Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
MAXIE SWAI Going on 60 y legendary strike up Seaview, gran says the Hales have business with Hatc
IT’S close to 60 years since he was the prince of Seaview, but Danny Hale remembers those nets bulging like it was yesterday.
The Crusaders legend was in spirited form when Match On Tuesday caught up with him over the weekend, crackling with witty and nostalgic anecdotes from what remains a treasured episode in his life.
So much water has passed under the bridge since he represented the Hatchetmen, of course, and many of his old team-mates who come alive in his stories are no longer around, alas.
His old club, strictly amateur during Hale’s early-sixties pomp, is unrecognisable too.
No longer the poor relation of Belfast’s Irish League quartet, the Crues are the reigning Premiership champions, their trophy cabinet bulging from the Stephen Baxter era and their coffers grown fat from regular forays into the Champions League.
Yet in defiance of time’s inexorable march, there is one conspicuous link back to the sepia-suffused pictures which captured his heyday – the family name.
In fact the teamsheet for Friday night’s win at Newry City contained not one but two Hales, his grandsons Rory and Ronan, the former joining back in November and the younger of the two hooking up with his brother just a few days ago.
They are not the first Hale siblings to play for the club either.
Danny’s late older brother Gerry, who incidentally would later emigrate to Canada and be crowned that country’s player of the year, blazed the trail years before he did.
So his warm enthusiasm at this latest turn of events, the revival of the Hales’ connection with the club, is understandable.
And the 77-year-old family patriarch, who lifted the Ulster Cup and Co Antrim Shield during his spell with the Shore Road men, says he knows from experience the boys couldn’t have joined a better club.
“I’m delighted, absolutely delighted they have joined, I think it’s great,” said Hale, who scored 143 goals for the club in four seasons, a club record before it was eclipsed by Curry Mulholland (149), Glenn Hunter (157) and current talisman Jordan Owens.
“I had some great times there and I scored a lot of goals for the Crues and I’m very proud to have won amateur caps when I was playing for them,” he said.
“I’d some very happy days there, a great bunch of lads, big Albert Campbell, Danny Trainor, Norman Pavis, Alan Mcneill, “Bimbo” Weatherup… let’s hope the grandsons can follow them.”
Another record of Hale’s, for goals scored in a single season for the Crues (55), still stands, and such is the esteem in which he is held the club named a suite after him at the ground, with his black and white image prominent in a montage on the wall where the press conferences are held, creating a particularly poignant backdrop as Ronan was unveiled last week.
The latest generation of Hales may be new to the club, but Rory joked he feels he knows the place inside out from the amount of times his grandad has regaled the family with tales of his glorious yesterdays.
“He doesn’t stop talking about them,” laughed Rory.
“No, he was chuffed to bits about us signing and he was down last Saturday at the match and he’ll be down regularly this season to his own suite so he can have everybody talking about him.”
Rory arrives at Crusaders with a great pedigree. A Republic of Ireland Under-21 international, he is a product of the Aston Villa academy where he spent four years honing his craft as a box-to-box midfielder.
He was a big hit upon his return to Ireland, first with Galway United and then last season with Derry City, making more than 40 appearances as the Candystripes plundered their first League of Ireland Cup since 2011.
After so many years away from his native North Belfast, however, Hale longed for home, the Newington area of North Belfast, and took little persuasion when the Crues came calling, putting pen to paper on a twoand-a-half year deal.
He believes the Irish League’s top flight to be in rude health, the live TV coverage afforded by Sky and the BBC raising its profile with the very desirable knock-on effect of making targets of its best young talent – Liam Boyce, Rory Donnelly, Joe Gormley, Michael Smith, Stuarty Dallas, Jordan Stewart, Paul Smyth, Gavin Whyte, Brad Lyons and Mark Sykes all earning their breakthroughs across the water, albeit with mixed results.
The Hale brothers’ path to England was very different to theirs however.
Rory starting at Cliftonville before moving to Aston Villa at 16, Ronan at the Reds’ arch-rivals Crusaders before signing for the Villans’ fiercest foes Birmingham.
Yet if the topsy-turvy fortunes of our best youngsters proves anything, it is simply that far from being paved with gold, professional football is the most brutal of cut-throat worlds where teenage players uproot from their families at a particularly impressionable age, only to find themselves ruthlessly discarded as the academy system bottle-necks towards the first team.
It provides for an interesting contrast nonetheless, the young hopefuls who rise through the academies fighting to survive the cull, and the Irish League youngsters who make a name for themselves here first before being sold, thereby circumventing the apprenticeship rat race.
The Hales found themselves in the former category, and while Rory admits it was a crushing disappointment when he was jettisoned by Villa, he reckons going straight into first team action with Galway United helped soften the blow.
“When you are trying to break through from the Irish League you have to be exceptionally good, like Gavin Whyte and Mark Sykes, two class players,” he said.
“But my experience, when you do get let go, it’s good to come back home and go straight into a first team, and when you come back from England you have that pedigree and experience and managers can throw you in at the deep end and that’s what happened to me.
“And I learned a lot tactically and technically which I don’t think I would have got over here, learning off players like Stiliyan Petrov and Gabby Agbonlahor and all those players who were really good to me.
“That experience can only help me in the long run and
I feel I have improved technically so much over the last five years.”
That said, Hale maintains his only concern right now is showing the Irish
League what he’s all about and driving Crusaders to honours.
But having tasted it before, the glitz and the riches of England continue to