Dave Hannigan: Liam Brady? Paul McGrath? UCC freshers’ soccer team? Funny where life takes you

I am staring wistfully at a phone booth on the corner of Gillespie Road and Drayton Park, yards from Arsenal tube station. A relic from another era. The last time I stood in that glass box was November 27th, 1993. Brandishing a wire notebook full of hieroglyphics, I filed a match report about Arsenal versus Newcastle United, phoning my hurried take on a 2-1 home win down the line to a copy taker at the dear old Sunday Tribune in Dublin. My first Premier League gig. All I was short was a trilby hat with a press card tucked into the band and somebody shouting, “Get me rewrite!”

That earnest young man enunciating every precious word was 22 and giddy at the prospect of the strap under his byline next morning reading, ‘At Highbury’. The impossible glamour of it all. In the first flush of a journalism career, I had a head full of hair and some serious notions, oh so many notions, about myself. On this particular afternoon in April, I’m 52, near enough bald as a coot, world-weary, and traipsing through North London with two exhausted American teenagers in tow. They are not in the mood for their father’s hoary reminisces of a time three decades ago when he fancied himself as quite the soccer correspondent.

Imagine their delight, then, when I stopped on the Ken Friar Bridge leading to our Airbnb abutting Emirates Stadium so I could admire a flag containing an image of a hirsute Liam Brady. They had no interest in my yarn about the afternoon a quarter of a century ago when Chippy, then head of youth development at Arsenal, gave me a tour of the art deco marble halls of hallowed Highbury. No, the lads were more concerned with how soon they could get back on wifi. Nostalgia is so wasted on the young.

We had not come to England at Easter specifically for their father to trip down memory lane. It just couldn’t be avoided. The original purpose of our odyssey was a couple of football matches to take the boys’ minds off the first anniversary of their mother’s death, the chance to catch up with old friends, and to maybe absorb some accidental history along the way. Turns out we had different ideas of what that last bit entailed. I envisaged us stopping at Westminster Abbey. They wanted to go to JD Sports. I was hopeful of visiting the house where Giuseppe Garibaldi once stayed. They refused to leave the admittedly wonderful Classic Football Shirts shop and cafe in Spitalfields.

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Still, they picked up local culture here and there. “What is a facking tw*t?” asked Finn 20 minutes into watching West Ham United getting dismantled by Newcastle on a Wednesday night. I feigned ignorance but he wasn’t buying it. “They keep saying, ‘Moyes, you facking tw*t!’ What does that even mean?” He entered London Stadium an innocent 12-year-old Long Islander and departed with an enhanced swearing canon and a love of randomly shouting “Irons!” as if raised on a diet of jellied eels and Upton Park.

His older brother’s most memorable cameo that evening came after Newcastle’s fourth goal went in, prompting a sustained chorus of “Geordie boys, taking the piss”. The home supporters streamed towards the exits, but one elderly gentleman stopped, stood legs apart and lifted his right arm in the air, two defiant fingers cocked at the oblivious away fans in the section next door. The image of that truculent cockney statue of liberty is still making us laugh.

In lieu of the stations on Good Friday, we went to Shrewsbury Town v Peterborough, accompanied by Mark (our genial host for the week) and Ray, two old college pals long in English exile. Thirty-three years ago, we wore the skull and crossbones together on a UCC freshers’ soccer team, all undergraduate brash, brio and beer. Somehow, we have reached middle age, sensible and staid, a school principal, a university administrator, and a history professor, sitting in the stands, surrounded by our sons, their accents traversing the globe from Noo Yawk to cut-glass Middle England. Funny where life takes you.

It was my first time in Shrewsbury since a February morning 27 years ago when I interviewed Limerick’s Tommy Lynch, a true gent and club stalwart, about the impending visit of Liverpool in the FA Cup. They played at rickety Gay Meadow then, where an ould codger named Fred Davies manned a coracle to fish wayward balls from the nearby river Severn. Montgomery Waters Meadow, their slightly antiseptic current home, boasts no such quirks but, thankfully, still sold steaming half-time Bovril. Every beefy sip was a sense memory transporting me back to childhood days dipping shards of Cuthbert’s bread in bowls of the stuff in my mother’s kitchen.

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At Villa Park for a 2-0 win over Nottingham Forest, the thrill for my boys was an up-close glimpse of Emiliano Martinez, whose appalling buffoonery and antic chicanery was one of their enduring highlights of the World Cup. For me, that game was an opportunity to wheel out the age-old boast. “I was out on that field once.” Silence and disbelieving stares. “Well, I was with a television crew and we were given the run of the place because we were making a documentary about the great Paul McGrath.”

They still seemed slightly incredulous, so I clarified that this was before they were born. Different time. Previous life.