Ringmahon proud of its past but looking to its future
Cork’s mighty Rangers aim for national cup glory
THE EASY thing would be to make this about Caoimhín Kelleher.
Even though his name won’t appear on the team sheet for Sunday’s nal, he’s still a Ringmahon boy, their most famous son, the local lad made good.
But this story is about the wet Tuesday and Thursday nights, when a group of 20 lads religiously turn up to train, tease and laugh their way through the warm-up and then sweat their way through the night.
If they wanted, they could easily skip a session, especially when it’s cold outside and the alternative is a couch in front of the re and a Champions League game on the telly.
But that’s not who they are. They’re players not watchers, doers not shapers.
And for ve years they have been on a mission. Three semi-finals have been lost. Tears have been shed.
They’ve been on this journey, sat on these buses, and trekked their way around Ireland, wearing out the motorways between Cork and Dublin,
“We’re erce proud of Caoimhín, of everything he has done, of the fact he is one of us; just as we are proud of Browner (Irish international Alan Browne),” says Ringmahon Rangers captain Anthony Mcalavey.
“But it is about us. We want to make our own history and not live off their story. We want to write our own one.”
Story
For a dozen of them, the Ringmahon story is the only one they know. Four years of age when they were introduced to the club and to a ball.
They’d learn to control and then master it. They’d grow up. Miniblitzes would evolve into organised games. Seven-a-side, nine-a-side, then full-size.
And year after year they’d keep coming back.
They’d discover things like league titles and cup nals but other words would form a critical part of their understanding of what it takes to be an amateur footballer: terms like club lotto, Christmas draws, bag packs.
They’d begin to understand that they didn’t get from Cork’s southside to distant suburbs or faraway towns without the devotion of a mum, a dad or a de-facto parent from within the club, the volunteers who magically make things happen.
The years and decades would pass but the same names would keep appearing on Ringmahon team sheets: Keane, Fitzgerald, Hurley and Hayes.
For it is that sort of club, steeped in the community, passed down from one generation to the next.
It has been in existence 73 years and only two men, John and Sean Fitzgerald, have served as club secretary.
It has always been an unpaid role.
That’s the irony about soccer and
GAA in this country.
At grass roots level, soccer is way more reliant on volunteerism than its rival sport which has a culture of bringing in outside managers to train club sides, often rewarding them handsomely.
Amateur soccer clubs are known to also pay their managers but not to the same extent. Ringmahon’s boss, Aidan Foley, is a local. He joined when he was seven.
Sponsor
And both he and anyone who has ever managed a grassroots soccer club, at senior or underage level, knows that as soon as you take charge of a side, you become an accidental sponsor.
On Sunday they play Glebe North from Balbriggan in the Intermediate Cup nal, the most prestigious amateur football competition in Ireland.
The clubs are remarkably similar, steeped in their communities, one 73 years old, the other 76.
“This means everything to us,” says Ringmahon chairman Paul Higgins, in his 36th year as a Ringmahon Rangers man. He was four when he joined.
“If there’s one day I’ll never forget; that was beating Airfield, up in Dublin,” he recalls, “2-1 down with seven minutes to go, and we ended up winning it.
“That one of our own, Adam O’callaghan, he’s still only 18, got the winner, sure that was a great story because we are looking at Adam play football since he was six-years-old.”
The Intermediate Cup final is soccer’s equivalent of the AIB Club Championship in hurling and football.
Buses will be booked to bring 500 supporters up to Weavers Park in Drogheda for the nal, and when they pass Balbriggan, on the road north, a cavalcade of Glebe North cars will join them on the motorway.
This is the kind of afternoon that draws us to football in the rst place and keeps us interested in it now.
It isn’t the distant petrol dollars of a foreign government, who spend billions on players as if it was loose change in their pockets.
Nor is it the tedious process of watching the FAI engineer one messup after another to nd a new manager.
Chief
No-one gets involved in a football club to read about a well-paid chief executive seeking holiday pay in lieu.
No-one ever laces a pair of boots because they will one day dream of seeing a power struggle play out between grey-haired men in an Abbotstown boardroom.
They do it because there is a thrill of running and kicking and scoring.
Then, as the years pass, and the legs slow, they keep coming back to the game because they remember the sixyear-old who matured into a
rst-teamer, who is there at the back post when a cup tie is in the balance and has the composure to turn a 2-2 draw into a 3-2 win.
They do it because they remember the work that went in to making a one-pitch club into a four-pitch club, the fundraising needed to build a carpark, a gym, and to add extra dressing-rooms onto the clubhouse to cater for the girls section of the club.
This is what football is about. It’s about dreamers, not about schemers, and it is about clubs like this, Ringmahon and Glebe, 73 and 76 years in existence, chasing the same Cup and the same dream, seeking as their captain said, to write their own history.
This is what football is about because this is you, the six-year-old you, content in the knowledge that with a ball at your feet and a dream in your head, life can be as good as perfect.
‘This is about us. We want to make our own history’