The Last Word: The League’s Elder Statesmen Visit The RSC

by John Kehoe

(first published in the March 2011 Athlone Town programme)

One of the great, but often underappreciated, aspects of football culture is the long and starried history behind it, stretching back and back through the decades. Like horse racing, rugby and golf, the game has developed a rich historic tradition, going back years and years, to a more Corinthian age when men with impossibly stern expressions, impossibly large moustaches, and impossibly voluminous pantaloons strode out on the Sabbath to play what was even then a recognisable version of the sport we all love today.

Indeed, go back further and further and there are any number of references, mentions or hints in the historical record, of some class of a game called football that was played hundreds of years before the Association codified its rules in late 1863.

Our neighbours across the Irish Sea would appear to be far more steeped in these venerable traditions, as the current League of Ireland has a comparatively youthful look about it, especially in the First Division where six of the eleven sides were only founded post-1950 (Finn Harps, Mervue, Salthill, Monaghan, Cork and Wexford in that order). Indeed 12 of the League’s 21 clubs have only been able to call themselves League clubs in my lifetime (work it out!).

Flying the flag for the old-timers though, are tonight’s visitors Athlone Town. The League of Ireland’s oldest club, founded in 1887, the year before the Football League itself, putting the midland side on a par with the Burnleys and Preston North Ends of this world. The Town were on the losing side in the Leinster Senior Cup final of 1896. A garrison town playing the garrison game since long before those garrisons moved on, that competition, like its Munster equivalent, regularly featured regimental teams, such as the Royal Irish Rifles, and the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Athlone joined the League of Ireland in 1922, the season after its Dublin-only inauguration, and managed a creditable 6th place finish. The following year they lifted the FAI Cup, beating Fordsons of Cork, but by the end of the 1927-28 season they were refused re-election to the league, and it was to be 1969 before they returned to the top level. That meant that they missed out on encounters with the Blues until that season, when the two games finished 1-0 and 1-1, slightly in our favour.

That could be seen to have set the tone somewhat, with games between the two clubs regularly squeaky-tight ever since. Who could forget the unprecedented four draws of the 2008 season, or even last October, when two late goals in the last five minutes were required to turn the game around and salvage our – ultimately unrewarded – promotion tilt. If that shows us anything at all it’s that it behoves young whippersnappers like ourselves to respect our elders!