Let’s start off on the right foot. Now, whether that happens, I don’t know. I’m hoping and praying that it does.”

More than most, Ireland’s goalkeeping coach has reason to want the headlines to be good ones this time around since he was the man who was between the sticks on the last occasion the two countries met — the notorious 1995 friendly at Lansdowne Road which had to be abandoned amid scenes of terrifying violence as visiting fans went on the rampage and attempted the premature demolition of the old ground.

“It’s 18 years ago and it brings it straight back,” says Kelly, recalling that dark episode in the serene surroundings of Watford’s training base in St Albans, where the latest crop of Irish footballers are preparing for the first meeting with England since that infamous night in Dublin.

“For Ireland at the time it was totally unexpected. We had never experienced anything like that violence against our fans, and on home turf as well. It was a complete shock. What wasn’t shown [on television] was the wave after wave of England fans that looked like they were going to tumble over the top of the upper tier of the West Stand. I was stood at the South Stand goal and it looked like they were going to maraud over the top.

“Frightening is not the word. It’s hard to describe as a player, but imagine what it was like from a supporter’s point of view and having that debris raining down on you. I remember seeing a whole section of seating getting thrown over the top. You just think ‘how is someone going to survive that if it hits them on the head?’ How someone wasn’t killed that night I don’t know.”

Kelly recalls he felt the tension building in the ground even before kick off.

“There was definitely a negative atmosphere in the warm-up,” he says. “Even the English fans were being booed by their own fans and they found that quite shocking, I think. There was a tinderbox atmosphere where something might kick off. David Kelly got the goal for us, David Platt had a goal disallowed and that seemed to be the trigger.

“I was at the far end and I could see it unfold. The amount of debris — I still can’t put it into words — there were iron bars, whole sections of seats. The old floodlights at Lansdowne Road had a sort of misty quality to them and it was just incredible to see the things raining down on the people below.

“After we were taken off, I think we thought at first we were going to go back on, to be honest. If you remember, the old Lansdowne Road had a sort of a holding area before you went out onto the pitch. We were waiting there to find out what was going on but by then we couldn’t actually see the escalation in the violence, with people spilling out onto the pitch. Then the referee, rightly, made the decision to abandon the match.”

Kelly says that in all the years he’d known him, he’d never seen manager Jack Charlton in such a state as he was when the full extent of the outrage became clear.

“Jack was angry. There was disappointment and disbelief. Not only that his team didn’t have the chance to finish the game but also because of the country he represented. He had his memory of what he did in 1966 and to see that violence in an Ireland context meant there was a sense of embarrassment. He got hold of one supporter at one stage. It was like Brian Clough — that sort of moment. I remember him walking around and you could see in some of the interviews he did that he was just dazed. It was a mixture of daze and rage and disbelief. I’d never seen him like that.”

Kelly insists that, at least as far as he was concerned, there was no nagging sense that Ireland had also been robbed of a match-winning chance against England.

“Football went to the side because of the violence,” he remarks. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, he says the players’ main concern was to reunite with those family members who had been sitting in the section of the West Stand adjacent to the worst of the violence.

“We tried to find our families as they were right next to where it kicked off in that upper stand,” he remembers. “Fortunately they were okay but it was the people below that took the brunt of it. Our families were no more than 20 to 30 metres to the left so we were trying to find out if they were okay. Had the England fans decided to go to their left, the stampede that could have followed would have been catastrophic. It was a night of mayhem all around.”

All these years later, Alan Kelly is now hoping that Wembley 2013 will be “a fantastic occasion” though he reckons that, even if all goes well tomorrow night, there will still be a little bit of business left unfinished from ’95.

“It’s gone on too long, 18 years,” he reflects. “It would have been great to meet England at the Aviva Stadium and hopefully that will come quickly, as that would put everything to bed in terms of that fixture being played at the new Lansdowne Road. When that happens, for me that will be the end of it.”