By Gerry Farrell Rivalry is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as follows: “competition for the same objective or for superiority in the same field”. Well, that certainly sums up the relationship between Bohemian FC and Shamrock Rovers FC. In order t
By Gerry Farrell
Rivalry is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as follows: “competition for the same objective or for superiority in the same field”. Well, that certainly sums up the relationship between Bohemian FC and Shamrock Rovers FC.
In order to understand how the Dublin clubs built up one of the fiercest rivalries in Irish sport, it requires a jump back in time to April 1923 when they faced each other four times in various cup competitions.
As the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt” and the final of these matches almost ended in violence after two Bohemians players had to be stretchered off due to rough tackling by the opposition. At the final whistle, Bohemians’ half-back Ernie Crawford removed his jersey and challenged Rovers star forward Bob Fullam to a fist-fight.
Crawford, who was born in Belfast and captain of the Irish rugby team, was also a decorated World War I veteran. Not a man to be taken lightly. Fullam himself was no shrinking violet: as well as being an accomplished footballer who was capped twice by the Republic of Ireland, he supplemented his income as a docker in Dublin Port. He had finished the 1922 FAI Cup Final amid a mass brawl after Rovers were beaten by St. James’s Gate. The fighting only ceased when the brother of the Gate’s Charlie Dowdall reportedly confronted Fullam with a pistol.
Could we perhaps trace the beginnings of the biggest rivalry in Irish football back to these events in the 1920s?
In the early decades of football in Ireland, the Dublin Derby was the games contested between Bohemians and Shelbourne. Both clubs had been founded in the 1890s with Bohemians finally settling into their permanent home in Dalymount Park in 1901. Shelbourne had their beginnings in what is now Slattery’s Pub at the junction of South Lotts Road, Bath Avenue and Shelbourne Road in 1895. Founded by a group of dock workers from the local Ringsend/Sandymount area, their name was reportedly decided upon by a coin toss between the names of the various nearby streets. It was these two clubs who would have the great north-south city rivalry of the city.
By the 1904-05 season Shelbourne and Bohs were the only Dublin-based clubs competing in the Ulster-dominated Irish League and they faced each other in the final of the 1908 Irish Cup, which Bohs won after a replay. This was the first time the final had been contested by two Dublin sides.
Bohs didn’t even face Rovers in competitive games until 1915. The first meeting came in a Leinster Senior Cup first round tie on January 9, 1915 – Bohs winning 3-1 thanks to a hat-trick from forward Ned Brooks. Later that same year, Rovers were elected to the top division of the Leinster Senior League and their second game at that level was against Bohs, who again won on a 3-1 scoreline. That game came just two weeks after Rovers’ young centre-back James Sims died tragically in a shipping accident in Dublin Bay.
But, in terms of rivlary, it was still very much Bohs v Shels.
After teams previously competed in the League run by the Belfast-based Irish Football Association, a new League was formed by the Football Association of Ireland on the back of the work
that the Leinster Senior League had done. Rovers didn’t compete in the League in that season but they reached the Cup Final and in the following season were elected to the League and finished as champions.
The ‘20s would begin an era of intense competition for Bohs and Rovers; before the decade was out both clubs would have three league titles apiece to their names. Rovers would have also begun a run which would establish their reputation as “Cup Kings” by winning the FAI Cup five years in a row. The first of those five-in-a-row titles would begin with victory over the holders, Bohs, in the 1928-29 final in Dalymount Park. The initial game finished 0-0 but in the replay Rovers ran out 3-0 winners, with two goals coming from John Joe ‘Slasher’ Flood and another from the aforementioned Bob Fullam.
On April 22, 1945, almost 22 years since the tussle between Crawford and Fullam, and 16 years since their last Cup Final meeting, Bohs and Rovers met again in Dalymount Park in the final. To date it is the last FAI Cup Final meeting of the pair and remains the biggest attendance ever for an FAI Cup Final, with 45,000 reportedly packed into the famous old ground that Sunday afternoon.
Among the Bohs ranks was Irish international Kevin O’Flanagan, newly qualified as a doctor. He had a poor game that day, perhaps due to the fact that he had failed to diagnose himself with the ‘flu and had played the game with a 103-degree temperature! Podge Gregg, the Rovers centre-forward, broke Bohs hearts in the second half as he converted from a Mickey Delaney cross to score the game’s only goal. On the Rovers bench, as coach, was a man well familiar with the fixture, Mr. Fullam.
By the time of that final, Bohs’ star was already on the wane. Their strictly amateur status meant that they tended to bring through and develop players before losing them to Irish or cross-channel clubs who were prepared to offer professional terms. As just one example, the following year Rovers lost the FAI Cup Final with four former Bohemians players in their line-up; Frank Glennon, Noel Kelly, Charlie Byrne and goalkeeper Jimmy Collins. The team that defeated Rovers in that 1946 final was Drumcondra FC. For the next two decades, as Bohs drifted towards the lower reaches of the league table, the great north-south Dublin rivalry would be between Drumcondra and Rovers in what many view as the competitive peak of the League of Ireland.
Between the end of the 1940s and the early ‘60s, Drumcondra would see players of exceptional quality grace Tolka Park. Among them future Ireland legends Con Martin, Eoin Hand and Alan Kelly Snr. as well as the likes of Tommy Rowe, John ‘Kit’ Lawlor, Christopher ‘Bunny’ Fullam, Ray Keogh, Dessie Glynn, and Jimmy Morrissey to name but a few. They would win five league titles and another two FAI Cups. In Europe, they would knock out Danish side Odense from the Fairs Cup and face the likes of Atletico Madrid and Bayern Munich.
Rovers would claim three more titles in the ‘50s. This was the era of player-manager Paddy Coad and his exciting young side that became known as ‘Coad’s Colts’, which featured the likes of Liam Tuohy, Paddy Ambrose and Ronnie Nolan. The matches between Drums and Rovers, whether in Tolka Park or at Milltown, were huge fixtures in the sporting calendar. Well before television coverage became the norm and when direct experience of British football was through occasional newsreels and the odd pre-season friendly or player guest appearance, the Rovers/Drums rivalry captured the sporting imaginations of the Dublin sporting public to a huge degree.
As this great rivalry played out during the ‘50s and into the ‘60s, Bohs were very much in the back seat. However, in the early ‘60s they experienced a turnaround in fortunes thanks in no small part to their new manager, Seán Thomas. Thomas was the man who had just led Rovers to the 1963-64 league title but quit after a bust-up with the club’s owners, the Cunningham family. His next port of call was on the north side of the city where he helped revive the fortunes of the struggling Dublin 7 club. In his first season, Bohs finished an impressive third place in the league, which was a huge improvement on 12th the year before.
By the end of the ‘60s, the Bohemian membership had decided to make the biggest change in their history. They were going to scrap their amateur status and begin paying players. The policy quickly began to pay dividends. Only a year later Bohs would win their first major trophy in almost 35 years when they defeated Sligo Rovers in a second replay of the FAI Cup final. Amongst the Bohs XI several seasoned pros, including a number of names more than familiar to the Rovers faithful: Ronnie Nolan, Johnny Fullam and the first professional Bohemian, Tony O’Connell.
Over the course of the next decade, Bohs would win another two league titles and another FAI Cup during a relatively fallow period for Rovers. Despite bringing in Johnny Giles as player-manager (and a certain Eamon Dunphy as player-coach) and signing Irish international Ray Treacy, a solitary FAI Cup was their only reward. Things would change by the beginning of the 1980s. Manager Jim McLaughlin, backed by the finances of the Kilcoyne family, brought unprecedented success to Milltown and in some ways the basis for a lot of the modern enmity with Bohs crystallised in these years.
By the early 1970s, Drumcondra were struggling before their League spot was eventually taken over by Home Farm. With the disappearance of Drums from League football so went a great footballing rivalry. So it naturally transferred over to Bohs, who were a resurgent side in the ‘70s and that meant a rekindling of an old squaring off that had never really disappeared. That helps to explain why players switching between the two clubs has never sat well with both sets of supporters. From the ‘70s, ‘80s and into the ‘90s, it was really one-way traffic as players left Dalymount for Milltown, including the likes of Pat Byrne, Terry Eviston, Paul Doolin and Alan Byrne, which tended to create a certain amount of rancour amongst Bohs supporters.
It should be mentioned that the movement wasn’t totally one way, and that (whisper it) even the legendary Jackie Jameson began his footballing career at Shamrock Rovers before making his name at Dalymount in the 1980s.
Despite the success of the McLaughlin era, the 1980s was also a time of disharmony for Rovers. Owner Louis Kilcoyne decided to sell the club’s home ground of Glenmalure Park in Milltown, which would then be developed for houses and apartments. Glenmalure had been home to Rovers since the ‘20s and the supporters acted swiftly by forming the pressure group KRAM (Keep Rovers at Milltown). Their actions, however, couldn’t halt the sale of the ground and the by the late ‘80s Rovers had migrated northside, first to Tolka Park and then, for two seasons, to Dalymount, home of their arch-rivals. No doubt a galling episode for the small group of supporters who chose to attend games in the Phibsborough venue, tenants to their great adversaries.
The 1990s were to be fallow years for the Hoops, a solitary league title in 1993-94 season when the club were playing their games in the RDS. The club had plans to relocate to a permanent new home in the south Dublin suburb of Tallaght as far back as the mid-1990s but it was to be almost another 15 years of wandering before they would kick a ball at a completed Tallaght Stadium. The intervening period contained more lows than highs, including examinership and a first-ever relegation in the 2005 season.
But there were a couple of notable victories against their old rivals Bohs, perhaps the most pleasing would have been Rovers’ 1-0 win thanks to a Seán Francis goal in Dalymount in 2001. That victory sent Rovers, briefly, to the top of the league but it also meant that they had defeated their great rivals in their own back yard on the 100th anniversary of the opening of Dalymount Park. Rovers may have viewed that as some form of revenge for a result earlier that year which has gone down as one of the most storied in League history.
That particular game took place on January 28, 2001 in the then-home of Rovers, Morton Stadium, Santry. Rovers – then managed by Damien Richardson – swept into a commanding 4-1 lead by half-time having got their first goal through Tony Grant only two minutes into the game. At half-time Bohs manager Roddy Collins gave a rousing team-talk, exhorting his charges to go out and “win the second half” and what followed has gone down in legend for Bohs supporters.
Five second-half goals followed unanswered from Alex Nesovic, Dave Morrison, Mark Rutherford and a brace from Glen Crowe. Bohs left the pitch 6-4 winners and on a roll. Many players from that side have credited the result as part of the impetus that would see Bohs haul back league leaders Shelbourne and finish up by winning the League and Cup double by the season’s end.
Today, whenever the two sides meet, there is likely to be action, drama and plenty of colour and pageantry in the stands. There have been times when footballing passions have spilled over as happened all those years ago with Crawford and Fullam. In 2003, Rovers were forced to move from their then-base of Richmond Park in Inchicore after crowd trouble during a match against Bohs. A year later, at a match in Dalymount, former Hoops Tony Grant and James Keddy, who had just signed for The Gypsies, were greeted with a torrent of abuse, then pig’s feet and finally a large pig’s head was thrown onto the pitch. A not so subtle message from the Rovers faithful about what they thought of Grant and Keddy’s move cross-city. Grant, interviewed by the Irish Sun newspaper several years after the event described the derby games in this way:
“That game, it’s a religion to the supporters, it’s a cult, it’s what they live for. It’s the same for both sets of fans.”
The Noughties did nothing to diminish the rivalry between the two. The move to Tallaght Stadium was to revitalise Rovers, who took the title in 2010. Despite being on the rise and Bohs encountering financial troubles of their own, the derby games have remained wildly unpredictable. While recent seasons have been dominated by exceptional Dundalk and Cork City sides, the Bohs-Rovers rivalry remains the biggest game in the Irish football calendar.
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