Remembering Shelbourne legend Ollie Byrne, a true maverick.
Paul Fennessy ATTENDANCES AND the standard of football may be on the up, but there’s one thing the League of Ireland doesn’t have today — and that’s someone quite like Ollie Byrne.
As a youngster, Ollie briefly played for UCD but a problem with asthma meant his dreams of becoming a top-level player never came to fruition. “He had a brain there. I would regularly be in Tolka in the mornings because I worked there with him for 15 years. And the phone would ring and it might be someone from another club or the FAI: ‘Listen, we have an issue. What do the rules say about this and that?’Joe Casey, the former chairman of Shelbourne, who remains on the board of management, remembers one particular case.
A controversial figure, Byrne found himself before the courts more than once. In 2006, he escaped conviction after apologising for assaulting Roddy Collins over remarks the then-Shamrock Rovers manager had made on the radio. He was cleared of a breach-of-the-peace charge arising out of a confrontation with St Patrick’s Athletic supporters in 2003. The owner claimed that when he gave two fingers to rival supporters, he was merely indicating that the score was 1-1.
As Byrne’s obituary in The Irish Times noted: “Ollie often spoke about retiring before the job took its toll on his health but few who knew him ever believed he’d be able to walk away.” “He had woken at maybe two in the morning, thinking: ‘I need to ring Alex Ferguson, I need to ring Howard Wilkinson,’ who he had a very good relationship with. Ring Wilko, and see if [Leeds will] come over and play us.”And while money was often tight, Byrne was persuasive enough to frequently convince people to part with their hard-earned cash.
At the time of his arrival, the team were playing at Harold’s Cross, the league felt stagnant, and crowds at Shels were poor while results weren’t much better. The European dream was not an unequivocal failure, however. There were some memorable nights, notably in 2004, when they faced Deportivo. The Spanish side had reached the Champions League semi-finals the previous year and held them to a scoreless draw in the first leg at Lansdowne Road before a creditable performance in the away match amid a closer contest than the eventual 3-0 scoreline suggests.
“He never turned off. And the problem was that when things were going wrong, it affected him. And he wasn’t the sort that would talk to anyone about it. “But he had to know everything was being done and he had that attitude: ‘If I don’t do it myself, it won’t get done.’ “Everyone used to think that Pat Dolan and Ollie didn’t get on. Pat and Ollie actually had a quite good relationship. They played games. Ollie would ring Pat and say: ‘Listen, I’m going to have a pop at you in the paper this week.’
But Byrne’s effect on Rutherford was genuinely life-changing. When he first moved to Ireland aged 19 from his hometown club Birmingham City in 1991, it was meant to be a one-month loan. “There was only one move, from Newry to Bohemians, that Ollie had no part in. I always remember seeing him a couple of days after. I was stuck in traffic and he was in the taxi next to me and he was saying to me: ‘Why did you join Bohs?’
” I remember seeing Andy and his brothers outside, and them saying to me: ‘Mark, he probably won’t recognise you. Go in and have a chat anyway, he’ll hear your voice.’ And it was surreal going into him, he could barely talk. But I said: ‘Ollie, it’s Mark, I don’t know if you remember me.’ And straightaway, he says: ‘Of course, I remember you, Mark, I’ll never forget you.’ And that’s always lived with me since. Those last words: ‘I’ll never forget you.’“He passed away in August 2007.
“No matter how much logic you tried to put into the conversation, you weren’t really getting the answers you wanted from him, but you accepted that because you knew he wasn’t doing this for anything but the betterment of the club. He wasn’t doing it for himself, he died with absolutely nothing. “We made about 600 grand on that European run, we’d make more money nowadays, but me being an accountant [I remember] we made a loss of 1.7 million instead of 2.3. Ollie deemed that to be a success.”Casey also backs up Andy’s recollections over Ollie having an uncanny ability to persuade people to part with their cash.
2006 will go down as surely the most incredible season in Shelbourne’s history, as the club won the league despite ongoing problems over players not being paid. “So everybody played the match. When the game was over, they opened the envelopes and there was nothing in there. The lads just laughed.”
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