18 Reasons to Love the LOI

Good article in the examiner today by Aidan Russell...

There are still reasons to love League of Ireland

The Sports Illustrated writer Joe Posnanski recently recounted a favourite quote he prodded like loose change from an interview subject.

Louis ‘Red’ Klotz, has the most unenviable jobs in sport; coaching the team that faces the famous Harlem Globetrotters every week.

The Washington Generals (also often known as the New York Nationals) are the journeymen stooges who, game after game, season after season, decade after decade are duped by the same flashy crossover and follow the ball-on-the-string trick like a loyal but obtuse dog teased with a biscuit treat.

In the 58 years since he’s taken charge, Klotz’s teams have beaten the Globetrotters just twice. Amazingly, they’ve lost — wait for it — over 13,000 times.

But Red yet still shelters an un-dimming flicker of hope. This past winter the Globetrotters, a well-oiled organisation more adept at slick marketing and cheap publicity stunts than the ad men of Madison Avenue, announced they’d face the Generals again. But this time on ice.

If Klotz was perplexed at this curious arrangement or fearful for the safety of his boys, he didn’t let on. In fact, he made a foolhardy statement that encapsulates his entire outlook: “We excel on ice”.

Yes, that’s right. After decades playing the pantomime villains and losing every game bar a couple, he thinks ice (ice!) will suit the Generals’ playing style.

With unflinching optimism like that, he must support Sligo Rovers. Or Shels. Or be a season ticket holder at Dalyer. Or any League of Ireland club.

Tonight the Airtricity League kicks off after a 12-round close-season that left even Roddy ‘Queensbury Rules’ Collins punch-drunk. While its players went, scandalously, unpaid, Cork City endured a court-room drama so protracted and convoluted I thought I’d put the Boston Legal DVD back in the Lost box-set. The once great Derry City also dropped a division in a summer winter of discontent.

But tonight, after all the off-field attrition — though the battle scars are admittedly yet to heal — a football match will break out. And then another. And a few more. It’s perhaps an apposite time to reaffirm some of the many reasons why we love domestic football.

1. The quaint stadia, like the Carlisle Grounds. Bray Wanderers’ home is the only stadium that needed a Hollywood budget to bring it up to 1920s standards with Neil Jordan casting the charming, seaside ground as Croke Park in Michael Collins. The Dart spin is nicer than a Tube journey too.

2. We’re on the way, meet you in… Kennedy’s of Drumcondra; The Black Lion, Inchicore; The Horseshoe on the corner flag in Turner’s Cross Tavern; the Yellow House in Waterford. Wherever.

3. The Aviva Stadium. It looks like Optimus Prime’s foot spa but it’s ours now too. The Palindrome will likely host Bohs and Rovers’ Dublin derby in August. The RDS and elsewhere was grand in the interim but it’ll be good to be knocking about Lansdowne Road again for the big days.

4. Ryanair. You don’t have to pay Michael O’Leary to use the toilet on the way to Flancare Park. Though Longford is like a foreign country sometimes.

5. Jonny Logan. The Eurovision titan’s Hold Me Now was appropriated by Bohs fans after a particularly successful sing-song in a Stockholm bar. You don’t hear that on English terraces.

6. Terraces! What am I saying? There aren’t any terraces in the EPL. If I wanted to sit in a comfortable seat with affluent middle aged men for an hour and a half I’d queue for a prostate exam in the GP’s waiting room.

7. Gary Lineker’s MOTD puns have ruined more of my Saturday nights than nightclub doormen.

8. Ball was there ref, the ball was there!

9. Neale Fenn’s first touch.

10. Walk away, player!

11. Gary Twigg. The Scottish striker has a haircut that’s heard around the world, but he’s the most natural scorer this side of Ashley Cole.

12. Ashley Cole

13. Friday night football. A pay-slip, a hair-cut and a pint before kick-off is, scientifically, the best start to any weekend, right?

14. Fans’ jokes when UCD visit: ‘Come on lads, these have bleedin’ school in the morning!’

15. Watching a midfielder steaming into a tackle before emerging from puddles of blood and gnawed bone with the ball, then turning to your pal and saying: “I used to have him in my pocket at U15s, ‘member?”

16. Mick Wallace’s Italian renaissance in Wexford. And his Youths side wear pink. Forza.

17. The asterisk; we usually boast more than any other league in the world.

18. Summer football — the sun shines but we excel on ice too.