How Alfie Hale ruined my Life

Last week I talked about a moment in the Shamrock Rovers v Dundalk game on the opening day of the season when a sublime pass from Jason Byrne shattered my own delusions of footballing grandeur and briefly reminded me why I never made it as a footballer myself.

Now, before I go on I need to make one thing absolutely clear, never in a million years was I ever going to trouble the world of professional football. Not ever. But I will stake my St Brigid's Boys U11 player of the year (Oh yes!) statuette that I am not the only deluded fool who reserves a part of their daydreaming schedule for high definition, slow motion replays of the glory days that never were.

For proof simply wander into any proper Dublin pub on your own and open up the sports pages of a newspaper. Within five or six minutes you will surely be accosted by some middle aged ne'er do well keen to share the fact that “I used to play for Home Farm you know!”. My best ever example of this was a slightly wobbly gentleman in The Big Tree who claimed to have played with Ronnie Whelan and insisted that I ring him up to prove it, this despite the fact that neither of us, sadly, had his number on us at the time.

We probably all have our memories of a day when footballing greatness reached out and almost touched us. It's one of the games magical properties that the passing of the years, not to mention the swelling of the waistline, only enhances those shimmering highlights. A little bit of distance, and perhaps a pint or two of your favoured beverage, can obliterate decades of Saturday morning incompetence, leaving only the glorious memory of that Cruyff turn you executed against the Silver Granite. Do you remember that? It was bucketing down and we all got ninety minutes 'cos the subs pissed off into the club house to watch the Grand National. Ah, if only the scouts had been watching that day.

My own football career, let's call it that seeing as how we are celebrating delusion, began with a schoolboys team that pushed the envelope of hopelessness. We played in the same plain red shirts and white cuffs that Best, Law and Charlton wore in the sixties. This might have been more impressive if our mentors had taken their laundry duties seriously. For some, wintergreen or Deep Heat is the smell of football, to me it is still the tangy odour of mildew.

Week after week we were battered by obscene margins. Ten, eleven, thirteen goals conceded was common. Our main striker, Nigel, once scored a hatrick in a thrilling 5-3 defeat and finished the season as top-scorer, with three. Honestly, I'm not exaggerating, letting in less than ten was a decent days work and it is a testament to football's ability to foster the imaginings of young boys that we all still believed that one day we might become stars.

I spent two years at St “Never mind, you played well” Boys FC before landing a big move to Carrigaline United in Cork at the tender age of eleven. The deal was brokered by my Dad who somehow managed to wangle a new job at precisely the same time!

This was where my career really took off. We seldom lost by more than seven at Carrigaline and even, on rare occasions when the planets aligned, managed the odd win. This was new territory for me and my confidence swelled. I even scored a few goals... you know, those things that other teams got. With the help of a forward thinking referee who believed that a cynical foul deserved a penalty, regardless of where on the pitch the offence was committed, I once scored a hatrick of spot kicks against Douglas Hall and I became the first member of our team to be able to reach the six yard box with a corner kick. Surely now the call from across the water would come.

Patiently, I played on, up through the various age groups, occasionally monitoring the touchlines for serious looking strangers with trilbies and notepads. I scored a goal against Crofton Celtic at Turners Cross, then just a field with nets that hung flat against the goal frame. I performed a perfect overhead kick against Ballincollig that, had it not flown several yards wide, would surely have made the shortlist for Match of the Day's goal of the season. And I once hit a free kick that smashed so impressively off the crossbar that I was secretly pleased that it hadn't gone in. My CV was becoming difficult to ignore.

But nothing happened. Until, that is, I turned sixteen and was asked to join our Mens team for a pre-season trip to Waterford. Unlike the teams I played with, our mens team was quite good. They actually won cups, instead of just entering them. The coach, Charlie, was an Englishman who was alleged to have some tenuous connection with Sunderland and he had arranged a friendly against Waterford United. I was deemed to have sufficient promise to be brought along for the experience.

I thought I was just going on a jolly but when we got there I was named in the starting eleven, which endeared me greatly to the rest of the lads. This was a big trip for them too and now one of them had to sit on the bench while the kid got a run out. I should have been thrilled, over the moon, “unable to put it into words, Des”. But I wasn't, I was “sick as a parrot, Tony”. I was terrified.

And matters took a turn for the worse when I realised I was going to be marked by Alfie Hale. Alfie had played for Aston Villa in his day and earned 14 caps for the Irish international team in the seventies. He must have been in his forties at that point but he was still a tough little bastard and I was a weedy little 16 year old who considered a sexy nutmeg against the full back from Ringmahon Rangers as one of his crowning achievements. I suddenly decided that dreaming about being a footballer was a whole lot more fun than actually trying to be one.

I did not play well and Alfie retired himself to the bench at half time, job done. Nothing to worry about there lads. I scuffled about for the rest of the game, trying to look busy but, although we won the game 2-1, my one and only brush with League of Ireland football was a resounding failure. On the up side, later that night in a nightclub in Tramore, I copped off with a jaw droppingly gorgeous local girl while Je T'aime played in the background. It was an achievement that was loudly cheered by the rest of the team when I eventually stumbled back onto the coach at the end of the night. I guess heroism comes in many different shapes and forms.

So be patient the next time you are collared by a drunken bar fly who claims he used to play with Paul McGrath before he made it. And offer the time of day to the old soak who swears he was supposed to go for trials to the Villa “except I had an injury you see”. After all, we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.