Eamonn McCann on the FAI Cup final: ‘The sound of the crowd is the music of the game’

“There’s no feeling of oneness like being carried along in the soar and sway of the terrace, the swelling euphoria, the plummet to gloom, the cheering, the sneering, the whoops of delight, walking to the ground with a lilt in your step, your own private emotion shared out in the public street, like a spendthrift scattering joy ... The sound of the crowd is the music of the game.”

Eamonn McCann, Hotpress April 2021

The music of David Balfe, aka For Those I Love, falls lightly into conversation with Eamonn McCann about an FAI Cup final between two clubs drenched in lyrical memories. The Undertones inevitably follows, as does former Shelbourne chief executive Ollie Byrne’s parallel life as promoter of Skid Row, a band that proved “crucial to the emergence of Thin Lizzy.”

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“It’s the best football song ever, from anywhere,” says McCann of Balfe’s ‘I Have a Love,’ a stirring tribute to Paul Curran, the late poet and Shelbourne fan. “He is singing about the Coolock Reds, really, his gang. And of course, it is about his pal, and a love that will never fade. That is just so heartfelt.”

It’s Tuesday morning and McCann, now 79, is already in stride.

“Will I just ramble on?” he asks.

Please do. This is what we came in search of in advance of Sunday’s cup final; but McCann is never garrulous, not about Shelbourne nor his lifelong connection to Derry City FC, despite decades of shape shifting from journalist to political activist to politician to journalist all over again.

“The first time I heard David’s song it struck me that one of the closest relationships people ever have is with a gang of boys or girls. But young men strike up the closest relationships from being in a gang, not necessarily a football gang, but some sort of gang in the streets.

“That’s the Coollock Reds, a gang with a passion in common. A passion which surges up every week with a match and comes down again. Many men, I think, never again experience that sense of communal joy they feel standing on terraces. Never again.

“So I felt it very deeply, about David’s song, especially seeing him perform on Jools Holland when he took the Shelbourne flag off the microphone and waved it. If you are a League of Ireland fan you are a hard-hearted person if you didn’t have to stop yourself crying watching that.

“It was the greatest celebration of friendship, peer groups of young men, and football passion. And that’s why it is the best football song I’ve ever heard.”

It splashed Shels and Tolka Park across a wider plain, a place where sport and music mesh.

This was always so.

“I knew Ollie but not through football,” McCann remembers of Mr Shelbourne from the 1970s until his death in 2007 (factoring in some forced hiatuses). “I remember discovering Ollie’s role at Shels and being surprised. I knew him through Terry O’Neill, a rock promoter, and a close friend of mine.

“Terry ended up working for Shels in PR so there was this interpenetration between football and music or Shelbourne and the club scene in Dublin, all embodied in Ollie. He gave you entry into both worlds. We got on well, but he was a cantankerous boyo.”

Byrne ran a club on Mary Street in Dublin, as well as promoting Irish bands Skid Row and Thin Lizzy, so partial credit goes to him for helping, or at least not hindering, Phil Lynott’s rise.

“‘As well him as another, as Molly Bloom said, but Dublin was a very odd place at that time. I lived there for a number of years, while Shamrock Rovers were at Milltown. A great tragedy for Dublin, I think, moving Rovers from there to the badlands of Tallaght, were nobody could go!” He delivers this line with a jocular spirit before paying homage to the same area. “I was in the Rua Red gallery a few weeks ago. If you’re doing nothing some afternoon it is right beside the Luas station [and Tallaght stadium], it has a wonderful exhibition on at the minute.”

But back to gangs and how they shape us; McCann grew up on Rossville street in the Bogside, a seven-minute walk from the Brandywell.

“Some of my first memories as a child is waiting for the crowd coming back from the Brandywell, asking ‘who won? who won?’ People would come over and tell you who played well and so on.

“The Bogside had a great sense of itself. Not only from The Troubles but right from the beginning, from the 1920s and the foundation of the northern state. That sense of embattlement working-class Catholics had in the north.

“That’s not to say Derry was a Catholic team, it never was, ever. There was never a nationalism about Derry City which was any way rough-edged or offensive to anybody else.

“It was a sense of identity of Derry and of the area around the Brandywell rather than a political sense. This embattled community having a football club to represent them created something special. And it is still there.”

The club’s history being less tainted by green and orange hues, more candy-striped.

“Nobody does ‘oh ah, up the ra’ at a Derry match,” says McCann. “And I am not being disparaging to the [Republic of Ireland] women. But it is impossible to imagine the club fans chanting ‘oh ah ...’ It just won’t happen. It would be so far out of the minds of the ex-prisoner who attends the Brandywell for matches, or the Sinn Féin politician, it just wouldn’t occur to them.”

It has been heard at one League of Ireland ground in 2022.

“It is a bit of self-conscious bravado that is supposed to convey this bravado to the listener, in a semi-jocular nature.”

For all Derry City’s efforts to avoid political and paramilitary quagmires, in 1972 the club was effectively forced out of the Irish League and only regained senior status by a Fifa dispensation allowing them to enter the League of Ireland in 1985.

“The return was an act of defiance,” McCann remembers. “We were down knocking on the FAI door for many, many years but nobody wanted to know about us.

“The expulsion of Derry from the Irish League in the north conformed to the life of the vast majority of fans. It was quite spectacular. Here was the football team treated in the way we were being treated.

“It is debatable whether we were right about all that. The older I get I wonder if there was more to it. There was a great deal of whataboutery. They threw Derry out but what about this, what about that.”

Anger became many a young Derry person’s fuel during The Troubles?

“We had reasons to be uncheerful.

“But there was something apt about swaggering around the 26 counties, with our Derry flags, having been held at bay for so long by the southern counties. Here We Are. Here We Are.”

Music and football offered equally compelling distractions.

“The sound of the crowd is the music of the game,” wrote McCann in Hotpress last year before staring into football’s existential threat. “The task now is to save the music from suffocation by couldn’t-care, tone-deaf zillionaires and sheikhs.”

The looming spectre of the Qatar World Cup casts a shadow over every football conversation in November 2022. “It was the final confirmation about how deeply corrupt world football had become. When the World Cup being awarded to Qatar, everyone knew what it was. Bribery. There was no other explanation, and there still isn’t.

“Everyone knew that there is something terribly wrong here but the dominance of money, of capitalism and of repressive states is a bit too blatant with Qatar. Maybe there will be backlash against them politically. We will wait and see but it was the final and clinching proof of corruption in world football.”

McCann sees hope where none previously existed. He sees League of Ireland clubs no longer confused about being “a business or a sport.”

“League of Ireland football is a product in its own right. I think it has a healthy future. You can sense, as soon as you walk into the Brandywell, that these are people who know what they are doing.”

To start with Balfe, Shelbourne’s modern song-and-dance-man, demands an epilogue dedicated to The Undertones, Derry’s post-punk immortals.

“Everyone in Derry considers The Undertones as our own. They never left Derry, they literally never went to live anywhere else. That is recognised.

“I feel a buzz of pleasure every time the team runs out to ‘Teenage Kicks’ blasted from the speakers. And that terrific feeling when the whole ground sings ‘I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight, get teenage kicks right through the night.’ I mean, what a football song that is.”

One that never fades.