Summer Cups Priests and Celtic

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This is another article that I have been working on for a while I hope you like it.
Here is a taster.
Historians have long been aware of the degree to which the game of soccer has been the predominant sport played in Donegal since the inception of the the Irish state. In a detailed examination of sports history in Donegal by UCC it is very obvious that soccer was very much the game of choice. There are possibly a number of reasons why the ‘Foreign Game’ held sway throughout the county for such a long time. I know of one prominent Donegal GAA manager who played League of Ireland football for a Cork team in the 1960’s which
would never be the case now as things have changed somewhat.
For the full article click here

Franco and Football:Facism vs Pragmatism

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Franco and Football Fascism v Pragmatism

It is often said that we judge others on their actions while we judge ourselves on our intentions. A prism we Irish often look through when judging the actions of those involved in our various wars with our neighbours the British. We at times find great difficulty too in forgiving and forgetting. What enables a person to forgive and forget .

In looking at the life and football career of Salvador Artigas in Spain and France I was amazed at Francos capacity to forgive and forget when it came to his two great interests in life Real Madrid and the Spanish national team. Two incidents highlight the ends that Franco would go to on behalf of these two teams. Salvador Artigas was playing for Barcelona when one of these erroneous incidents happened.

Barcelona were playing Real Madrid in a national cup final the Generals Cup.(Franco). It was played over two legs the first one being played at Camp Nou. Barcelona won that game 3 nil. The second game was to be played in Madrid in front of Franco. The game was a nil all draw at half time and Real were struggling. At half time an uninvited guest visited the Barcelona dressing room. A member of Franco,s secret police entered the Barcelona dressing room and made a statement that Barcelona were to lose not only the game but the tie as well or suffer the consequences. A former president of Barcelona Josep  Sunyol during the civil war had been abducted by the facists and his body had never been found. It was Sunyol who recruited Irish Man paddy o Connell as Barcelona coach. The Barcelona players took the threat very seriously. Barca lost the second half 11-1 so Real not only won the game but the Generals cup as well. I wonder what their half time team talk was about.

Another incident which highlighted Franco and Real trophy lust was how they went about signing the great Argentine centre forward Alfredo Di Stefano. Di Stefano was about to sign for Barcelona so he flew into Barcelona airport. When he landed he was taken by police to another plane which took him to Madrid where he signed for Real. Before De Stefano arrival Real had not won a trophy in ten years. With de Stefano in the team Real won La Liga the following year and this started a run of success which included 6 European Cups numerous La Ligas and Generals cups.

Franco saw football as a way of diluting the damaging  effects  his Fascism had on the image of Spain after the rest of Europe experience when fighting it during WW11. Football was seen by him as the best way of creating an image of Spain as a happy wealthy united country. A Public relations tool. Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao now use their football stadiums as a way of promoting their separatist causes. Francoesque. Artigas was Catalan by birth and as a player played for Barcelona and Bilbao so at a guess he followed the republican cause during the civil war. He also played for Bordeaux and Rennes in France.

When the civil war erupted in the early 1930s in Spain Artigas followed his political instincts as he followed the Republican flag and joined their air force.

It was this decision to join with Franco enemies which would seem to have made him an enemy of Franco for the rest of his life.

Artigas was trained in France at Argen Airport where he learned to fly and use the  weaponry  of a Russian built Polikarpov I-16. Flying the plane he fought in one of the last major battles of the Spanish civil war, the battle of the Ebro River. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 men were casualties in this battle with the Republican side suffering the most which was possibly the beginning of the end for their cause. Artigas survived unscathed.

After the war Artigas returned to football coaching Bordeaux and Renne in France eventually returning to Spain where he coached Barcelona, Seville and Bilbao. It was in 1969 that an extraordinary event happened. Franco wanted more success for the Spanish National team so he decided to create a dream team of coaches. Two of the coaches were Real stalwarts Miguel Munoz and Spanish Irish coach Luis Malowny . The third coach was Salvador Artigas the anti-facist  who had fought against  Franco’s  fascists on the battlefield.

It seems so improbable that  someone  with  Francos  lust for power and his unforgiving nature would employ a former political enemy. Just how good or lucky was Salvador Artigas. Did Francos pragmatism overcome his fascism for once?

Spanish Irish Footballers

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Spanish  Irish  Footballers. The Molownys

Malowny  is I presume derived from the more commonly used Irish surname Moloney. In a number of  census carried out in Ireland between 1847 and 1863 there were only five households in Ireland who registered under the name Molowny. By some strange set of circumstances the largest number of   people bearing  the name Molowny in the world reside in Spain. There are 150 registered Molownys  most  of them residing in the Canary Islands with a few families in Madrid. By sheer accident  I  discovered  a  connection  between  one particular Molowny and Real Madrid football club. I was having a coffee one morning in my usual cafe in Denia Spain where  I picked up a newspaper which had been  left behind by an earlier customer. The paper was obviously a  Madrid  published  daily as even with my limited Spanish most of the news concerned Madrid politically with the sports pages covered in articles about Real Madrid. One article in particular caught my eye and it was about who were the most successful managers in the history of Real Madrid.

There were photographs of the sixteen Real managers who have  won  trophies  with  the club since the 1950,s.  Migueal  Munoz won fourteen trophies between   1960 and 1974.  Zinedine  Zidane was second with 8 but joint second also with 8 was Luis Molowny. The spelling was different but the more I kept repeating the name Molowny in my head the more it sounded like Moloney . On using Wi Fi I discovered who  and what the man with the strangely spelt name was famous for.

Luis Molowny was a man born on an island but he was a descended   from people  from  another Island a long way from Spain, Ireland. As i read through a number of his profiles he is always referred to as being of Spanish of Irish decent.  One  profile  like all the  the other profiles had him in the Spanish Irish category but one also had a Spanish flag beside his name and an Irish tricolour underneath it. Most of the profiles were written in Spanish so it wasn,t  a case of Irish wishful thinking.

Luis Molownys career and ethnicity  seems to have been a well kept secret from the world outside of Madrid. In truth there was a bit of a Molowny football dynasty In the Canary Islands. Previously to Luis there were two cousins  Abelardo and Raul Molowny who were third generation Spanish Irish Their father is given credit for being one of the first coaches in the Canary Islands.  He was described as the emulator of that rough sport which had been imported from the British Isles into the Canary Islands at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Luis was born in 1925 and by the time he was fiveteen he was considered a tremendous footballing talent. At  fiveteen  years of age he was considered good enough to play against men but under Spanish football  rules he could only play in friendly games against men as he had to wait until he was nineteen. Word got out to the Spanish mainland about the boy wonder and Barcelona and Real Madrid each made an effort to sign him. It seems that Barcelona sent a representative by boat towards  the  Canary Islands but Santiago  Bernabue  chairman of Real became  aware of the Barcelona  representative  on the boat so he sent his representative by aeroplane with a bag of money. Luis signed for Real Madrid the contract he signed was for 250,000 pesetas transfer fee and 3000 pesetas a month to Molowny himself. A lot of money for a 16 year old footballer in the 1940’s.

 

At nineteen Luis made his debut for Real Madrid in a game in Madrid against Barcelona. Madrid won  2 – 1 Luis scored the second goal with a header. This was the beginning of an eleven year career with Madrid. Luis was  given  a  nick name by the Madrid supporters, E l  Mangas . Mangas means sleeves in Spanish and the nickname came from his habit of pulling down the sleeves of his jersey around his hands to keep his hands warm.  It was said that after coming from the warm Canaries to the winter cold of Madrid he needed all the help he could get to keep warm. After a very successful eleven years with Madrid Luis retired at 32 and began coaching within the Madrid underage system. He however returned  to the Canary islands were he took over managing a local team suffering one relegation but eventually playing their way back to the top  division and finishing second behind Real Madrid in La Liga.

In 1974 he replaced Miguel Munoz  as coach of Real Madrid. His time coaching Real  was very  broken up as twice he was there for a few months and twice for two years each time. In the space of less  than  five  years   as coach he won three la Ligas, two EUFA cups, two Spanish Cups and a Spanish League Cup.  Whatever   the  logic  of Santiago  Bernabue   was when Luis was being sacked as Madrids manager his next job with Real was Sporting Director. In 1990 he retired to his beloved Canary  Islands  were he died in two thousand and ten.

Luis Molowny in reality had little connection to the land of his forebears but the Spanish when describing   his ethnicity   generally describe him as Spanish Irish. In Ireland I am sure he is completely unknown   another   lost soul of the Irish  diaspora .  I hope I have gone  some way towards acknowledging the efforts of the forgotten Irish who often left these shores in the worst of circumstances but succeeded in foreign lands becoming successful in so many different ways , in Luis Molownys  case playing and coaching football at the highest level on the planet.

Luis played in all, 198 games of football  for Madrid  scoring 107 goals. He was capped  at  international  level  7 times. When he  retired  from  playing  he also managed Spain as an interim manager 4 times winning 2 drawing 1 and losing 1.

John Clarke(Clarkeysfootball.wordpress.com}

The Man Who Saved Barcelona Football Club

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The Man Who Saved Barcelona Football Club
  Galway Advertiser, Thu, Oct 09, 2008
If you walk down a street named Calle de la Mar in the town of Denia on the Costa Blanca in Spain you will see at number 20 an Irish bar called Paddy O’Connell’s.
Normally I avoid Irish bars overseas but a friend of mine told me that the name on this bar had special significance to the supporters of Barcelona Football Club. Inside the bar didn’t disappoint my initial aversion to Ireland’s largest export.
What did arouse my curiosity though were some of the photographs on the smoke stained walls: Photographs of football teams of men who played their games during Spain’s darkest days, the years between the nineteen twenties and the nineteen forties. Men now long since dead, some from the passage of time, some from the bullets of political enemies. I was still unaware of who Paddy O’Connell was and his connection, if any, with these men. After some research I discovered who Paddy O’Connell was and his connection with the footballers in the photographs. Paddy O’Connell turned out to be a soccer player who at the end of his extraordinary career became a football manager, as many players do.
Patrick Joseph O’Connell was born in Dublin in 1887 to a working class, strongly nationalist family. He played junior football for Frankfort which was a founder member of the League of Ireland. He joined the famous Belfast Celtic Football Club in 1909, playing as a wing-half or centre-half. One of his team mates at the time was Oscar Traynor, later a revolutionary and Fianna Fail cabinet minister. Paddy was then transferred to Sheffield Wednesday in the old first division. From there he moved on to Hull City. While representing his country he came to the attention of Manchester United who signed him, for the 1914 season. Paddy went on to captain Manchester United becoming the first Irish born footballer to do so.
O’Connell’s international career saw him win six caps and captain Ireland the only time Ireland have ever won the “home” international championship. The game against Scotland, Paddy O’Connell played with a broken arm and Ireland finished the game with ten men winning the tournament!
Fixing scandal
At the time that O’Connell joined Manchester United (1914 ). World War I had begun and it was expected that the English FA would suspend all football as most of the players would be drafted into the army. The possibility of losing not only their livelihoods but also their lives resulted in players becoming involved in one of the first match-fixing scandals in English football and Paddy O’Connell was caught up in it. Manchester United were in danger of being relegated so the night before they played Liverpool a number of players from both teams met and decided that Manchester United would win the game 2-0. The odds given by a bookie were 8 to1. With United leading 2-0, as planned, they were awarded a penalty which Paddy took. It seems that he missed it and the game finished 2-0 as planned. The consequence of this betting coup was that four Liverpool and three united players were banned for life from football. Paddy O’Connell escaped any punishment.
Barcelona FC
In 1922 with the Civil War in Ireland and no football being played there was no reason to return to Ireland, so Paddy O’Connell went to Spain to manage Racing Santander. Under his management they were regional champions five times. In 1928 they were one of the founding members of La Liga. He would return to Santander between 1948 and 1949. Real Oviedo were his next club, before he moved on to Real Betis, this is where he achieved his greatest success. With Betis he won the Segunda division in 1932. In 1935 they were La Liga champions, Real Madrid (Franco’s team ) finishing second.
With political events moving toward civil war in Spain, Paddy O’Connell became manager of one of the greatest clubs in world football, Barcelona F C. Barcelona was a club being run by anarchist revolutionaries when Paddy took charge of the team. In the 1935 season Barcelona won the Catalan championship and were beaten 2-1 by Real Madrid in the Spanish Cup Final. Around that time the chairman of Barcelona, Sunyol, was captured by Fascist militia near Madrid, they executed him and his body has never been found.
Destitute and alone
With Catalonia on the verge of being overrun by the Fascists, Barcelona football club, the great symbol of the Catalan people was penniless and on the verge of being destroyed in the political madness. La Liga was suspended so the club had no hope of raising the funds which would allow it to stay in existence. Just when it seemed they had no future they received an invitation to tour Mexico and the United States playing eight friendly games. The tour would guarantee them $15, 000 which was a fortune at that time. This money is credited with saving the club for the future. Paddy O’Connell left Barcelona with 14 players and a doctor. The tour lasted two months and only four players made the journey back to Barcelona, seven stayed in Mexico, three in France preferring to live in exile than under Franco’s fascists. The money was placed in a bank in Paris as it was felt that either the anarchists or Fascist would have taken it to finance their war had it been returned to Barcelona. This is why Paddy O’ Connell has a special place in the hearts of the people of Catalonia, he saved the great symbol of their nation. To the Catalans he is Don Patricio O’Connell.
When the civil war ended O’Connell moved to Seville FC, he managed them from 1942 to 1946 they finished runners up to Real Madrid in La Liga 1942-43. In 1946 Paddy returned to Santander the club where he began his incredible Spanish odyssey. The circumstances of his life just seemed to spiral downwards when he returned to London where he died destitute and alone in St Pancras on the January 27 1959 aged 72.

Catalonia A political Football

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Catalonia a Political Football

Sport and Nationalism are potent motivational forces at certain times within society. Is it a good idea to mix sport and politics? In Catalonia these two forces seem to be inextricably linked between the Catalan independence movement and FC Barcelona. A number of Barcelona players Pique, Xavi and former manager Pep Guadiola have expressed avowedly nationalist sentiments in support of the Catalan nationalist cause. The other side of this is the approach of Anders Inesta who has been part of Barcelona FC since he arrived from la Mancha in Castilian Spain at the age of 12 to Join La Maise the Barcelona academy. Inesta also speaks the Catalan language and in press conferences he takes questions in Catalan but answers them in Castilian. Espanol the other team in the city of Barcelona are the team which is supported by those who live in Barcelona but consider themselves Spanish, supporting the government in Madrid.
The more I read of the present situation in Catalonia the more I seem to be finding parallels with the partition of Ireland and the formation of the Northern Irish state. For example an argument often used by the nationalist supporters in favour of independence is that although Catalans are only 16% of the population of Spain they create 19% of the Spanish GDP. This was also one of the principle arguments used by the Protestants in Northern Ireland when pushing for the partitioning of Ireland into what was essentially a catholic Southern independent Ireland and a protestant Northern Ireland state.The greater Belfast area created 80% of the industrial wealth of the whole of Ireland now it is an economic backwater. N. Ireland was the place where I was born and spent 33 years of my life.
In the past number of years I have gotten to know people who place themselves on either side of the Spain/Catalan question. Some of them see themselves as being Catalan with no interest or loyalty to Spain while others see themselves as being provincially Catalan but nationally Spanish .The banners on display in the Camp Nou are more often an expression of Catalan nationalism than of football. I see this as a subversion of the idea of sport into something else. None of us like it when teams like Lazio, CSKA Moscow, and Partisan Belgrade bring their politics into their football stadiums with them.
There are 7.5 million people in Catalonia and a good proportion of these are migrants from other cities and provinces of Spain. The number of socios of Espanol have increased over the years. I believe this is reflective of new migrants finding it difficult to assimilate within FC Barcelona and the political atmosphere in Camp Nou. Migrants or minorities are inclined to ghettoise themselves so I am sure the there are ghettos in many of the cities of Catalonia populated by migrants and their descendant. In N. Ireland most of the minority Catholic population would have preferred unity with the Republic of Ireland. I assume most of the migrant non-Catalan population of Catalonia would rather remain part of Spain. As a former member of a minority population (N. Irish catholic) I can well imagine the feelings of political and cultural alienation, and the uncertainty for the future felt by the non-Catalan in Catalonia at this time.
When Ireland was partitioned in 1921 about one third of the population of the north was catholic. These catholics owed no allegiance to the new state, while the other two thirds were protestant who set up a protestant parliament for a protestant people. Those catholics isolated within this new protestant state were told to accept, change or leave. They didn’t leave, they stayed and seethed. I wonder would similar sentiments be voiced to any degree on the pro-independence side in Catalonia? In Spain, as in Ireland, old enmities die hard. The most vociferous of the Catalan parties, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, has called for a unilateral declaration of independence. During the Spanish civil war one of its former members was captured by nationalist troops and his body has never been found. His name was Josep Sunyol and he just happened to be the President of FC Barcelona at the time. There seems to be a fear within the more moderate Catalan politicians that this party could win the majority of seats at the next Catalyunan election and declare UDI. On the other side of the argument are the likes Javier Tabas and former Real Madrid chairman Lorenzo Sanz a former member of the Spanish National Front, both of whom would be considered very right wing and anti Barcelona. They are advocating the expulsion of FC Barcelona from La Liga. It is a situation fraught with disastrous possibilities for Spanish people, politics, and football.
I have read much on the history of Spain from the 1920’s onwards. I first visited Spain,( Majorca) in 1967 so I got a sense of the fear and loathing of the then Spanish Dictatorship by many of the ordinary Spanish people I met. I took a crack from a Guadia Civil’s baton for not wearing a t-shirt on the street in the town of Soler. It reminded me of home. The Catalans were then a suppressed minority, culturally and politically. In their drive towards a Catalan state I would hope they will be mindful of the rights of minorities. I see Sinn Fein are playing their away game again.A sporting metaphor. In Ireland they call for a vote by all the people of Ireland on the issue of ending Partition and they call that democracy. In Catalonia they are supporting the catalonians call for only catalans be allowed to vote and they are saying it is their democratic right,Democracy? Well  Sinn Fein style. Win win with a loaded deck. My contention is that FC de Barcelona should remain politically neutral in all the present political uncertainty. The business of a football club should be football, leave politics to the politicians.