St. Patrick’s Athletic deservedly clinched the Airtricity Premier Division League title last Sunday and in a congratulatory tweet I mentioned the fact that I thought manager Liam Buckley was “a gent”. A few people didn’t share the opinion with me, mainly because they don’t know the man; and because he’s the St.Pat’s manager and not their own. So I started typing.
Firstly, I don’t know Liam Buckley well, I’ve met him a handful of times and he’s always been polite but first impressions count and my first real impression of the man came in 2010, the day after FORAS (where I was Chairman) had been granted a licence to enter a Cork City team (of which I had just become Chairman by default) in the First Division.
We had received the licence at approximately 9.20pm on a Monday night. Seven people suddenly become the board of a football club, with hundreds of members simultaneously becoming owners of their football club. We had ten days to put a manager in place, build an admin team, find and register players, organise a training base and a home stadium; and book a bus to Derry for our first game of the season. Only Ten days.
In the midst of this chaos I received a phone call from Liam Buckley, then manager of Sporting Fingal. He’d gone to the trouble to find my number, he called to wish us luck and to offer us a pre-season friendly the following weekend [the final weekend before the season kicked off]. He told me it was great what we’d achieved in Cork, how great it was to see the club continue and he let us know that there were countless “great people within the league” who’d be there to help, a fact made abundantly clear over following years.
Liam didn’t need the friendly match, his pre-season was almost complete, but he knew our new manager would need one. He offered to put his team on a bus to Cork the following weekend, at his club’s expense, to do a favour for a bunch of supporters now running a league of Ireland club.
Unfortunately, the game never happened, through no fault of Liam. When he rang, we hadn’t a ground to play any match, had neither a manager nor a single player. I thanked him for his generosity and admitted we’d be lucky to have things pulled together for the league opener never mind the following weekend. As it turned out, nine days later, Tommy Dunne took 11 players and 2 subs [one injured and one goalkeeper] to the Brandywell where we secured a draw in one of the best night’s I’ve had in football.
Cork City went on to win promotion in 2011, but Liam Buckley’s generous offer will stay long in my mind. There’s a lot of talk about “real football people” in the media these days, Bucko is one, and he’s a gent.
ninetyplusfour 