Staff at The Rocket pub near Putney Bridge looked as if they had just crawled from the trenches of the first World War. They were shell-shocked after a Thursday afternoon spent trying to fling pints over the bar counter faster than the hordes of thirsty Shamrock Rovers fans could sink them.
The queues grew longer as the crowd of Rovers fans, in London for their club’s Europa Conference League clash with Chelsea, bayed for sustenance. They were raucous but in good form, as giddy as children at where they were. They drank it all in, in every sense.
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The bar staff were losing the battle, which implies the Rovers fans must have been winning it. Alas, this was the only victory the Hoops would taste on what turned out to be a chastening evening. Still, the hours ahead would hold some moments of magic.
About 3,000 Rovers fans travelled to London. According to those who came, the morning’s Ryanair departures to Gatwick were like Hoops charter flights. Others had flown to Birmingham and even Liverpool before pouring south on trains.
Some gathered at Earl’s Court but the majority congregated at The Rocket, on the south bank of the river Thames across the water from Chelsea. London Metropolitan Police encircled the pub in large numbers but, in truth, they had little to do but babysit the playful Rovers crew.
A handful of Hoops were hosted at Stamford Bridge before the game. Chelsea had graciously invited along two former Rovers players who had also played for the London club. Lifelong Rovers fan and former player John Coady (64) spent two seasons at Chelsea in the late 1980s, scoring on his debut. Hoops legend Paddy Mulligan (79) won the Uefa Cup Winners Cup with the Blues in 1971 during a six-year stint in London, half at Chelsea and the rest at Crystal Palace.
When Coady moved to London in 1986 he lodged in digs at Raynes Park with Tipperary woman Kit Myles, who passed away during the recent Covid pandemic. In a lovely nod to his past, this week he stayed in south London with Kit’s daughter Tina and her husband, Terry Noble.
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“Everybody is treating us royally,” said a delighted Coady, speaking on Thursday hours before the game. “We’re going down to Stamford Bridge for a champagne reception at 5.30pm and then we’ll watch the match.”
Coady said every fellow Rovers fan he knew was “shaking their heads in wonder” at being in London, and hitherto unbeaten in the competition, to take on the Premier League giants.
“This is Rovers playing at the highest level. We’ve earned it. It’s every schoolboy’s dream.”
Was Coady dreaming of a famous victory? “If we’re not slaughtered, that’ll be good enough for me.”
There were similar sentiments back at The Rocket. Stuart Wilson was aged four in 1980 when his Rovers-mad father spirited him south across the Liffey from their Cabra home to Milltown for his first Hoops match. “If my dad was still here he’d be mesmerised by this,” he said.
Wilson said the Conference League had given ambitious clubs like Rovers “something to aim at”. They were there on merit, he said. “It’s not beyond us to pull off a surprise but I just hope we don’t get a whooping.”
Nearby, the Fields clan had gathered from their homes in Tallaght, the Liberties and London. Derek Fields held aloft a seasonal scarf: “Santa is a Rovers fan.” His son, Derek jnr, moved to London 17 years ago. Now they were supping pints together in Putney.
Derek snr’s brother, Eamon Fields, said their father had been a Shels fan. “We all went for Rovers. You have to rebel,” he beamed. With their nephew Tom Fields, they had all travelled abroad before to follow Rovers in Europe. But they were almost vibrating with excitement for the Chelsea clash.
Most Rovers fans set off from the pub at 6pm for an organised march to Chelsea’s ground. The Met cleared the way as the Hoops swarmed over Putney Bridge, paralysing rush hour traffic. London commuters filmed them on their phones from the upper decks of their marooned red buses, utterly bemused at the sight of an enormous flow of Dubliners in green bobble hats singing their own version of Wham’s Last Christmas (“… I’ll give it to Stephen Bradleeeey”).
There were about 2,000 Rovers fans on the march, which must have equated to about 14,000 internally concealed pints of beer. Stamford Bridge was more than two miles away and would take over an hour to reach with police crowd control. Officers mostly turned a blind eye as increasingly desperate Rovers fans kept peeling off down side streets to relieve some of the pressure from their session at The Rocket – this was turning into Rovers’ Long March to Weedom.
All along the way, up the New King’s Road and all through Fulham, locals hung out of their windows to catch a glimpse of this odd green parade. At long last, the Rovers reached the Shed End of Stamford Bridge, where they made infinitely more noise than the rest of the stadium combined.
There was some enhanced banter with the Chelsea fans nearest the away end, some of whom occasionally chanted about the Pope and the IRA. A few Rovers fans responded with songs musing on the merits of monarchy. It probably wasn’t what either club’s executives would have preferred to happen. But the truth was that there was no real feeling of menace in it from either side.
Chelsea piled on the early pressure while Rovers – at first – defended like warriors. The Hoops fans never stopped singing. Then a calamitous mistake gifted the Blues the lead and the surrounding Chelsea fans took the opportunity to put the Irish back in their place.
Almost immediately, however, Markus Poom equalised for Rovers. The roar from the delirious away end filled Stamford Bridge. Grown men and women flung their limbs about like the subjects of some sort of mass exorcism, but an ecstatic one. It was a moment of beautiful bedlam and for eight glorious minutes the Rovers fans dreamed of the impossible.
But that was what it turned out to be. Another mistake gifted Chelsea the lead. Then they scored a third and Rovers fans settled down for the denouement they knew lay ahead.
The away end’s rhapsodic ovation at the end for their team – defeated 5-1 – was heartfelt and grateful. But the miracle was not to be. The Hoops fans were last to leave the stadium as they poured out into the cold, dry air of London. They had been defeated but were unbowed, happy to have been there and to have dreamed, if only for a few fleeting moments.
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