lansdowne road

LANSDOWNE

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Gerard Siggins &Malachy Clerkin

� THE STADIUM� THEMATCHES� THE GREATEST DAYS

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Gerard Siggins was born in Dublin in 1962 and has livedalmost all his life in the shadow of the old East Stand at Lansdowne

Road. His earliest memory of the ground is at age seven, when he

was flattened by Ken Kennedy when the Ulster hooker crashed into

the touchline seats. He has written on sport in the Sunday Tribune

since 1985, where he was sports editor from 1989-94 and is now

assistant editor. This is his fourth book.

Malachy Clerkin is the chief sportswriter of the Sunday Tribune

where he has worked since winning a sportswriting competition

organised and overseen by his co-author Gerard Siggins in 1999.

He has been assured by his co-author that there was more than one

entrant, but has yet to see documentary proof that this was the case.

He has covered every conceivable sporting event for the Tribune,

from Olympic Games to World Cups in soccer and rugby.

This is his first book.


DedicationTo Paul Howard, who couldn’t be orsed

Acknowledgements

GERARD SIGGINS wishes to thank everyone who helped him in putting together his

chapters. Especial thanks to Deryck and the late Billy Vincent for the magnificent rugby

collection. Thanks also to Malachy Logan, Gavin Cummiskey and Irene Stevenson of The

Irish Times, Frank Greally of the Irish Runner, Gerard Whelan of the RDS Library, Ned Van

Esbeck, Frederic Humbert of www.rugby-pioneers.com, Brian Siggins, Peter Dunne,

Bohemians FC and Old Wesley RFC for their help and kindness. I am grateful to the staffs

of the National and Gilbert Libraries for their guidance and patience, and to my colleagues

at the Sunday Tribune for their help and advice.

Thanks to Michael O’Brien for believing in the project and cajoling us along, and to Helen

Carr for seeing us home with fantastic skill and fortitude. I also thank the many people who

chipped in with stories and leads over the years, and apologise for not having room to list

you all. Special thanks to the many who have stood and sat alongside me as we roared

Ireland on over the last forty years at Lansdowne Road. May we get the chance to roar on

many more victories in the new stadium. And thanks to all my family and friends who

have indulged my passion for sport and its history, especially my dad who first lifted me

over the turnstiles. He wouldn’t do it now. And to Martha, Jack, Lucy and Billy, who make

every day as joyful as all the tries and goals ever scored.

MALACHY CLERKIN wishes to say thanks to everyone who answered a phone, chased up

a photo and found a phone number. A special word of gratitude to the indefatigable Jim

O’Brien of Boston for turning what might have been just a passing reference into a fully-

formed chapter.

To the staff of the Pearse Street Library in Dublin not only for their archives, but for their

glorious workspace too. To P.J. Cunningham at the Sunday Tribune for making it a job, but

never work. To Rachel Collins, Eimear Lowe, Pat Nugent and Emma Somers for pep talks

and patience. To the family for all that and more. And to Olivia Doyle for the best time of

my life.


Introduction 7

Timeline 12

1. The 1870s: Dunlop’s Dream 13

2. 1875-1884: The Champion Rises, and Falls 21

3. 1876: Rugby Takes Root By The River 32

4. 1878: The First Rugby International 35

5. 1875-1925: A Sporting Zoological Gardens 42

6. 1887: Long Time Coming 58

7. 1888: ‘Not Very Black’ 64

8. 1894 & 1899: The First Triple Crowns 72

9. 1900: Soccer Takes A Bow 82

10. 1905: The Originals of the Species 91

11. 1914: Irish Rugby’s Fallen Volunteers 100

12. 1924-1935: Between the Wars 110

13. 1927: The First Home Soccer Tie For The New State 119

14. 1928: The Fatal Scrum 128

15. 1922-1939: The Bateman Cup Creates Club Legends 133

16. 1948: The Golden Age of Kyle & Mullen 138

17. 1947-1957: Morton’s Enchanted Evenings 149

18. 1958: No Warm Welcome for Wallabies 158

19. 1969-1970: ‘A Real Ordeal’ for the Springboks 163


CONTENTS20. 1968-1971: Soccer Returns 174

21. 1973: ‘At Least We Turn Up’ 183

22. 1973: United Irishmen 192

23. 1982: Ollie for Taoiseach! 201

24. 1985: Giving It A Lash! 212

25. 1986: ‘Go Home Union Jack’ 224

26. 1988: A Whole New Ball Game 233

27. 1991: So Near, and Yet... 243

28. 1993: Beautiful, Beautiful Munsters 253

29. 1995: Riot Acts 263

30. 1999: Ulster Says Yes! 274

31. 2001: Dutch Gold 282

32. 2003: Red Carpet, Red Faces 291

33. 2004: Elation Once Again 300

34. 2006: The Donnybrook in Dublin 4 310

35. 1873-2010: Evolutionary Road 319

Bibliography 326

Appendix 1 International Rugby Results 330

Appendix 2 International Soccer Results 335

Appendix 3 Lansdowne Road International Records 338

Index 346


Cigarette cards and stickersfeaturing Irish sportsmen.

06 LANSDOWNE ROAD


INTRODUCTIONt eight o’clock on the Sunday morning of New Year’s Eve

2006, John Kelly arrived at Lansdowne Road for a final day’s

work. His book of numbered stickers in his hand, he headed

off around the stadium. He passed the bins under the North

Terrace that were half-filled with water, rounded the radio

station people who were stitching up their promotional banner near

where the East Stand met the South Terrace and carried on his careful,

precise way along the front few rows of Lower West Stand.All in all, his

circuit of the stadium took just over an hour to complete. His job?

Checking each seat to make sure its number hadn’t been washed off by

the Saturday night rain.

This was Lansdowne Road on its last legs.We spent the day there to see

out the last game the old place would host before the diggers moved in.

With a nice tip of the hat to history, the final match replicated the first

ever rugby fixture – Leinster versus Ulster. But to be there to witness it

was to know that ‘replicated’ was the wrong word entirely.The place was

different, the rugby itself was different, the world was unimaginably

different.

Just about the only similarities, in fact, were the team names.Within

hours of the DART ferrying the last of the crowds into the Dublin night

after Leinster’s 20-12 victory, Setanta Sports footage of Brian O’Driscoll’s

stunning pass to himself in the second half was up onYouTube and had

begun its journey to well over three-quarters of a million hits.No part of

that sentence would have made sense to Henry Wallace Dunlop back in

1872.

And despite all the changes, nobody was in any doubt that still more

change was needed and needed badly. Just after 11 am, we went right up

to the top of the Upper East Stand and sat for a while to take the place

in.There was no getting away from it – what you could see from up there

was a stadium that nobody in their right mind could have imagined had

they started with a blank sheet of paper.

Down to the left was the South Terrace where the schoolboys stood

for the internationals. Its back wall started off high, but began to slope

away around its midpoint, as if slumping its shoulders in apology to those

in the houses on Lansdowne Road behind for obstructing their view.

A

INTRODUCTION 07


Pushed over to the side of the terrace nearest

the West Stand was the security centre – a

solid, square concrete box with a ladder up

to it.Then on around to another box, this

time one with a wide window through

which on big match days you could

see an RTÉ panel fulminating

amongst themselves in studio light. By

the time you reached the end of the terrace,

these constructions had encroached right into the

standing space so that it finished at a point, as if pinched by a giant

thumb and forefinger.

We looked across and saw the West Stand, separated from the North

Terrace by a lone floodlight pole and the Wanderers pavilion that had

stood there since 1912, as if a twee old cottage in the middle of an

international sports stadium was the most natural thing in the world. On

then to the Lower West Stand, pockmarked with plastic seating of all

different colours and shades, the legacy of wear and tear and one dark

night of riots in 1995.And the UpperWest Stand looking for all the world

like the old Hogan Stand in Croke Park – all brown wooden benches

covered by the same dun roof that had peeked out over it for fifty-one

years.

The upper stand had the press box in the centre, built in a time before

Wi-Fi, before ISDN, before the uniform use of three-point plugs even.

(Presumably also before the size of the average press buttock grew beyond

that of, say, an Olympic gymnast – but we digress). Underneath was

the lower stand where the dignitaries sat and below that

again the tunnel from which players would

emerge for games.

The venerable RTÉ floor

manager Tadhg de Brún has the

best story about that tunnel.When

the newly-elected President Mary

Robinson arrived for her first official

engagement at a Five Nations match in

A 1977 leaflet forthe LansdowneRoad DevelopmentFund

08 LANSDOWNE ROAD


1991, she and her husband took tea in the holding area while the players

filed onto the pitch and lined up ready to meet her. But between that

tunnel and the pitch there was a big, iron, sliding door and as the band

prepared to play the presidential salute, that door stayed shut.‘Have they

forgotten about me?’ the new president wondered aloud as she stood there

ready to take the pitch.

Suddenly, an almighty racket arose as someone on the outside of the

iron door started kicking at it noisily and repeatedly.The official on the

inside of the door, clearly unaware that he was the one holding the whole

show up,heaved it across in a rage and upbraided the chap who was doing

the kicking. ‘Would you stop that please – what’s the matter with you?’

he asked.And the official on the outside, oblivious to just how close an

tUachtarán standing, gave him his answer. ‘Would you leave the door

open, the fuckin’ president has to come out!’ De

Brún reports that ne’er a flinch came from anyone

in the presidential party, least of all the lady herself.

But back to NewYear’s Eve 2006; we looked on

down to the end of the West Stand and the

Havelock Square end.They came to call it ‘Currow

Corner’, after the small Kerry parish that gave the

world Mick Doyle, Moss Keane and Mick Galwey,

all of whom scored tries for Ireland on that patch

of grass. Just behind the corner flag was the

Lansdowne Pavilion, formerly a place for players to

change before and after matches, latterly a press

conference room where Ireland soccer managers

went to squirm and occasionally wish the DART rumbling overhead had

room for one more.

The back wall of the North Terrace was similar to its southern

equivalent, starting off high and proud but gradually draining away as it

met the corner with the East Stand. Opened in 1984, the East Stand was

by far the most modern-looking section of the stadium. It had seats rather

than benches throughout and the PA system didn’t crackle as much over

there as it did in the West Stand. Down below, catering vans powered

with the low hum of out-the-back generators sold burgers and pizza slices

Above and opposite:Tickets fromLansdowne Roadmatches: Ireland vEngland, 1949and Ireland XV vBarbarians, 2000

INTRODUCTION 09


for a fiver and tea and coffee for €2.50.The

East Stand might have been an

improvement on the rest of the place, but

the notion of a purpose-built concession

stand in the ground was laughable.

And yet, here’s the thing. Lansdowne

Road was full that day, full to bursting.

Fathers brought kids and fathers brought

fathers, whole battalions of families and friends turned out to

be part of what the marketing people called ‘The Last Stand’.As a slogan,

they’d argue it did its job – a footfall of forty-eight thousand adds up to

some serious unit-shifting after all – but inside the ground it felt like it

had struck the wrong note. This was no defiant action. Nobody was

chaining themselves to turnstiles and declaring theirs the dead body over

which the diggers would need to roll.There was a general, shrugging

acceptance that the old place had to go.The sooner the better, most of us

reckoned.

But people loved it like they loved a pair of torn and faded old jeans.

They loved the peculiar microclimate that would cause a visiting kicker

to see his first penalty carried one way on the wind and his second go

quite the other.They loved that the stands loomed over the pitch to such

an extent that the players’ voices carried into the upper tiers on quiet

nights.They loved the idea of the Lansdowne Roar and asking aloud in

groups of drinkers after a game where it had gone to at all, at all. It was a

kip of a place, but it was our kip of a place.

That’s why those forty-eight thousand people were there on a freezing

final day.To grab one last thread of a garment that had been part of us

since shortly after the Famine. No, of course nobody with a blank sheet

of paper would ever have built a stadium like it, but building stadiums all

in one go is a wholly modern enterprise. People didn’t build the great

stadiums of the past, history did. Stage by stage and decade by decade,

brick by brick and quirk by quirk.

Lansdowne Road was crumbling long before it was felled, but the

memories and the stories and the days it gave the nation were great

indeed and were always going to be sturdy enough to last long after the

10 LANSDOWNE ROAD


rain washed the last of John Kelly’s stickers away.

But just to make sure the stories live on, we’ve tried to fit 134 years of

the place between two covers. Some of the days are as familiar to your

average rugby or soccer fan as the weekend just gone, some won’t register

in the slightest. From the initial efforts of HenryWallace Dunlop to create

a sports complex by the Dodder in the late nineteenth century to the

first All Blacks in 1905, from early soccer internationals to athletics

meetings in the forties and fifties and American football in the eighties.

Days like the one where England turned up to play rugby at the height

of the troubles, keeping the real world at bay while we watched some

sport. And nights when sport took a back seat, most obviously when

soccer fans tore the place to bits in 1995.

Some stories sag with tragedy, others make you giggle and indeed

goggle at the Ireland of the day.The thing with a stadium that becomes

the focal point of a country a few times each year is that what goes on

within its walls must reflect something of the state of the nation beyond

them. And so we’ve set each day in its context and framed the hours

between the touchlines as they affected the times.

The old Lansdowne Road is gone and in its place

an impressive venue of shimmering glass adorns the

skyline on Dublin’s southside, visible and

identifiable to all from Pearse Street to Ringsend,

from Ballsbridge to Sandymount. The past

wasn’t a better place, just a different one and

in time the new stadium will tell its own

stories and host its own great days. For

now, however, you’ll have to make do

with these. Enjoy.

Gerard Siggins and Malachy Clerkin,

March 2010

Opposite and below:Ticket from Irelandv Albania, 1992and Ireland v SanMarino, 2006, bothin Lansdowne Road

INTRODUCTION 11


lansdowne road

Documents

especial thanks

coauthor gerard siggins

brian siggins

malachy logan

gerard whelan

rds library

stadium thematches

new stadium