Playing against the Busby Babes

There is a generation of amazing stories out there, football stories that are lost to a generation preoccupied with fitness, elitism, money and perks.

I remember why I fell in love with football. I was young and knew no different; I still don’t really. My grandad was my mentor. He was my world. My brother, my best friend, my Dad, my grandad all rolled into one.

He wasn’t a superstar but he played all his life in a number 11 jersey before moving into management as the gaffer of Palmerstown Rangers FC. His greatest managerial achievement was winning the Frank Mitten Cup and even though I was only four, I remember going back to the Mucky Duck in Palmerstown afterwards and the place was jammed with family, friends and club men and women for one of the best days in the club’s history.

Lifetime friendships came out of that team as they do with every other club in the country and from the football incredible stories emerge.

When I breached the age of being able to go for a pint with him, I recall the evenings I spent at the bar instead of being with my friends. I made my excuses about not going to the ‘Springer’ and the ‘Spa’ in Lucan so I could have my evenings with him telling me the stories about the days when footballers were men.

The heavy steel-capped boots, the rain-sodden tonne-weight leather ball that would carve the head on ya if you caught the feckin' laces, the brutal challenges and the magic sponge.

He had little time for the athletic hair-gel brigade who adorn the dressing-rooms these days. “They’re too bloody fit now,” he would say. “Can’t ride a challenge at all.”

I loved his stories and I listened to them over and over again and never tired.

Yesterday, I chatted to someone else’s granddad. His name is Liam Hennessy and he is a Shamrock Rovers legend. The last time an Irish team played against an English club in a competitive European fixture was back in 1957 when the Hoops inexplicably were drawn against the Manchester United Busby Babes in the third season of the European Cup. Liam played in those games.

It was the stuff dreams really were made of.

“There much bigger crowds back then. Here, in Dalymount there would be 40,000 at the game and you couldn’t hear yourself think!” he recalled.

“We were beaten 6-0 but it wasn’t a fair score. It didn’t reflect the game. It was only 1-0 at half-time and then Tommy Taylor, the famous centre-forward, who as we all know died in that dreadful crash, scored and then it was in the last twenty minutes they got four of five goals when we were....well we were shagged actually!

“Marking fellas like Taylor and Liam Whelan, God love him, wasn’t an easy task but we did put up a decent show and in the second leg in Old Trafford they only beat us 3-2. And the crowd applauded us instead of some of the vitriol that you hear today.

“It was a strange atmosphere. Whenever you played for Rovers we were used to being cheered for but over there it was unusual for us. Anything you did good was applauded, it was just a crowd of cloth caps! That’s all I remember! I never seen as many cloth caps as I did that day,” he recalled with a smile.

The game in Manchester took place on October 2, 1957 in the preliminary round of the competition. Just four months later, the United team would be decimated by the awful tragedy that was the Munich Air disaster on February 6, 1958 as the Busby babes were making their way home from their 3-3 draw with Red Star Belgrade in the quarter-finals of the competition.

Liam remembers the day well.

“I came in from work about 5.30pm and my good wife was sitting down and she asked if I had heard the news? I was a carpenter on a building site and I said I hadn’t and she said there had been a dreadful crash involving the Manchester United team and they don’t know yet how many are injured or dead.

“I listened and listened to bulletins as I could. I didn’t eat my dinner thinking of.....dear God....especially Liam Whelan as i was marking him in the game, and what a lovely lad he was.  Eventually of course the whole story came out but I couldn’t understand why they were in Munich.

“They were refuelling and from the snatches we were getting from television, I can’t even remember if we had colour television back then, but it gradually came over the papers, the pictures in the papers...and to see all the lads stretched out and some of them obviously weren’t going to make it you know.

“Actually we got a lovely letter from Matt Busby the month after. I wrote to him.

“And I’ve got a lovely one there from Matt Busby thanking us for that, even though at the time he wasn’t sure that he was going to make it you know. But thank God he did. And it really has never left because anytime you mention Manchester United, and younger people, while they would have heard of it, they have no idea of the trauma that people went through especially the friends and families of those lads that were killed,” Liam explained.

The following year, Shamrock Rover splayed Nice in the European Cup and the Irish lads had a new experience that day when they encountered a synthetic football for the first time in their lives!

“We looked at this thing and it was a black and white panelled ball and we nearly afraid to touch it –as if it was going to blow up or something. It was terrific because we discovered that when you hit it, boy it really travelled!

“Liam Tuohy and Jimmy McCann ‘Maxi’ were our wingers. It was very exciting for us as players. Like I even found that I could drive the thing another twenty yards and when it swerved, I mean in the League of Ireland if a poor divil was telling you that a ball was swerving, you’d be wondering where he had been the night before!”

“Things were different then. If we got a fresh pair of socks in Rovers, we thought we were elected! Now they’re getting a fresh million euros. But back then they were best days of our lives. We didn’t have much, we worked hard and we were happy.”

I only spent an hour in Liam Hennessy’s company and I have promised myself to revisit and talk some more.

My own grandad is gone on now but I’ll have his stories forever and will make sure my own kids will know them to pass on to their children. Our generation needs to know what we’re missing out on.

If you know a grandad, whether he be your own or someone else’s, find the time to talk to him and let his stories of football live on forever.