The Rise and Fall of Cobh Ramblers

The "miracle" was no miracle at all. Cobh Ramblers have been threatening to do it or something like it for years. They beat Drogheda in 1975 when the Louth men were one of the better League of Ireland teams. In 1981 they beat Galway who, homely and humble as they undoubtedly were, were still a League of Ireland team and favourites for the game. Through the past eleven years Ramblers have won the Munster Senior League eight times. And they won the Intermediate Cup in 1980 and this year. 

The "minnows" label simply will not stick.

Amongst the people and players of Cobh there is a deep and general conviction that without Liam McMahon as coach and manager the Ramblers success story could not have happened. Liam himself will have none of that,

"It's a players' game. Those who can play, those who can't play coach, and those who can do neither administer."

That's Liam - fluent conversation closely woven, dappled with bon mots, often acerbic, always illuminating.

There were no portents of this golden age of Ramblers when Liam McMahon arrived as coach in 1972. The club had won nothing since 1956. The 1960s had been a bleak and sterile period. The great majority of players came from outside Cobh, and many of them took the view that they were doing the town quite sufficient honour by turning up for matches, and that to expect them to discommode themselves by such plebeian pursuits as training, or indeed trying, was altogether unreasonable.

McMahon played for Cobh for a while during that period, so he had a very clear idea of what was necessary and how to go about getting it.

And he got it. By any standard Liam McMahon's mind is singularly lucid and uncluttered by jargon. By the standards of football spokesmen it is a marvel. He shudders at mention of systems, and then begins to expound and grow slightly lyrical on the subject of skill. His basic concept is simple and even a bit old fashioned. It is that when you have the ball, no matter where on the pitch, you are the attacking team. He wants to see daring and invention from his players - all the time.

The forward who receives the ball and takes the easy way out by passing it backward is the bane of the game.
There is the essence of his football thinking. He loves the confidence, effrontery, skill, love of mischief whatever ineffable brew it is that makes a player want to really show that he is better and smarter than the other fellow. And when you get within range, you shoot! Liam reckons that Cobh put in more shots per game than any other team in Ireland.

These are some of the elements of success. And the size of their forwards - lack of size, to be exact - is vital to the recipe too. This predilection for smaller forwards is of a piece with the rest of McMahon's thinking, for with his insistence on a very high proportion of shots, Cobh need speed, durability and nimbleness to get those shots in and to snap up any resultant breaks around the penalty area. And you feel that he gets rather a wicked frisson out of watching some great hulk flailing at the slipstream of one of his pixies.

Cobh had no feeling of inferiority going out to play League of Ireland teams. They knew that their flair for playing the ball predominantly on the ground, and the way they encouraged individual enterprise made them unwanted opponents. They felt too that League of Ireland teams might be easier to play against, inasmuch as they are more disciplined and inclined to hold their formation than the mainly gung-ho devil-take-the-hindmost sides Cobh had been meeting.

And so it proved to be. For, though defeat came in the end it came because of momentary lapses of concentration rather than any discernible footballing superiority of Sligo. Indeed, there are many good judges who will tell you that over the seven hours Ramblers played most of the really good football.

Nobody knows yet how much the Ramblers have earned by their exploits. But it won't be much short of £30,000 - and it's as good as spent already. The beneficiaries will be the followers. A new stand to seat about 500 is planned. The remainder of the accommodation will be concrete terracing. The club pavilion is to be extended to include a new games room. And a new training ground is to be purchased and floodlit.

Of course, Ramblers have been an easy team to follow, with their abundance of success over the past eleven years. But without the members - 300 of them at just £3 per year - and the followers, and their support at the gate and at the bar, the successes might never have come. It was those same members and supporters who, when before the first Sligo game Flower Lodge was found to be badly rundown, gave their time and labour free to get the pitch and surrounding banking back to a state approaching their former excellence. "Greater love than this no man hath."

And between the facelift and the romance of the Ramblers the crowds were back to the proportions  of the glory days of the Lodge. And back too was the man who once summed up what the game is all about with "Will ye come on Cork Hibernians ou' dat, an' wake up ou' dat, ah' score an oul goal ou' dat, an' leave us go 'way for a pint ou' dat".

The doings of the Ramblers brought a tiny accretion of interest and a loan of a little validity to the interminable flummery about reviving League of Ireland football in Cork. In the week after their exit from the Cup, Cobh played two Munster Senior League games in Cork. The gates were hardly worth collecting.

A few thoughts at parting from the man who, for a short two months, had just a wee bit to do with
insulating one small town from the world and the waffle of Fitzdukes of the Apocalypse. Liam McMahon on:
The best team of the World Cup? Brazil. The best player? Conti. Biggest disappointment? West Germany - "let European football down." Soccer internationals at Croke Park? "Why should there be? If soccer in this country had leadership with a bit of backbone, we'd have a stadium as good as Croke Park for ourselves." Zaniest ambition? "To coach a gaelic football team."

And on Sunday April 24 Cobh Ramblers Cup was won by Sligo Rovers who beat Bohemians by one goal. What Rovers? Bo who?