Timoney: No such thing as weakened Leinster side
Ulster ace says absence of key men will not lower visitors’ standards
AHEAD of Leinster coming to Kingspan Stadium tomorrow evening, Nick Timoney understands the depth available to the visitors more than most.
While the three-in-a-row Guinness PRO14 champions come north looking to seal their spot in this year’s final without a litany of front-line stars thanks to international duty, their understudies have not let standards slip this season, with their form through this campaign’s long Test windows nothing less than imperious.
Despite regularly missing up to 20 players, Leo Cullen’s men have been required to not only win their games but do so with a relentless accumulation of bonus-points.
With their second and even third string line-ups having been up to that challenge, they come to Belfast boasting a six-point advantage in the table with only three left to play.
Even as a two-time Leinster Schools’ Cup winner at Blackrock College, the latter of the two coming when captain, and an Irish Under-20s international, Timoney never moved beyond the sub-academy at his native province and, if anything, the level of depth has only strengthened since his time in the set-up.
“(You look at their back-row), and they are nine or 10 deep with quality players,” he says. “There are lads who will be just outside the Ireland 23 that are still Leinster players and even if none of their international players play, they still have quality right down to their 19- and 20-year-olds.
“It is pretty impressive, the consistency, and it has been the last three seasons or even more when they have lost a lot of players to international duty. It is impressive how they can have two completely different 23s and manage to play quite similarly and play to a similar standard.
“No matter what team they put out, we know the challenge is coming.
“It is obvious they are very impressive and it is going to be a huge task for us. I think we are going to have to step up from what we have played the last couple of weeks.”
Timoney himself has already been taking that step. Man of the match last time out against Ospreys, the 25-year-old has struck upon a rich vein of form that is all the more welcome given it has coincided with confirmation of fellow No.8 Marcell Coetzee’s summer departure.
It is less than three months ago that Timoney was running out for the ‘A’ side on a Champions Cup weekend but, since Christmas, he has been one of the best performers in the side.
The upturn, he believes, has been aided by his mental approach.
“It’s a mindset thing, I think,”
he says. “I’d been in and out of the team or on the fringes of the team for a while and I got quite uptight in the way I played. I was worrying about selection all the time and that wasn’t getting me picked at all.
“I realised I wasn’t focusing on the right things, I wasn’t focusing on going out, enjoying myself and playing my own game and playing it well. I was focusing on what can I not mess up.
“Since then, it has just been a case of ‘I think I’m a good player, I back myself and play the way
I like to play.’ I don’t think too much about things, I just focus on being aggressive, using my athleticism and just going out to play.
“Not playing for a long time sort of gives you a perspective and that helped me to switch about the way I go about things on and off the pitch.
“I don’t think there was anything too specific or I didn’t change anything too drastic but I kept working hard on what I had always worked hard on and what I think my strengths are.”
ONE hundred years ago to the day, one of the most consequential goalless draws in the history of football was played out at Windsor Park.
The match was an Irish Cup semi-final between Glenavon and Dublin-based Shelbourne. The tie set in train the sequence of events which led six months later to the inauguration of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) and the division of administrative responsibilities for the sport on the island of Ireland that persists to this day.
The political situation on the island at the time was, of course, far from conducive to the problem-free staging of any sports encounter. The Anglo-irish War had broken out in 1919 and continued to sputter. Shelbourne’s home city of Dublin was under curfew; Belfast was every bit as tense.
As the Northern Whig noted on March 5, 1921, the day of the match, for “the first time this season a Dublin club will make the journey north of the Boyne”.
The paper also explained how the Dublin curfew had influenced kick-off time.
“It was originally intended that this game should start at three o’clock,” it noted. However, “owing to the fact that curfew now comes into operation in Dublin at nine o’clock, the Shels are forced to remain overnight in the city, and so the kick-off has been fixed for 3.30”.
Shelbourne travelled north as Cup holders, having won the 1920 competition in unusual circumstances, beating Glenavon en route, after two semi-finalists were ejected in the wake of a riot. A year on, though, the Dublin side were the underdogs, with Glenavon favoured to progress to the final to play either Glentoran or Brantwood.
In the event, the Dubliners parked the bus, and their determined rearguard action was enough to earn a replay.
Under the headline “Shelbourne create a surprise in Irish Cup semi-final”, the Athletic News reporter called ‘Scribe’ described how “it was a case of Shelbourne defence against the Glenavon forwards”.
However, “the Lurgan forwards never really settled down to their usual game, and though Jack Brown (who was to make his international debut in a hailstorm at Swansea a month later) went up forward in the second half, replacing Cochrane, they simply could not get through”.
‘Scribe’ also commented on a “remarkable display” by Paddy Walsh, the Shelbourne goalkeeper. This, he wrote, was “really the outstanding feature of the game”.
Through this man-of-thematch performance, it might be argued that Walsh — soon to depart with several team-mates for an unlikely (and short-lived) football revolution in Pontypridd, Wales — unknowingly played a key part in the sport’s Irish partition. It was, after all, with the replay earned by his saves that the path towards a schism gathered decisive momentum.
With the tie having been played in the north (albeit not Lurgan), one might, under normal circumstances, have expected the replay to be assigned to Dublin, where Shelbourne had triumphed 3-0 over the same opponents the previous year. However, the Belfast-based Irish Football Association (IFA), then the ultimate authority for the sport throughout Ireland, decided in their wisdom to summon the two teams once again to Belfast for the game on March 16.
In their defence, these were not normal circumstances. As Neal Garnham wrote in his book, Association Football and Society in pre-partition Ireland, Dublin was “in turmoil… Six Republican prisoners were to be executed two days before the intended replay. An identical set of executions in Cork the previous month had led to the killing of six soldiers in the city in retaliation.”
Then again, there was a widespread perception in the south that the IFA had tended to favour northern clubs in various ways, such as international selection and financial assistance, over a prolonged period. Seen in this context, it was scarcely a surprise that Dublin-based administrators should take a dim view of the replay decision.
Shelbourne refused to travel north again, resulting in the tie being awarded to Glenavon (the Lurgan club went on to lose the final 2-0 to Glentoran, who beat Brantwood 4-3 in the other semi-final clash).
For their part, the Leinster Football Association (LFA) passed a resolution condemning the “unsportsmanlike action of the… IFA in ordering Shelbourne to replay in Belfast their drawn Cup tie with Glenavon,” adding, “We regard the decision to be against the best interests of the game”.
A report of this meeting from a journalist known as ‘Viator’ in the Dublin newspaper Sport was followed by a warning that “the Dublin clubs will seriously consider the question of the advisability of severing their connection with the Belfast Association at the end of the present season”.
On June 8, the LFA duly voted to disaffiliate from the IFA. On September 2, the FAI held their inaugural meeting.
‘There was perception that the IFA tended to favour northern clubs’
In light of the political partition of the island, and consequent creation of Northern Ireland, with which the football split closely coincided, it is interesting to note that the two football bodies, the IFA and the new FAI, were not at first differentiated along strictly geographical lines.
In July, a competition called the Falls League, based in west Belfast, decided to affiliate with the Dublin body. Sport viewed this as a “bombshell”, observing, moreover, that “the IFA has taken this badly, and not surprising”.
Two years after the fateful Irish Cup semi-final, on March 17, 1923, a Falls League side called Alton United travelled to a still tense Dublin and won the newly-minted FAI Cup final at Dalymount Park, upsetting Shelbourne 1-0 in front of 14,000.
Paddy Walsh, back from Pontypridd, lined up once again in the Shels’ goal. This time he was not the star. The Dublin Evening Telegraph reported that “the ball entered an empty net with Walsh and (defender Paddy) Kavanagh in collision, due to a stupid piece of misunderstanding”.
In September 1923, the FAI were granted membership of Fifa, effectively setting the split in concrete.