Late goals are bad for your vision

In the run up to last week’s game against Bohemians, the Shamrock Rovers twitter account was looking for fans to tweet some derby day memories. The first ever game against Bohs in Tallaght is one that Rovers fans never tire of talking or indeed tweeting about. Gary Twigg’s late goals that turned a Rovers defeat into a victory in the blink of an eye left an indelible mark on people’s memories and quite a mark on my shins as in the mad celebration that followed I was forced into the seats in front of me!

Gary Twigg celebrates late goal against Bohs in 2011 in Tallaght – Photo by Bobby Best

Looking through last week’s tweets, unsurprisingly there weren’t too many recent good memories of derby days in Dalymount given Rovers’ record in the Dublin 7 venue with no wins in the five outings coming into the game. However, tweets from the ground were trending in Ireland that night thanks to photos of the atmospheric pyro display by the SRFC Ultras and a Vine video of Gary McCabe’s penalty opening the scoring in front of a full house of over 3,500.

Pyro in Dalymount ahead of kick off

Close to 1,000 Hoops fans watched from the Shed End as McCabe opened the scoring from the penalty spot directly in front of them. A couple of hundred Rovers fans had ringside seats sitting in the Jodi Stand at the opposite end of the stadium in the second half for the two sweeping moves that ended with goals from Ronan Finn and Marty Waters. Those headed goals cemented the 3-1 win as the Hoops put three past Bohs for the first time since the win in Tallaght in 2011 a few days after the Hoops had played Juventus in the Europa League qualifiers.

McCabe’s goal in Dalymount was the first Rovers had scored in the venue since Ronan Finn’s late late header in April 2011. My video of that goal – Ronan Finn injury time equaliser for Shamrock Rovers against Bohs – was the memory that I tweeted ahead of last Friday’s match. It is a dramatic late goal but you can also see the exact moment when I got my glasses broken in the goal celebration thanks to a stray elbow!

With 93 minutes gone on the clock, the Hoops won a corner, which saw Rovers goalkeeper Alan Mannus sprint into the penalty area to try and get on the end of. When the ball came in, both Finn and the Northern Ireland goalkeeper rose to head the ball, with many thinking it was Mannus’ touch that sent the ball into the top corner of the net. Nobody really cared that it was actually Finn and nor did I too much as put my bent set of specs back on my face after the whistle to end the game moments later.

This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten some collateral damage off an injury time goal. Back in November 2002, during Shane Robinson’s first spell with Rovers, the Hoops had a “home” game against St. Patrick’s Athletic in Richmond Park. The scoreline was 1-1 deep in injury time when Robinson found Hoops striker Noel Hunt in the penalty area. Hunt squared for James Keddy who scored the winner to provoke a manic celebration from The Hoops fans in attendance.

In the ensuing madness in the Rovers end, a fan crashed into me from behind and sent my glasses flying. My eyesight is pretty poor and with a -10.5 prescription it puts me pretty much in blind territory without my specs. All around me Rovers fans were jumping around in delight and I’m trying to tell them to stop as my glasses are somewhere below them! When the final whistle went a minute or so later, I’m thinking how the hell am I going to get home without my specs. Friends and strangers alike standing around me, cast there eyes downwards to try and spot them when a friend goes “I’ve got them!” They had somehow flown off my face and settled on the upright in between two seats. I think I celebrated the return of my glasses more than the goal.

The final late goal that comes to mind affecting my vision is from 2011. It was a finish to a game that caused a complex secretometer phenomenon involving my lacrimal apparatus. In fact it might have affected the Hoops Scene reader too that night, whether you were at the game or watching from your TV back in Ireland.

You might need a bit more information to know what I’m talking about but if I say that it was the result of a Rovers game in Serbia, you might recognise that what was affecting my vision that night and maybe yours were tears.

I’m almost surprised to think back that I had any liquid in my body that evening in Belgrade for the Europa League Play-off against Partizan. That was due to the temperatures being above 35 degrees at kick off, the sweat inducing atmosphere in the ground from the Grobari Ultras and the tension filled game that went into extratime after Pat Sullivan’s stunning strike.

Rovers fans had been advised that maybe football colours wouldn’t be the best thing to wear while wandering around Belgrade, the city where crowd trouble caused Partizan to thrown out of the same competition four years previously. On match night, most did wear colours. Someone asked me was I wearing the old 2006 Rovers home jersey, as a point of how far Rovers had come since then relegation to the First Division. No, was the answer as it was simply the thinnest jersey I had and hence the most comfortable in that weather!

“Tallaght Time” isn’t the only recent football book that has a chapter written about that famous Shamrock Rovers win in Serbia. Last year James Moor wrote a book about his experiences as an Englishman working in Belgrade and following Partizan in the 2011 season. “Grobar – Partizan Pleasure, Pain and Paranoia” doesn’t have a happy ending for the home team in the play off as we know. It is interesting to read his take on the penalty minutes from the end of extratime that had Europa League group stage qualification at stake.

“As Shamrock’s Stephen O’Donnell prepared to take the penalty the stadium booed as one. O’Donnell kept his nerve and put it away. Shamrock’s 50 or so travelling fans, hemmed in beneath the executive boxes by a thin luminous line of stewards managed to make their cheers heard among the stunned silence of 20,000 Grobari. At the final whistle, while the Irish players jumped up and down and saluted their few dozen fans, the Partizan fans let their team know what they thought of them.”

It is a cold hearted Shamrock Rovers fan who didn’t have a tear in their eye that night when the penalty went in or at the final whistle when the famous victory was confirmed. I’d even hazard a guess that if this evening you watched back the 35 second video – Winning penalty by Stephen O’Donnell, Partizan Belgrade v Shamrock Rovers – taken from amongst the small section of Hoops fans in the stadium and the subsequent screaming celebrations, some moisture might well effect your vision once again!

Article published in Hoops Scene 2014 Issue 4