A little bit of my broken heart will always reside in the Riazor
BROTHERS IN ARMS: Kevin, Paul and Brendan O’Brien on the Estadio Riazor pitch after a 1-1 draw with Barcelona in May, 2009.
THE New Year was just eight days old when Lucas Pérez celebrated his return to Deportivo La Coruna, his hometown club, with a brace of goals and at least one kiss of the crest in a 3-0 win against Unionistas in Spain’s third tier at the Estadio Riazor.
These public declarations of devotion tend to trigger a merited suspicion in such cynical times. Not here. Pérez had already proven his affections by stumping up half a million euro towards his own transfer fee so that he could leave La Liga side Cádiz early.
Now 34, he had left home for Alaves as a 15-year old, migrating across four countries and more than a dozen clubs – including stints with Arsenal and West Ham – before pushing for this third spell back home and the ten-fold pay cut that reportedly came with it.
My brother Kevin would have loved all that. Deportivo’s gradual but seemingly irrevocable slide down the divisions has made it almost impossible to source a stream of their games, but he always kept vigil through various live score websites and club forums.
January 8 would be Kevin's 53rd birthday and it’s all too easy now to picture him raising a glass at the time, either at home or in Casey’s pub in Portlaoise, to the club’s Prodigal Son. And contemplating the almost-annual trip to A Coruña for the last home game of the season.
Life took him on a different path. Kev had been diagnosed with HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) cancer just under a year earlier. He passed away peacefully two days before Perez’s homecoming, surrounded by loved ones in the home he and his wife Grainne had made for themselves.
***
“What’s with the Deportivo thing?” It’s a question that’s been asked of us as a family time and again in the last five months and the simple answer is that another Portlaoise man, Paul Ryan, was the instigator more than 25 years ago.
Paul was working for UCD on their B Comms (International English) programme for a spell in the city when he met some locals who had backpacked around Ireland as teenagers. Their invite to a Depor game was the gateway to everything that followed.
The right man was in the right place at the right time. This was the era of ‘Super Depor’. Between 1995 and 2002 they won their first and only La Liga title, two Copas del Rey and reached the quarter-finals and then the semi-finals of the Champions League.
That’s the most basic of outlines and it needs colouring in. The loss of the title on the last day in 1994. The fact it was Real Madrid they beat - in the Bernabéu - to seal that first cup win. The recovery from 4-1 down from the first leg to beat AC Milan in Europe.
There's so much more. They went on a hell of a ride.
If there were other, subconscious ties, then maybe they came in the commonalities in weather, music, linguistics, mythology and even genetics that have spanned the centuries between this country and the autonomous region of Galicia.
Depor’s status as something of an outsider appeals too. Galicia is far from the corridors of power in Spain, whether that be in politics or football, and A Coruña is a city of just 250,000. Big by our standards, but the second smallest urban area to produce champions of Spain.
And the colours didn’t hurt.
Paul, understandably, got hooked and his friends took notice. Kev was one of the early adopters and ties continued to bind, friendships being formed that led to a crisscross of people between Ireland and Galicia that continues to this day.
The fact that the Laois footballers were box office in Croke Park at the time didn’t hurt the bedding-in period but great days spent rubbing shoulders with Barcelona and Real Madrid and contesting Leinster finals were never the glue holding all this together.
The people are the glue. Always the people.
How many have travelled over from Portlaoise? Dozens and dozens. Over 30 made the trip in May of 2015 alone. Partners, siblings and friends of friends have been sucked into the circle but a core contingent straddles the two decades.
A Coruña is a draw all in itself. An overlooked but beautiful city flanked by golden beaches and with a smorgasbord of museums, squares, bars and restaurants where you can still buy two beers, an Americano and four small pintxos for the princely sum of €7.80.
Our attachment to the city and its club has spread across the wider area like spilled ink on paper with Santiago de Compostela, the majestic regional capital and traditional Camino end point for so many pilgrims, now a regular staging post in its own right.
The idyllic coastal towns of Santa Cruz and Santa Cristina lie just a taxi ride away and expeditions by our very own Lewis and Clarks have pushed hours further along the coast in either direction, discovering new people and culinary and geographic delights as we go.
Kev was among those to have stitched this love for Galicia and for northern Spain into a Camino, which he did twice, but the city of A Coruña and the cathedral that is the Riazor continued to be the epicentre of it all, even after the club fell on hard times.
Why? Well, financial problems dogged Depor. That’s the PG version. It’s five years since they last played in the top tier, there have been three years spent in the Segunda since those glory days, and next season will be their fourth successive campaign in the third-tier Primera Federación.
And Laois think they have problems.
***
Our brother Paul said in his eulogy that Kev’s essence was to be found in his love of people and place. If there was a podium to be filled here then you could make the argument that sport was a strong runner for the last of those three steps.
Kev served Portlaoise AFC on and off the pitch, worked for a time in the local squash and tennis club that was owned and run by the family, and loved his golf and his darts and pretty much every other sport that could be accessed with a remote control.
We knew all that but the weeks after his departure brought new glimpses of the man. Stories of small but significant kindness towards friends and acquaintances. The love of nature. His value as a colleague and friend in the Department of Education in Tullamore.
He organised tipster competitions at work with his friend Pat Teehan and took great joy in hanging a Laois flag beside his desk ‘behind enemy lines’. He also turned out for departmental football games long after his prime was passed.
Mam walked into the kitchen one day and produced a pamphlet from a CBS Portlaoise awards night in 1983 when he was named first year athlete of the year. The fact that she had held onto it for four decades made the heart break all over again.
A friend sent on a clipping of a photograph in the ‘Leinster Express’ with Kev holding the runners-up prize at the Juvenile Perpetual Shield at the Heath Golf Club a year before. Someone joked that he didn’t look at all happy with that.
We spent our last months with Kev unburdened by any reserve or awkwardness that can too often stifle and silence. It made for the most loving and life-affirming of experiences and the man himself summed it up succinctly with a humour that never flagged.
“Green tick for cancer,” he said.
The rest of the world would melt away from that front sitting-room as we talked through his health and treatment options, life, family and friends, or just listened to his list of 54 favourite songs that was supposed to be a top 100 until the bell beckoned sooner.
Sport couldn’t help but elbow its way in. Now and then we would sit back and watch Liverpool, his first love, struggle through their Jekyll and Hyde season under Jurgen Klopp. His last successful bet, on Michael Smith to win the World Darts Championship, came through less than 48 hours before he died.
Jerseys decorated the room as he was waked and rested on his coffin in the church. The U14 soccer team he helped coach with his friend Gordon Conroy provided the guard of honour as the hearse made its way to the church. The Laois footballers sent their condolences.
Our friends in Galicia reached out too.
Half-a-dozen gathered at a memorial wall outside the stadium on the day of the Unionistas game and recorded a message of breathtaking beauty for their departed friend. One held aloft an Irish tricolour with a ‘Riazor Irish Blues’ motif.
The mural behind them depicted a young girl in a Depor jersey face to face with an old man in the most tender of poses. Tattooed over the top is an inscription that translates roughly as: ‘Depor supporter seed, breathing new life from the beyond’.
The wreath they laid read ‘Kevin O’Brien, one of our own’ in Galician and the local radio station, Deportes COPE Coruña, started its coverage of the game later that day with its own 90-second tribute to what they described as ‘un deportivista de Irlanda’.
***
Kev wrote five letters in the month before he passed: to Grainne, Mam and Dad, Paul and myself. They are havens of real sentiment, memories and hopes for the future – his and ours – and he asked that his ashes be scattered in five locations.
Two were in the county that he loved so dearly: one in the back field behind the house where we grew up, the other up in the Slieve Bloom Mountains.
Three were in Galicia: Finisterre, Muxia and on the Riazor beach near the stadium.
Last month, Paul, myself and maybe ten of his friends travelled over for Depor’s last home game, as tradition demanded. We fulfilled Kev’s wishes and we gathered again at the Riazor mural beside Gate 11, laid another wreath and remembered.
Depor had done their bit on the weekend of his passing with that fairytale win. They marked his month’s mind with a 1-0 defeat of Mérida, Alberto Quiles scoring four minutes into injury time, and they came through for Kev again this time against Algeciras.
The 4-0 stroll was not at all the Depor we have come to know. Our friend Carlos Seco sipped beer afterwards and said it was the first time all season that he had felt relaxed watching the team go about their business.
Kev left us a bounty of gifts. Most obvious was his love, his life and the way he lived it. There was his unfailing positivity and concern for others throughout his illness. And his urging that we celebrate his memory rather than mourn his passing. To “kick on” with our lives.
Paul sent me on a book a few months ago, an edited collection called ‘Irish Stories of Loss and Life’. A friend of his had suggested he pass it on and she bookmarked two chapters. The first of them was entitled ‘Turning Grief Around’.
The story used glass jars to represent our world and balls to signify grief. At first, the ball would take up the entire jar but the hope that the ball would shrink over time is misplaced. The ball will always be that ball. The answer is to make your jar bigger.
Kev knew what he was doing when he wrote those letters. We look back now at his last months and we can see plainly that so many of his words and actions were designed as bricks on a path he laid to ease the journey ahead for his loved ones.
In his letter to dad, he implored him to start writing a history of Portlaoise AFC. He knew how that would help him, focus him, and the ripples and connections it would inevitably create as he went about the business of talking to so many old friends.
Taking us back to Galicia and the Riazor was another part of that.
The intention travelling over was that it would be my last trip. How could another happen without Kev? Then Paul and I went back to the mural before we left. It was quiet, peaceful, and both of us felt the same grief in leaving what, to us, is Kev’s place.
How can we not continue to go back when Depor and A Coruña and its people have made all our jars so much bigger?
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