A brief history of the club
by Liam Lanigan (club co-founder)
What does a new
club look like when it first takes the field? You would want them to make a
striking impression, letting the hurling world know that they are serious from
the moment they leave the dressing room with a loud roar and the flash of crisp
new jerseys. You would want the violence of intent to be visible in the first
swing of the ash. You would want your opponents to remember the day they played
you for the first time.
Sunday, April 11 2010, was that impression made? I’m not sure those of us who were there cared too much. We were happy to be there at all, our boots sinking into the field at the Commercials’ grounds in Rathcoole was impression enough for us. 24 hours earlier, we thought we’d have to forfeit our first ever match for no better reason than that we didn’t have any jerseys. All the work and struggle of the previous 5 months was about to go up in a puff of deeply embarrassing smoke. Pride in the jersey from day one? Well, anyone who fielded that day will probably always have a soft spot for whoever it was in Mary Immaculate College Limerick that returned a set of jerseys unused due to the lack of a sponsor on the front. As it happened, we hadn’t even agreed on what club crest design we would use, if we ever got jerseys of our own.
Everything about the formation of the club was ramshackle, contingent, improvised, last-minute. And nothing about it was traditional. We had first come into being when Conor O Droma put a thread up on the now defunct GAA website An Fear Rua, asking for people interested in Junior hurling in Dublin. At this point the hypothetical team was intended to play as a part of Ranelagh Gaels. This author met O Droma in Russell’s of Ranelagh to discuss how we might proceed. One of those nights about which it’s best to follow Scott Eyman’s famous advice, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Not that the legend amounts to much, so I’ll stick with the truth. We looked at a few pages of estimated costs, decided that yes, we can do it, drank far too heavily for a week-night, giving the new team a baptism of wheat beer and Smithwick’s which was to prove highly prophetic.
That was in November 2010, and much of the intervening time until that first game is far too dull, too intricate, and too contested to bother recounting. In other words, it is a typical story of GAA politics the petty details of which are best ignored unless you get your kicks from that kind of thing (one lesson learned early: some people get their kicks from that kind of thing, and should never be allowed to intrude on the enjoyment of your day). Out of much back and forth came the resolution that if we were going to play real, competitive hurling we would only be able to do it standing on our own. Thus with winter passing and the beginning of the 2010 Adult Hurling League Division 9 looming extremely close, Réalt Dearg was born.
Well, first it was Cu Chulainn’s. That was shot down because some other team was calling themselves that. Someone else suggested Michael Cusack’s. Saint this and Saint that were bandied about. One or two of us had been advocating RD for a while, and one night in Bushy Park, after making the team do interval sprints until they were no longer able to think straight, breathe, or speak in dissent, the name was put to a vote. RD it was.
That first day was the culmination of many weeks of training, organisation, discussion. It was a collective effort on the part of a large group who, for the most part, didn’t know one another at all before that effort was under way. Nursing an injury myself, I didn’t take the field, although I still wanted to tog out (at the time I didn’t realise what a twat that made me look). The warm up was excessive for the heat of the day and the overall shambolic fitness levels of the team (it was on that day that team stalwart Trevor Jackman coined the phrase “running is for lads that can’t read the game”). We started a little slowly, players weren’t in their best positions because we didn’t know what those positions might be, just yet. There were a lot of us: at one point as I ran past some of their players I heard them remark that it might be worth asking if they might borrow a few of them. And it was a cosmopolitan group, too, with two French players coming on as substitutes, along with a Canadian and a German.
We lost that day. And the following week, in a challenge against Civil Service, this time decked out in old jerseys given to us by our generous neighbours St. Jude’s, we lost as well. And we lost a few more times after that. But we were doing other things as well. Recollecting the running of the club at that stage, from the current vantage point of carefully organised subcommittees, delineated roles of executive officers and the machinery of recruitment, fundraising and so on all working like a (fairly) well-oiled machine, those days have a kind of Wild West quality. We had a secretary (O Droma) and a Chariman (Jack McNamara), and some other more loosely assigned roles, but virtually everything we were doing was being learned and made up on the fly.
But it was an exciting time, too. There was an overwhelming sense that whatever we were doing, whatever the setbacks (we had no pitch and played our games away from home, we had no idea whatsoever of how the county board operated…I could go on), we were getting matches played, we were part of the Association, even if none of us could ever figure out quite how we had gotten away with it.
And with it, we were becoming good friends. I had played some hurling with other teams in Dublin, but had always felt that they were either simply a team for Sunday, or one where the bulk of the players had been friends since childhood, and that there was no real way into relating with such a team. Often our players were new to the area, with few friends in Dublin, almost but not quite all from down the country, brought together by a love of the sport. The sponsorship of Vaughan’s was a help in cementing those bonds. Maybe too much of a help. But it was a testament to the excitement that the club represented to us at the time, the sense that we had made something that could mean something.
What that might be, was unclear. We are not a traditional club, and though we are working always towards greater integration into the community, building links with the place where we hurl and becoming part of its identity, in those early days we represented only ourselves, and one another. And we had a sense of defiance. We had received some encouragement from other clubs. Hurling people like to see more hurling people, and ultimately everyone in Dublin hurling is dependent on that. But as anyone knows, when it comes to match day, encouragement and sportsmanship are not always in such plentiful supply when the team you’re playing start winning.
We had learned early enough in the life of the club that while hurling, as it always has been, is a sport in which close bonds are forged, even across enemy lines, it’s still as dirty as any other sport that people deem worthy of taking seriously. There were clubs, or more specifically managers, whose attitude to RD in those early days served to galvanise us as a team with a common purpose (the old “they hate ye lads” speeches only work when it feels vaguely true). All the more unfortunate that our first ever victory came against a team whose manager was always a gentleman, a hurling enthusiast who was eager to see us succeed. The win against Good Counsel in June of that year was celebrated like 10 All Irelands and a Papal Visitation rolled into one.
League is one thing, as they say, however the championship fortunes of the team had continued to flounder, and RD finished at the bottom of their group, hastily planning a trip to the Galway races to unwind. When the players discovered that finishing at the bottom of a four team group still entitled you to a place in the quarter finals, they were somewhere on Shop Street, in no fit state to respond in a healthy way to the news. Suddenly, there was a necessity to get the RD house back in order, in time for an impending clash with Fingallians in a match that would make or break the year.
In the end, it made it. On a warm, damp evening such as only an Irish summer can produce, under the lights of Lawless Park, the Stars came truly to life, a team to be taken seriously from that day forward. (Then they got absolutely trounced in the semi-final by Castleknock on a miserable Sunday morning in Tymon Park. Whatever.)
Every year brings new challenges, new setbacks and new achievements in the life of a club. But no mix of words that I can produce will be able to capture the essence of being a part of it. These are not just games that we play on a Sunday.
The years since have been good to the club. On our last day of the first season we had so many players that there weren’t enough jerseys to go around, and a second team had to be formed. Just last year, the same problem happened again, and we formed a third. There are not many clubs where the rate of expansion is a genuine concern, an issue in urgent need of being managed.
In our second year we also, very briefly, found a home for ourselves in Ringsend Park, an accommodation that didn’t sit well with more established, powerful and influential clubs to our east. At times the bitterness over that episode spilled onto the pitch (isn’t it convenient how the details are lost to politeness and time…but they are never lost to those who take the field), but were never allowed to overwhelm our sense of having a bigger objective than engaging in petty squabbles. With the passing of time, the club’s entry into more normal relations with the county board, and the establishment of a more stable system of administration, there came a more obvious sense of direction to the club. On the field our resolve and steel was being properly forged in the white heat of the training sessions of the great Gary Kelly, whose contribution to the club’s character is much greater than he probably appreciates. But we do.
I can point to the really landmark games. Losses like that to Kilmacud Crokes in a county semi-final by a hair; and in a league final replay after extra time against Clan na Gael in 2011. Victories too, like the B-team’s famous win in a county quarter-final against a heavily fancied Wild Geese in 2013, the C-team against Raheny in 2014, and proudest of all the day when the Dearg captured the AHL7 trophy with a heroic victory over Castleknock, characterised by Trevor Jackman’s four (was it five? It’s more every time I hear about it) clearances in the final two minutes to hold out for the win. I can point to those games but they only tell a part of the story. And I can point also to the training sessions, in the pelting, blinding sleet of Stepaside in February and the fair green sward of Drimnagh in July. But those are just places and times and things.
To borrow an idea of A team manager Harry Stone: Réalt Dearg is a team without a history. We have no club house walls with faded photos of half-remembered men holding half-remembered trophies. We have no sense of following in the footsteps of greatness or of inheriting a proud tradition that is represented by the jersey we wear and for which we are representatives every time we take the field. But that has been, to us, both a liberation and a duty. We are free to make our own history, and we are making a unique and new kind of club, one that is nevertheless beholden to the traditions of the game and admiration for its players. But we are also keenly aware of our duty to make that history. One day it’ll be our half-remembered faces on a club-house wall, reminding boys with red stars on their shoulders that the jersey they wear has a proud history, and that people who cared about it once fought to make it a symbol of something meaningful.
But no history is worth a damn if it isn’t looking forward. Memories of games and teams and players and wins and losses are only signposts. Next year. Next match. Next ball. Next ball. Next ball. Have them seeing stars.
Sunday, April 11 2010, was that impression made? I’m not sure those of us who were there cared too much. We were happy to be there at all, our boots sinking into the field at the Commercials’ grounds in Rathcoole was impression enough for us. 24 hours earlier, we thought we’d have to forfeit our first ever match for no better reason than that we didn’t have any jerseys. All the work and struggle of the previous 5 months was about to go up in a puff of deeply embarrassing smoke. Pride in the jersey from day one? Well, anyone who fielded that day will probably always have a soft spot for whoever it was in Mary Immaculate College Limerick that returned a set of jerseys unused due to the lack of a sponsor on the front. As it happened, we hadn’t even agreed on what club crest design we would use, if we ever got jerseys of our own.
Everything about the formation of the club was ramshackle, contingent, improvised, last-minute. And nothing about it was traditional. We had first come into being when Conor O Droma put a thread up on the now defunct GAA website An Fear Rua, asking for people interested in Junior hurling in Dublin. At this point the hypothetical team was intended to play as a part of Ranelagh Gaels. This author met O Droma in Russell’s of Ranelagh to discuss how we might proceed. One of those nights about which it’s best to follow Scott Eyman’s famous advice, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Not that the legend amounts to much, so I’ll stick with the truth. We looked at a few pages of estimated costs, decided that yes, we can do it, drank far too heavily for a week-night, giving the new team a baptism of wheat beer and Smithwick’s which was to prove highly prophetic.
That was in November 2010, and much of the intervening time until that first game is far too dull, too intricate, and too contested to bother recounting. In other words, it is a typical story of GAA politics the petty details of which are best ignored unless you get your kicks from that kind of thing (one lesson learned early: some people get their kicks from that kind of thing, and should never be allowed to intrude on the enjoyment of your day). Out of much back and forth came the resolution that if we were going to play real, competitive hurling we would only be able to do it standing on our own. Thus with winter passing and the beginning of the 2010 Adult Hurling League Division 9 looming extremely close, Réalt Dearg was born.
Well, first it was Cu Chulainn’s. That was shot down because some other team was calling themselves that. Someone else suggested Michael Cusack’s. Saint this and Saint that were bandied about. One or two of us had been advocating RD for a while, and one night in Bushy Park, after making the team do interval sprints until they were no longer able to think straight, breathe, or speak in dissent, the name was put to a vote. RD it was.
That first day was the culmination of many weeks of training, organisation, discussion. It was a collective effort on the part of a large group who, for the most part, didn’t know one another at all before that effort was under way. Nursing an injury myself, I didn’t take the field, although I still wanted to tog out (at the time I didn’t realise what a twat that made me look). The warm up was excessive for the heat of the day and the overall shambolic fitness levels of the team (it was on that day that team stalwart Trevor Jackman coined the phrase “running is for lads that can’t read the game”). We started a little slowly, players weren’t in their best positions because we didn’t know what those positions might be, just yet. There were a lot of us: at one point as I ran past some of their players I heard them remark that it might be worth asking if they might borrow a few of them. And it was a cosmopolitan group, too, with two French players coming on as substitutes, along with a Canadian and a German.
We lost that day. And the following week, in a challenge against Civil Service, this time decked out in old jerseys given to us by our generous neighbours St. Jude’s, we lost as well. And we lost a few more times after that. But we were doing other things as well. Recollecting the running of the club at that stage, from the current vantage point of carefully organised subcommittees, delineated roles of executive officers and the machinery of recruitment, fundraising and so on all working like a (fairly) well-oiled machine, those days have a kind of Wild West quality. We had a secretary (O Droma) and a Chariman (Jack McNamara), and some other more loosely assigned roles, but virtually everything we were doing was being learned and made up on the fly.
But it was an exciting time, too. There was an overwhelming sense that whatever we were doing, whatever the setbacks (we had no pitch and played our games away from home, we had no idea whatsoever of how the county board operated…I could go on), we were getting matches played, we were part of the Association, even if none of us could ever figure out quite how we had gotten away with it.
And with it, we were becoming good friends. I had played some hurling with other teams in Dublin, but had always felt that they were either simply a team for Sunday, or one where the bulk of the players had been friends since childhood, and that there was no real way into relating with such a team. Often our players were new to the area, with few friends in Dublin, almost but not quite all from down the country, brought together by a love of the sport. The sponsorship of Vaughan’s was a help in cementing those bonds. Maybe too much of a help. But it was a testament to the excitement that the club represented to us at the time, the sense that we had made something that could mean something.
What that might be, was unclear. We are not a traditional club, and though we are working always towards greater integration into the community, building links with the place where we hurl and becoming part of its identity, in those early days we represented only ourselves, and one another. And we had a sense of defiance. We had received some encouragement from other clubs. Hurling people like to see more hurling people, and ultimately everyone in Dublin hurling is dependent on that. But as anyone knows, when it comes to match day, encouragement and sportsmanship are not always in such plentiful supply when the team you’re playing start winning.
We had learned early enough in the life of the club that while hurling, as it always has been, is a sport in which close bonds are forged, even across enemy lines, it’s still as dirty as any other sport that people deem worthy of taking seriously. There were clubs, or more specifically managers, whose attitude to RD in those early days served to galvanise us as a team with a common purpose (the old “they hate ye lads” speeches only work when it feels vaguely true). All the more unfortunate that our first ever victory came against a team whose manager was always a gentleman, a hurling enthusiast who was eager to see us succeed. The win against Good Counsel in June of that year was celebrated like 10 All Irelands and a Papal Visitation rolled into one.
League is one thing, as they say, however the championship fortunes of the team had continued to flounder, and RD finished at the bottom of their group, hastily planning a trip to the Galway races to unwind. When the players discovered that finishing at the bottom of a four team group still entitled you to a place in the quarter finals, they were somewhere on Shop Street, in no fit state to respond in a healthy way to the news. Suddenly, there was a necessity to get the RD house back in order, in time for an impending clash with Fingallians in a match that would make or break the year.
In the end, it made it. On a warm, damp evening such as only an Irish summer can produce, under the lights of Lawless Park, the Stars came truly to life, a team to be taken seriously from that day forward. (Then they got absolutely trounced in the semi-final by Castleknock on a miserable Sunday morning in Tymon Park. Whatever.)
Every year brings new challenges, new setbacks and new achievements in the life of a club. But no mix of words that I can produce will be able to capture the essence of being a part of it. These are not just games that we play on a Sunday.
The years since have been good to the club. On our last day of the first season we had so many players that there weren’t enough jerseys to go around, and a second team had to be formed. Just last year, the same problem happened again, and we formed a third. There are not many clubs where the rate of expansion is a genuine concern, an issue in urgent need of being managed.
In our second year we also, very briefly, found a home for ourselves in Ringsend Park, an accommodation that didn’t sit well with more established, powerful and influential clubs to our east. At times the bitterness over that episode spilled onto the pitch (isn’t it convenient how the details are lost to politeness and time…but they are never lost to those who take the field), but were never allowed to overwhelm our sense of having a bigger objective than engaging in petty squabbles. With the passing of time, the club’s entry into more normal relations with the county board, and the establishment of a more stable system of administration, there came a more obvious sense of direction to the club. On the field our resolve and steel was being properly forged in the white heat of the training sessions of the great Gary Kelly, whose contribution to the club’s character is much greater than he probably appreciates. But we do.
I can point to the really landmark games. Losses like that to Kilmacud Crokes in a county semi-final by a hair; and in a league final replay after extra time against Clan na Gael in 2011. Victories too, like the B-team’s famous win in a county quarter-final against a heavily fancied Wild Geese in 2013, the C-team against Raheny in 2014, and proudest of all the day when the Dearg captured the AHL7 trophy with a heroic victory over Castleknock, characterised by Trevor Jackman’s four (was it five? It’s more every time I hear about it) clearances in the final two minutes to hold out for the win. I can point to those games but they only tell a part of the story. And I can point also to the training sessions, in the pelting, blinding sleet of Stepaside in February and the fair green sward of Drimnagh in July. But those are just places and times and things.
To borrow an idea of A team manager Harry Stone: Réalt Dearg is a team without a history. We have no club house walls with faded photos of half-remembered men holding half-remembered trophies. We have no sense of following in the footsteps of greatness or of inheriting a proud tradition that is represented by the jersey we wear and for which we are representatives every time we take the field. But that has been, to us, both a liberation and a duty. We are free to make our own history, and we are making a unique and new kind of club, one that is nevertheless beholden to the traditions of the game and admiration for its players. But we are also keenly aware of our duty to make that history. One day it’ll be our half-remembered faces on a club-house wall, reminding boys with red stars on their shoulders that the jersey they wear has a proud history, and that people who cared about it once fought to make it a symbol of something meaningful.
But no history is worth a damn if it isn’t looking forward. Memories of games and teams and players and wins and losses are only signposts. Next year. Next match. Next ball. Next ball. Next ball. Have them seeing stars.