An Inconvenient Truth

Every Game An Away Game by Bluebeard
(first published in the March 2010 Wexford Youths programme)

With Wexford here for tonight’s game (and with a little luck, myself as well), I find myself forced to confront an inconvenient truth. I myself am a Wexford man. I was brought up in Wexford, near to New Ross. My parents were born and brought up in Wexford, and still live there. When I am back for the games, I normally stay in Wexford. My sister has an ostentatiously West Wexford accent to the point of cliché. Supposedly, Waterford was just where we used to do the big weekly shop.

I’ve been going to Blues games for twenty years now and a fan for longer – as soon as I could convince my folks that dropping me alone among strange men from the big dangerous city at Kilcohan on a Sunday afternoon was a good idea, I was a regular. I dragged my father along a couple of times: I don’t think he ever got it – two sides each four men short of a team, not a stick between the lot of them and a balloon instead of a ball, sure the boy mustn’t be right in the head.

At the time, there was no senior team in Wexford – the best team in the county was Ross Celtic. At that time, a couple of Wexford lads were playing with the Blues, most prominently Paul Cashin from New Ross, a postman in the town and a maestro on the field – the man who nutmegged Tigana! The Blues had players from Tipp, Kilkenny, Wexford and Waterford in the squad – there might have been a team in Kilkenny, but the Blues represented the whole of the South East in my eyes. It was the logical choice in my mind.

And the jeering in school for such logical choices! “Why would you be wasting your time with them?” a chorus would cry, headed by boys who knew of nothing but International and English football on the telly, lads for whom Ince was an angel for his club and a demon for his country. But my thick neck prevailed, and I continued to come.

So when Mick Wallace came to enter a team from Wexford into the league, some of my friends thought that I might have a quandary. At that stage I was living in Dublin, and my friends had accepted that I had masochistic tendencies on a Friday night, the more stylish noting that I wore a blue that didn’t suit my skin tone too. The idea that my own home county would have a team of their own would surely mean I would forsake the Blues for the Youths.

To be honest, it never crossed my mind. Because it isn’t just about local pride – an accident of birth. It’s about invested disappointments over many seasons yielding cherished small victories and successes. Like beating Rovers to stay up. Or seeing us reach a cup semis and finals last year. Or knowing that I once stood sheltering by a container in heavy rain against Finn Harps in what is now the City end of the New Stand, because all there was where the old stand is now was a muddy bank, and I knew my turn to be destroyed sliding down it was due soon.

I could no sooner drop the Blues for the Youths than put my shoes on the wrong feet. I have enduring connections with the club, and the fans that make it. They were my club growing up in West Wexford, when I was in Dublin, and then London, and will continue to be when I move farther afield again. I stuck with them through the bad times; I’m owed the good.

I genuinely wish Wexford Youths well in all but three or maybe four games a year. And I’d love to see them win the First Division – but the year after we do.