BOND OF BROTHERS
The cup minnows fighting hard to keep a club alive
WHEN he gets home to Oliver Bond flats tomorrow, Eddie Keogh is going to pull the curtains, turn off his phone and have a lie down in a dark room.
He probably won’t sleep, not after the week that’s been. Not with everything whizzing around in his head.
And not when there’s yet another fundraising mission to focus on, just so the club he built can stay afloat. It never stops.
Oliver Bond Rangers were established in Dublin’s inner city in 1947 but disbanded in the mid-1990s.
Six years ago, Keogh wanted to give the Oliver Bond residents a new focus and recreational outlet.
Today, the team that has just been promoted into the fourth tier of the Leinster Senior League is playing away to Derry City in the FAI Cup.
Three bus loads of players, coaches, volunteers, family and friends will make the long trek to the Brandywell, with many staying overnight.
All in, it is costing the club the guts of €8,000 for the experience.
That’s quite the outlay considering Oliver Bond just about fork out the minimum €500 every time they play a home match.
They don’t have a ground and used seven different locations last season alone, including St Anne’s Park all the way out in Raheny. The sum of the club’s parts is a five-a-side pitch in the flats complex itself which is used by the academy but too small for the senior team to train on.
“We’ve two aluminium sheds as well,” says Keogh, “One is storage, the other is the office but you wouldn’t fit three people in it. Without help from our local businesses, we wouldn’t be here. They’re everything to us. They help with jerseys, kit, rent for training and match pitches.
“Everything costs money. It’s never ending. I’m constantly trying to fundraise but there’s only so many times you can go to the well.
“We’d love someone like Dublin Corporation to say, ‘We’re going to help you progress the club’ because it’s hard to sustain a small club.
“We’ve four teams in the Liberties – ourselves, Usher
Celtic, Iveagh
Celtic and Aungier Celtic. We’re a mile apart from each other and not one of us has our own home ground. We’d share one if we could.”
Carl ‘Happy’ Bateman is sipping a coffee on a bench by the canal when a group of lads from a nearby office walk past on their lunch break.
A roofer by day, the defender says: “You try to organise a night out with your mates and you’d be lucky to get four blokes. Eddie got a whole football team! How he’s done what he’s done, I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Bateman, 33, was playing Leinster Senior League football for Tolka Rovers when his groin started acting up. Keogh was breathing life into Oliver Bond Celtic around the same time.
“We’re both born and raised in the flats complex,” says Bateman. “Eddie’s a bit older but a group of us always played five-a-side with him in the flats before he got the knee injury.
“He just wanted lads to be playing ball and I knew he was setting up a team so I said, ‘Why not?’.
“My old manager was having a laugh saying, ‘You’re going to play for Oliver Bond, a Division 3 Saturday side, are you off your bleedin head?’.
“But it was loyalty to Eddie first and then to where I’m from.”
Bateman continued: “Everywhere has its good and bad but that’s not just Oliver Bond. That’s Hardwicke Street, Sheriff Street, Foxrock or Dun Laoghaire.
“Oliver Bond is salt of the earth and you can’t walk through the flats without seeing one of us from the team. I’m proud to say I’m from there.
“If Eddie set up a bowling club, the flats would get behind the bowling club. If it was a painting competition, they’d all be out painting. It doesn’t matter what’s going on, the Oliver Bond community will get behind it.
“Oliver Bond Celtic has helped me – and a few of the other lads on the team – get a focus in life. I don’t want to stop playing.”
That Division 3 Saturday team Bateman mentions has just won the LSL Major Sunday League and will move into the fourth tier of intermediate football this season. The club is
expanding and Keogh hopes to have three senior men’s teams this year, along with five kids’ sides and the academy.
“That’s nearly 150 kids and men from here playing football. We’re trying to give them a choice around the area,” says Keogh.
“It’s helped an awful lot of people, from players, coaches, committee members and supporters – if Oliver Bond Celtic wasn’t here, what would we be doing?
“It’s helped me mentally. It’s given me something to focus on. It gives everyone in the flats an option that we mightn’t have had before.
“It’s just a pity that we’re not being backed by a bigger entity outside of the local businesses.
“In five or six years without being backed, we’ve gone from the lowest league to playing Derry City. Could you imagine what we could do if we were backed?”
And Keogh continues: “It’s everything. It’s my life. To be from Oliver Bond, and see where Oliver Bond Celtic has brought the name, from being negative to positive, I’m proud.
“Some people look at it as a negative place to live and be brought up. We’ve had bad headlines in the past. But it couldn’t be more the opposite.
“It’s a good place to live. There are lot of good people. We’ve been down on our luck as a club but our people stand up and help us time after time. That’s why it’s working. They help us and we as a team give it back to the people with big days out – like this one.
“But when you see 50 to 60 kids running around the flats in Oliver Bond kits, that’s what really makes it worth it.”
The barbers around the flats have been busy this week. Call it the paparazzi effect.
“We’re trying to look at this game as another game of football but it’s hard when you’re getting interview requests and photographers at your training ground,” Keogh sighs.
“Training during the week was a paparazzi session! We’re not used to it but the boys are loving it and all got their haircut when they heard about photographers.
“It’s a one off and it’s great but the circus around it is madness. It’s hard to focus when you’re not used to it. We spoke to the lads after training and told them if they have aspirations of going anywhere in football they’ll have to get used to this.”
Our interview is winding up and Keogh’s phone is heating up.
He’s a man in demand, pulled this way and that. “It’s Rocky stuff, or a real Roy of the Rovers story,” he beams. “It’s hard to believe.”