The raven is calling the name of Athlone Town, and it is wrong

This betting scandal is the third time that the grand old club has surprised the world — but it must not be the last, writes Declan Lynch

THIS betting scandal, of which we have heard so much during the past week, is not the first time that the activities of Athlone Town FC have come to the attention of the international community. Nor is it the second time.

It is in fact the third such eruption, the first of which was in 1974, when an FAI Cup semi-final against Finn Harps in Oriel Park, Dundalk, had to be stopped for a while in order to repair the crossbar which had been broken by the Athlone goalkeeper Mick O’Brien, as he was swinging from it during one of the darker passages of a heavy defeat.

“Micko” was a wonderful man, and a fine keeper, who would sometimes display his extreme levels of fitness and his general enthusiasm for the game by performing such free-form acrobatics. But he was dealing with an inferior kind of wooden structure at Oriel, which could not sustain his weight nearly as well as the much more solid crossbars at home in St Mel’s Park.

Twice, indeed, it could not sustain his weight, for he brought it crashing down a second time, leading to his sending off, and an announcement over the PA which haunts me still: “Is there a carpenter in the ground?”

All round, it was one of the saddest days of my young life, not least because such a good and decent man as Micko had brought such misfortune on himself. And it became sadder still when the hounds of ITV got hold of some footage of the incidents and showed them to their millions of viewers the following weekend. Oh, how they laughed.

But they were not laughing — or at least not as much — when the Town captivated the world again by playing AC Milan in the UEFA Cup of 1975, holding them to a scoreless draw in St Mel’s, during which the otherwise excellent John Minnock missed a penalty.

And here we enter a quite bewildering place, in which we find ironies of the most savage kind. Because last Friday afternoon I just happened to be in Athlone talking to RTE’s John Creedon about that marvellous 0-0 “victory”, for a programme which he is doing about life along the River Shannon.

As we stood on the perimeter of the old ground, which is now just an overgrown field with a couple of horses grazing on it — not a lot of change there, I guess — we were acutely aware that we had unwittingly arranged this reprise of Athlone’s greatest day, during what now, for the grand old club, seems like the end of days.

There we were, seeing in the mind’s eye the pipe band which had paraded around the pitch before the game, led by a goat, entertaining the aristocrats of Milan with our local customs and hopefully making them very, very afraid. Or reminiscing about the pandemonium which ensued when the Town was awarded that penalty, and then missed it, a sequence of events which caused such a level of post-traumatic stress disorder to all parties, no one who witnessed it will ever be the same again.

There we were, remembering all that raging glory, while a short distance away at the new stadium that is called Lissywollen, the raven was calling the name of Athlone Town.

The raven was calling the name of the Town because of a betting scandal, and here the ironies move from the savage to the overwhelming. Because in this paper I have written extensively about the global gambling phenomenon, about how the betting corporations effectively own much of the business of football now, and about the absolute certainty that this would be a profoundly corrupting influence on the game.

Not for a moment did I think that one of the first casualties in Irish football, the first side to become notorious for gambling “irregularities”, would be my hometown club. And yet it was during a recent game against Longford Town — the Midlands Classico itself — that our old friend “unusual betting patterns” were noted in big bold capitals by UEFA, due to monies in the region of €400,000 inexplicably arriving into the Asian betting markets on this game — these weird bets which, according to UEFA, “indicate that betters held prior knowledge of Athlone Town suffering a minimum two-goal defeat, in a match which contained at least two first-half goals, and at least four in total”.

That’s a lot of prior knowledge, but the old algorithms were insisting that no other explanation was possible, that the match was fixed. They are talking about other matches too — there were incidents and accidents, there were hints and allegations.

“The dogs were barking about it,” said one of the faithful.

The FAI is conducting an investigation which could have the most brutal consequences for the Town, given that the precedents in other countries involve demotions to lower leagues and, frankly, in professional football in Ireland there is no lower league for Athlone to go to than the one they’re already in.

And though I and other Athlone supporters will always be bringing a gallows humour to any situation, it is also desperately sad to see this happening to a club which has been around in various forms for 130 years, which produced eight full internationals, from Dinny Hannon to Turlough O’Connor, and which was the most important feature of the first 17 years of my life. My father wrote a history of Athlone Town.

The best of football people have served the club for generations, and it would be utterly wrong to annihilate all that due to the machinations of a few blackguards — at an official level, Athlone Town has issued a statement saying that they are “absolutely shocked”, and I believe they are.

It would be utterly wrong to take out the Town for, if it proves to be the case, falling victim to a global gambling mania, particularly online, which has been enabled and encouraged at every level by the football authorities in many countries, the downsides of which have been virtually ignored and deeply misunderstood by the media. And just in case anyone might have the slightest chance of escape, it is being advertised incessantly, bringing one of the most intractable addictions known to man into the centre of our sporting lives.

The FAI, while it is investigating Athlone, would be conscious that it has an “official video and data partner” called TrackChamp, which allows League games to be live-streamed outside Ireland. And why, I wonder, would anyone outside Ireland want to be watching these games, when it is hard enough to get people inside Ireland to watch them?

A reasonable enough question, there, while they’re looking into the global reach of the Midlands Classico. And here’s another one: was there a carpenter in the ground?

‘I did not think my home-town club would be a casualty of the betting mania’