Apocalypse Always: The many deaths of the League of Ireland

If the League of Ireland were a doomsday cult, it would long ago have been reduced to a handful of fanatical adherents huddled together in a sealed cave and casting covetous glances at the Kool-Aid.

Its demise has been proclaimed, from within and without, with clockwork regularity since at least the late 1960s. The League-of-Ireland-in-crisis article has long been a reliable column-filler, passed between generations of desperate sports editors like a tawdry family heirloom.

And yet, through all this turmoil, the league has endured. From the satellite bombardment of the early nineties, through the Dublin Dons fiasco and the (now rather laughable) moral panic over “schooligans”, the league has trundled on, churning out homespun heroes and slivers of damp, muted magic as it has done for almost a century.

Like many Irish institutions, the league has survived largely because no-one has quite worked out how to get rid of it. The nation-state remains the basic organisational unit of football. For as long as it does, the FAI's blazer brigade will be obliged to maintain some sort of domestic championship (even one consisting of an endless series of matches between Shamrock Rovers and its entire alphabet of reserve teams) as the price for swanning around Europe in the reflected glamour of the national side.

But there are also deeper social and structural reasons for the marginalisation of domestic football. Top-level sport in Ireland is hugely dependent on the tastes and patronage of the country's political elite. The national broadcaster – minutely sensitive to the whims of the privileged - is the most reliable indicator of a sport's status within Irish society.

By this measure, the primacy of the GAA is unassailable; as much for the tone and tenor of RTÉ's coverage as for its sheer volume.  By comparison with RTÉ's breathless, bombastic GAA promos, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will looks like a home video of a family outing.

Likewise, rugby – the indissoluble social glue which binds Ireland's urban elite together – has never wanted for friends and allies in high places. Long before professionalisation and the Celtic Tiger swept rugby into the sporting mainstream, the All-Ireland League was a fixture on our screens.

In the early nineties, Sports Stadium viewers were mercilessly subjected to 80-minute mud-wrestles between teams with identical hooped shirts and names lifted straight from a Harry Potter book, at a time when the audience for domestic rugby consisted wholly of retired dentists and Fred Cogley's bridge partners.

By contrast, the League of Ireland didn't appear on live TV at all until as late as 1997. Seven years later, Shelbourne faced Deportivo La Coruna with a place in the Champions League group stages at stake, and Irish football appeared ready for prime-time at last.

After an epic 0-0 draw at Lansdowne Road, Shels fell 2-0 behind at the Riazor – at which point RTÉ literally pulled the plug, cutting away to live coverage of an Olympic 1,500 metre race. Had Shels qualified, RTÉ would have been obliged to act as their host broadcaster – forgoing lucrative coverage of England's Champions League entrants – and its relief at dodging the bullet was palpable.

But despite slights like these, and the mountain of ridicule heaped upon it year after year, the league retains the ability to lure thousands through the turnstiles. They come in dribs and drabs rather than torrents, admittedly, but total attendance in 2014 was well in excess of 300,000 – by no means a risible figure.

What keeps the dieheards coming back? Habit, certainly; bloody-mindedness, perhaps – but also the universal appeal of the game, an appeal no other top-level sport in Ireland can match. No-one will ever mistake Oriel Park for Camp Nou, but when Dundalk lifted the league trophy last October, they joined a roll-call of national champions stretching from Iceland (Stjarnan, if you're wondering) to Kazakhstan (a first title for F.C. Astana).

Whisk a Coptic monk into Croke Park and he would doubtless be impressed by the spectacle and the scale of the occasion; but guide him into the Jodi on a drizzly Friday night and he would understand his surroundings and the narrative of the game at once, and probably have a trenchant view on the personal hygiene of the referee's assistant.

This is what makes the League of Ireland a unique feature of our sporting landscape. We shuffle into the ground not to reinforce our ethnic identity, nor to flaunt our social status, but simply because twenty-two men (fewer if Buttimer is in charge) are chasing a ball across a hundred yards of grass that stretches from Sligo to Shanghai, deep into our collective past and far beyond our furthest horizons.

And if our passion is futile or misplaced – what of it? Success in the League of Ireland tends to prove almost as lethal as failure; of the eight clubs who have lifted the title since 2005, four have flirted with extinction as a direct consequence of groping too hard and too fast at glory.

Of all these, Pat Fenlon's Shelbourne team of the mid-noughties was probably the most complete (if far from the most likeable) footballing unit I have ever seen in the league, although the current Dundalk side runs them close.

Hustled to the top by their insufferable and irreplaceable chairman Ollie Byrne, Shels assembled a costly menagerie of talent to suit every taste, belying their modest attendances and revenue streams which often slowed to a whispering trickle, like the Tolka in summertime.

Ollie's money may not have been worth the paper it was supposedly printed on, but while it burned,  it lit up drab Drumcondra with the finite brilliance of forked lightning. For €15 (and if you were waiting for a ticket stub, you'd be waiting still), pilgrims could wriggle from the sickly, stifling embrace of the Celtic Tiger and enter a domain untouched by sponsored champagne lunches and pink polo shirts.

I was a non-partisan regular at Tolka Park during much of this period, and one incident exemplified the doomed majesty of Ollie's Shelbourne, and of League of Ireland football in general.

Eamon Dunphy may rave about his talents today, but he never saw, as I once did, a young Wes Hoolahan cruising through a livid mob of Dublin City defenders (he had pace then) like a mountain goat prancing across a minefield, an electrifying dribble which ended with a brilliant save from Robbie Horgan.

Jason Byrne notched a hat-trick in that game, but my sole memory is of Hoolahan's scything run through that bewildered defence. The fact that he didn't score seems important; instead of a memory worn threadbare by 50,000 views on YouTube, it exists only in the minds of those who saw it, with the perpetual poignancy of the unfinished masterpiece.

Hoolahan went on to bigger and vastly more lucrative things; Ollie's hollow bubble popped just before the national economy collapsed in upon itself. Within a year, the club was club was clinging to life and Ollie had relinquished his, after a sudden and dramatic decline.

The League of Ireland may never be allowed its moment in the sun, but, just like Weso's dribble and Ollie's reckless dream, it sometimes gets close enough to be warmed by the same rays that bathe Pelé and Jairzinho in the eternal glow of 1970.  For all the sneers and the mockery, that's a boast no other league on the island can make.

When next you're driven to despair by a paltry attendance or a putrid match, remember that there is more aching humanity in a single wild punt onto Emmet Road than in a hundred high-def Brian O'Driscoll bodyswerves, and all will be right with the world. Until Roddy opens his mouth again, then you're on your own.