Blue Is The Colour

Every Game An Away Game by Bluebeard

(first published in the September 2010 Limerick match programme)

The Blues’ visitors tonight are Limerick, the only other team in top grade football in Ireland who have the common decency to wear a proper shade of blue unblemished by unsightly stripes, though presumably they will have the manners tonight to wear their changed colours of yellow. On their many trips to the RSC, and Kilcohan before it, Limerick have as often as not worn white, now their third kit. Indeed, I think I’d seen Limerick play a half dozen times before I got it into my head that they wear blue, and that white was the away colour.

Blue and white have not been the only Lims options though. Slightly older fans will recall Limerick as the New Norwich, under the governance of Pat Grace back in the 1980s, with yellow home shirts and green shorts. That stemmed from ownership disputes in the early ’80s, around the same time as our troubles. Recent upheavals have also led to some colour experiments – most memorably the red and white stripes of Limerick 37 on arrival in the League, a recollection of the team colours of the club that first represented Limerick in the League in 1937. Back to blue feels right for Limerick though.

I have struggled to remember who it was said it about modern football, that players move so much, that boards are overturned, that managers are hired and fired, that sponsors make such demands, that grounds are built and left, that in reality you are supporting a set of laundry. It seemed most apposite of European football of the ’90s and this century. I googled it, and it turns out it was Jerry Seinfeld, who said of American sports that, as sports fans, we are basically just “cheering laundry”.

It is hard not to see the applications to Irish football. Look at the difference between the Shelbourne team that won the League in 2006, and the one that started in the First Division in 2007. Their manager, Pat Fenlon, famously the foe of Derry and Bohs, subsequently went on to manage both. Shels players who publically demonstrated great enmity towards other teams joined those very teams after the Shels bubble burst. Ollie Byrne, the big man there, suffered a brain tumor and he too had to depart. But the next year they wore red, and their real fans continued to watch an almost entirely different team take the field. The Rovers team we helped relegate in 2005 was almost to a man changed, changing ownership and structure, moving ground within another couple of years. The only thing they retained was their hoops and their fans. That, and the fact that they’re still evil!

There was huge change for us during the year 2005 too. We went through four managers, and massive change in the management and structure of the club. The arrival of Pat Dolan, a figure detested by so many fans, stymied the rot, saved us from relegation, and he became an almost messianic figure here. And after salvation, even more dramatic change at all levels in the club, with something like 3 players retained, as was our spot at the RSC. Otherwise, it seemed that the only things that had not changed were the fans and the laundry. And of course, our legendary and long-serving kit man, Michael Walsh. All credit to a long-serving long-suffering hard-working member of the club, who has outlasted almost everything other than our blue kit. At this stage, it almost seems that he is independent of the many façades of the club and has been with the laundry since before there was a club.

Of course, that probably isn’t actually true. But if it were, it would tie him very closely to tonight’s opponents. I mentioned earlier that Limerick joined the League as a red and white striped club. They changed to blue laundry over the summer of 1941. That same summer, we left top level football in protest at a Cork-slanted play-off fixture arranged despite our protests and superior goal difference and goals scored. We ended the season as double runners-up, after a replay in the Cup Final, and owing to our refusal to attend the play-off in Cork in May. The four seasons before we left the League, the club was second twice and Cup Finalists once. Despite the club’s disappearance, our laundry stayed in the League: Limerick bought it! In the four seasons we were gone, that same set of laundry continued the vein of form it found and went on to finish second twice more. Some might say that it was a good Limerick team, finding its feet in the League. As someone who has cheered a certain set of laundry for years, I’m going to claim that one for us!