Athlone Again, Naturally!

by Brian Kennedy

(first published in the October 2010 Athlone Town match programme)

One of the very first games I witnessed at Kilcohan as a kid would be against Athlone Town in the seventies. At that time the Midlanders were gearing up to play in the UEFA Cup having finished second in the League in the previous 1974/75 season.
Waterford had gone a couple of seasons without winning the League and it was during a spell when a little rot would set in, in terms of silverware.
Like a clown I thought I’d try impress my mother by asking her to go alone to the game, but when you’re seven years of age that doesn’t really hold much water. However she did send me along to Kilcohan with my mad uncles – the Butlers. I now realise 34 years later I actually would have been safer had I walked out the road from Larchville, gone through the turnstiles alone and roared the Blues on ’til it was pitch dark.
Right from the off the £2 my mum gave me certainly wasn’t to pay for me going through the turnstiles, as my uncle had a knack of working the machinery so that I  bent down and pushed my wiry body to move the turnstile at the exact moment he was above me paying for himself. It’s a trick he honed for several years after with his own kids.
Some called it ingenuity. Other called it the work of a cheapskate.
The game was a scoreless draw but I vaguely remember picking up a newspaper and looking in envy a few months later when Athlone drew 0-0 with a team called AC Milan at St Mel’s Park!
How times change, but Athlone spent a period of time in more recent years when they became a bogey side for the Blues. Longford have since taken over that mantle (well, up to last week they did anyway!)
They caused the start of a five game home losing streak in the eighties during a tough period for United, stayed undefeated in several trips to the RSC, and the one time I actually brought a girl to a match (boy what I didn’t know about love – bringing my first girlfriend to watch Waterford United on a damp Sunday and freezing terrace) was against Athlone in a 2-0 home defeat. Naturally she dumped me and I’ve gone alone to every home game since.
Its 22 years since Athlone last won a major honour – that came in the shape of the First Division title in the 1987/88 season and like us they’d floated between both top flight and second tier football, and money problems saw a link between us as well. Around Christmas 2008 the club held an emergency general meeting with supporters to unveil the true extent of their financial difficulties. Sure enough we were in a similar boat not long before (well us and about half a dozen Premier clubs). United persevered though as did Town (who were saved when the club launched a patron scheme with almost 400 fans contributing.

One of the best wins I’d seen over Athlone, in my one and only visit to St Mel’s Park, came in the 1984/85 League Cup adventure when we beat a strong Athlone side 3-0 with goals from Power, Bennett & Coady against a club that had won the League cup three times in the first five years of the eighties. I remember it as my father had been working in the area and agreed to let me watch the game. As a ‘big man’ of 16 I should have been alright as he was working around the corner but I somehow missed the car and spent 2 hours in the dark (alone of course) trying to find him.
Of course it would be the year United would go on and win the League Cup at Kilcohan against Finn Harps. I actually did have an excuse for getting lost that day as I’d come over all faint and blanked out when the tannoy announcer mentioned a crowd that involved FOUR figures!
Not 423, or 691, or even 47 – the exact attendance at the first game in that campaign against Limerick, I kid you not.
And so to the last home game of the season, and if it’s anything to go by, it will involve high drama, getting lost, and probably a crowd of three figures. We never do anything simple here and although we’d all love four goals in the first ten minutes I’m pretty sure there is more chance of Rod Stewart buying a drink or Liverpool putting in a decent ninety minutes than us notching that many so early. Athlone don’t really have anything to play for (always dangerous) so it should be an interesting game.
All the best and just to say it’s been a pleasure writing my notes again in the programme.