There is a picture that has sat wrapped in a brown paper bag in the corner of my front room for years.
When I pulled it out this week, I knew I’d seen it before but not for a long time and had forgotten about it until recently, when the evenings began to lengthen and Gaelic football, once a large part of childhood, came to mind.
The picture is of Antrim playing against Dublin in the O’Donovan Rossa Challenge match in Croke Park. A small handwritten date on the back says 1946.
That makes some sense as Antrim that year beat Cavan in the Ulster Senior Football Championship final and would go on to be beaten by Kerry in the All-Ireland semi-final in August.
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Cavan had won 14 of the previous 15 Ulster titles and it was Antrim’s first win since 1913.
There are six players in the shot, three from Antrim and three from Dublin. One of the Antrim players is my dad George ‘Geordy’ Watterson, standing in the left foreground and ready to lock on to any breaking ball.
The picture is 80 years old and if the date is correct on the back and the year is 1946, it’s the year Antrim played in one of the most storied matches of the time.
My dad, who captained the team, ran a small shop on the Falls Road in west Belfast and players of the era such as Kevin Armstrong, Harry O’Neill and Sean Gibson were regular visitors.
I can’t remember them coming in, but my mother Nuala did and before she passed in 2016, she spoke about the endless conversations and piles of Gallaher’s Blues cigarettes going up in smoke over the counter.
My dad didn’t get out of his 40s and died in the summer of 1969 just as the British army rolled down the Falls to be welcomed with tea and biscuits.
The soldiers built a sanger outside the shop door, another directly across the road and a third outside Aldos café at the top of the Donegal Road.
Dad was a gentle man and would not have enjoyed guns at the door, even less when the soldiers ripped up the Falls two years later in August 1971 after internment was introduced.
Local man Sean O’Neill – who we had always assumed without asking was Harry’s brother because he had red hair and looked exactly like him – was a regular in the shop and used to spend time in the Rock bar with my dad.
It was Sean who walked into the shop after the Saracens had left in 1971 bewildered, holding a green beret, a wooden baton and an unspent rubber bullet that the soldiers had dropped in the frenzy.
I’ve often wondered about the mood of the time and, had he lived, would being a county Gaelic footballer have been enough to be bundled into an armoured car and driven away.
On Sunday, August 18th, 1946, there was no such guesswork required as Kerry ran out 2-7 to 0-10 winners.
The late Weeshie Fogarty – psychiatric nurse, columnist, broadcaster and senior Kerry footballer – remembered the encounter in his Terrace Talk show on Radio Kerry.
“Antrim were then the opponents [of Kerry]… on a day which rained cats and dogs,” he said. “These conditions would suit the Kerrymen and the match would prove to be one of the most contentious for many years.
“Antrim got off to a disastrous start. Bill O’Donnell goaled within 10 minutes... The Northerners had drawn level by half-time only to go four points down again in the third quarter.
“The exchanges were rugged, fast and furious and a player from both sides was sent off. A bottle was thrown from the Cusack Stand at one of the Kerry players – an incident raised by the Kerry delegates, Dan Ryan, JJ Sheehy and Micheál Ó Ruairc, at the subsequent Central Council meeting.”
The match report in the Irish independent on Monday, August 19th, was less kind. In a time when bylines were not always used, the piece by Recorder offered a stern rebuke to the men in saffron and their hand-passing frills.
“It was a brave bid by Antrim, but they relied too much on fancy methods and one had the impression that the clash of styles was not for the betterment of the game,” he wrote.
I only saw my father play twice, both times at Casement Park in friendly celebration games where me and my brother Peter were inattentive ball boys behind the goals.
By then, he was into his 40s. The unfiltered Gallaher’s Blues were getting to him and the last move I remember him making in a match was taking a high ball in midfield, booting it up the pitch and walking off for the comfort of the dugout and cigarette, never to return.
The football conversations over the shop counter long ago vanished. My mother stuck it out for 20 years, sold the shop and left The Falls around 1989, while the last living member of the 1946 football squad, Eddie Spence, passed away in 2023, aged 97.
The picture will stay out of its wrapping now. The young men of 46 frozen in time at Croke Park.
Black and white, yellowing around the edges and stuck onto a stiff, white cardboard backing. After 80 years, maybe now is the time to put it on the wall.
