Emerald Exiles E-Book

Barry Landy

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

When football players leave Ireland behind in the hopes of carving out a future in the professional game, they often end up plying their trade in the UK –competing for a chance in the Premier League, the Scottish Premiership, or the numerous leagues below them. For decades, this has been the most attractive and obvious career path for Irish players. But what of those players who ventured further afield in search of glory, adventure, or simply their next touch of the ball? Since the dawn of the men's professional game well over a century ago, and up to the more recent expansion of women's football, Irish players – and coaches too – have made their mark on clubs and nations around the world. For the first time, Emerald Exiles brings together the stories of these pioneering players, who pursue football wherever they can, venturing beyond tradition and navigating the personal and professional highs and lows that journey brings with it. Charting the careers of players and managers such as Liam Brady, Robbie Keane, Anne O'Brien, Stephanie Roche, Frank Stapleton and a host of others – and featuring exclusive first-hand interviews with numerous players, Emerald Exiles is a unique analysis of Ireland's mark on world football and the individual stories behind it.    

Leseprobe

BARRY LANDY is a freelance journalist, based in County Louth. He is the editor of LouthNow.ie. His football reporting appears in the Irish Independent, Irish Daily Mirror, Irish Daily Star, The Irish Sun, The Irish Times, The42.ie, and RTE.ie among others. Barry is the former editor of The Emerald Exiles, a website dedicated to following the fortunes of Irish footballers plying their trade outside of the UK and Ireland. Emerald Exiles is his first book.

EMERALD EXILES

EMERALD EXILES

HOW THE IRISH MADE THEIR MARK ONWORLD FOOTBALL

BARRY LANDY

EMERALD EXILES

First published in 2021 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Barry Landy, 2021

The right of Barry Landy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-818-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-819-7

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

For Hannah

Contents

Introduction

1  The Pioneer Club

2  Continental Drift

3  The Italian Job

4  Once Upon a Time in America

5  East is East

6  Managing Expectations

7  Flying the Nest

8  All Roads Lead to Italy

9  The Euro Stars

10  The Second Generation

11  Coming to America

Epilogue

Bibliography

Image Credits

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

IRELAND’S WILD GEESE

Irish-born football players have earned their living in Britain’s professional football leagues since the late 1880s. Ever since, the trip across the Irish Sea to England has been seen as the natural movement for footballers with aspirations of carving out a career in the professional game.

Throughout history, all but a smattering of players capped at senior level for the Republic of Ireland national team have plied their trade either at home or in England and Scotland’s football leagues, and of course, more recently, in the Premier League. There is little mystery as to why – with no language barrier to overcome, a very similar culture and lifestyle to back home and close proximity to Ireland, the UK has forever been an obvious destination for our emigrants, whether they play the game or not.

Both England and Scotland have had at least three tiers in their respective football leagues since the early-to-mid–1900s, meaning opportunity has knocked for generations of Irish players. The stories and achievements of many of these players are oft told and well known to supporters of all ages. Modern-day Ireland is brimming with followers of Liverpool and Manchester United, owing to the great Irish players of the respective clubs’ vintage title-winning teams under Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Kenny Dalglish and Alex Ferguson. The likes of Ronnie Whelan, Mark Lawrenson, Roy Keane, Denis Irwin or John O’Shea need no introduction.

In an era where the best English clubs were teeming with Irishmen, the likes of Steve Heighway, Frank Stapleton, Jim Beglin and Kevin Sheedy, as well as UK-born Irish internationals Michael Robinson, Ray Houghton and John Aldridge ended their careers with medal hauls of which Irish players in the modern era can only dream. Going further back, names such as Johnny Carey, Noel Cantwell and Tony Dunne will be recognisable to Manchester United supporters of a certain vintage, for example. Similarly, Leeds United’s sizeable Irish support is owed in no small part to John Giles, a star of Don Revie’s great team of the 1960s and 1970s. Those players are widely known and rightfully adored across the country and in England, where their achievements are remembered fondly.

Many of the subjects featured in these pages have also enjoyed highly successful careers in the English game, including Jack Kirwan, Liam Brady, Stapleton and Robbie Keane, who have six FA and Football League cup wins – and just shy of 2,000 appearances – between them. Here, though, we look at their experiences outside of Ireland and Britain, in places as diverse as Amsterdam, Turin, Milan and Los Angeles. We look, in other words, at those who have emigrated further afield to further their football career.

To talk about emigration, in an Irish context, is to open the wound of a great national trauma. Thoughts instantly turn to the Great Famine and, in more recent times, recessionary depths that have led to the hollowing-out of Irish society. Large swathes of the population left home behind for opportunities in foreign pastures. Football, as peculiar an industry as it is, even within the sporting world, has been as affected as any other.

For many inside the game, as is often the case with civilians who are forced to leave Ireland behind due to economic conditions, emigrating to a new club in a new country is often merely a way of surviving in the sport. Football, like few other sports, lends a nomadic status to those who play it. They move, adapt and often improve themselves as a consequence. But the move itself is often as much a necessity as it is a choice.

In the last forty years, the globalisation of the game has made the presence of foreign players in leagues the world over commonplace. Nowadays, at least some teams in most countries in the world will have cosmopolitan squads, made up of players from multiple continents. Still, Ireland has witnessed nothing like the same spread of native football talent to the other leagues outside of Britain, i.e. in Europe, and beyond. Not since Steve Finnan in 2008 has a senior men’s Irish international played in the top-flight in either France, Spain, Germany or Italy. Ian Harte, playing for La Liga side Levante in 2007, was the last Irish-born player to feature in one of the continent’s elite leagues, with honourable mentions to the year-long spells of Jack Byrne (SC Cambuur) in the Eredivisie and Pádraig Amond (Paços de Ferreira) in Portugal’s Primeira Liga.

It remains doubtful that any of the other four major European leagues will see an influx of Irish footballers in the near future given the language and cultural differences, as well as the style of play, but also the standing in which Irish players seem to be held around the continent. (Though player movement to less prominent European clubs has become more notable in recent decades, at least.)

Still, in contrast to many smaller countries around Europe, there has never been a major temptation for Irish players to move beyond the leagues in Ireland and Britain. Perhaps it is simply due to the fact that English football continues to act, as ever, as the Promised Land for the Irish. What allure does Europe, America, Asia or elsewhere hold when fame, fortune and fulfilment can be found so much closer to home – in an English game that is piped into our homes in ever-more accessible forms? Money talks, of course, and what sets the English Premier League and Championship aside from other less-heralded leagues around the world is that these leagues offer a security that most footballers crave. It is, after all, a short career. The influence of the English game in Ireland is longstanding too, and players of all ages find it hard to shrug off the temptation of following in the footsteps of the storied greats that have gone before.

Yet with England especially becoming a more difficult place for Irish players to make it, given the influx of players from around the globe into the top two tiers, a broadening of horizons can do no harm.

These pages will profile just some of Ireland’s exiles who have already looked beyond Ireland and the UK in their careers, from pre-war managers such as Kirwan – the widely unheralded Dubliner who was the first-ever manager of Ajax – and another Dub, Patrick O’Connell, a La Liga winner with Real Betis whose legacy lives on at FC Barcelona.

There will also be a focus on Italy, which once upon a time proved to be a prime location for Irish players trying their luck abroad. Liam Brady, Anne O’Brien, Ronnie O’Brien and Robbie Keane’s respective spells in the country contained varying degrees of success, but none were without incident. Many other players, including Louise Quinn, Richie Ryan, Roy O’Donovan and Stephanie Roche have gone directly from domestic football in Ireland to stints in countries as diverse as Sweden, Italy, France, Canada, Brunei, Singapore and Australia.

This book is not an exhaustive history charting every Irish player and manager to spread their wings and take to the continent, or beyond. Instead, it focuses on a selection of them (those mentioned above and more besides) throughout history, from both the men’s and women’s game. Including sixteen interviews conducted for this book, it delves into these players’ experiences and tells tales from those who chose not to follow the tired, old script and instead wrote their own chapter in the story of how the Irish made their mark on the global game.

Unless stated otherwise, all direct quotes in the book come from interviews I conducted with the players involved.

1

THE PIONEER CLUB

Ireland’s footballers have a long, if not often storied, history of travelling outside of Ireland and the UK to further their footballing careers. Much of the first wave of ‘exiles’ headed for Europe, not so much to enhance their playing career, but to pursue a future in football coaching or management. The first notable example was a Dubliner by the name of Jack Kirwan, who would make for the continent near the beginning of the twentieth century, and go on to take a historic role with a future European powerhouse.

Born John Henry Kirwan in Dunlavin, County Wicklow in February of 1878, the young Kirwan was a natural sportsman who quickly became highly regarded in sporting circles around the capital, playing football for St James’s Gate and Gaelic football for Dublin, even going on to represent Dublin in the 1894 All-Ireland final, playing in the forward line as they overcame Cork over two games. He was only seventeen.

Still, despite his passion for GAA, it was his love for football that won out, likely because – like many Irish people at the time – he sensed the prospect of a better life in England. He moved there in the late 1890s, and enjoyed a successful playing career, spending one season at Everton and then six at Tottenham Hotspur, where he helped the team, led by Scot John Cameron, to a 1901 FA Cup final win over Sheffield United. A then world-record attendance of 110,820 had watched the first game at Crystal Palace, which ended in a draw, but Kirwan finally got his hands on the cup as Spurs won the replay 3–1 at Burnden Park.

He retired from playing in 1910. At thirty-two, Kirwan was soon looking further afield again, and would become the first exile to set sail for mainland Europe – travelling to a club with which readers will be very familiar.

Reports from the time are scarce and incomplete. What is known is that a chance meeting in London with the chairman of the recently founded Ajax football team, Chris Holst, led Kirwan in this new and unexpected direction. The club had been established a decade earlier and, still an amateur outfit, were playing second division football. Holst had come to England with a purpose: to find a British manager to help propel his team towards the top of Dutch football, as, in the early twentieth century, Britain was the country that clubs from across Europe looked to when they wanted to learn and develop their game. After that constructive – if seemingly fortuitous – meeting, Holst was convinced that he’d found his man. Soon after, Kirwan was appointed as the club’s first-ever manager.

At the time, HVV Den Haag and Sparta Rotterdam were the leading lights in the country’s Football League Championship, which was split into eastern and western classes. When Kirwan arrived in September 1910, HVV were the league champions, having already won nine titles since the league began in 1888. Ajax merely wanted to reach the top tier so they could test themselves against the very best.

Back then, the terms ‘manager’ or ‘coach’ were not widely used, so Kirwan was announced as the club’s new trainer. In an altogether different era with an unrecognisable media landscape, managerial appointments were not considered big news in the way they are today. As a result, the Wicklow man’s appointment did not make waves. Ajax’s status as an amateur team outside of the top flight didn’t help. Word of Kirwan’s new role was reported in a small, one-sentence brief in the sport section of the Het Nieuws van den Dag, a small daily newspaper in the Netherlands. It didn’t even mention that Ajax was the team to which Kirwan was contracted: ‘Jack Kirwan, the Irish international and former Spurs left-back, who helped this club win the cup, has gone to Holland to train as a coach. The footballer was an honest player, highly regarded in English football circles,’ the story read. To indicate where news of Kirwan’s arrival sat in terms of newsworthiness, it was squeezed in below the previous weekend’s English football scores, including Clapton Orient’s 2–1 win over Barnsley.

Kirwan arrived in Holland at the same time as Jimmy Hogan, another former player born into an Irish Catholic family, in Nelson, Lancashire, in 1882. He took up a position of trainer at FC Dordrecht on a two-year contract. Four years Kirwan’s junior, Hogan would go on to establish himself as a great pioneer of the game across the continent, managing in the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany and France, as well as in his native England, in the lead-up to the Second World War. Kirwan and Hogan’s flight to the continent was the beginning of a trend, as they sought to instil their learnings from their time in England. As Jonathan Wilson outlined in his book Inverting the Pyramid, Hogan – and, by extension, Kirwan – wanted to ‘teach those fellows how to play properly’.

Despite Kirwan being employed largely to keep the team fit, he was determined to bring more to the role. For example, Kirwan was known to regularly play along with his team in training and in friendly matches, and he quickly became a calming presence among his players, as well as devising some shrewd tactics. This energy and enthusiasm paid immediate dividends in the 1910/11 season, when Ajax claimed the Dutch second division title and then beat Bredania ‘t Zesde in a promotion/relegation playoff. An Irishman – even if many in Holland failed to make the distinction between British and Irish – had just helped earn Ajax a place at the top table for the very first time in their history.

Kirwan’s commitment to the club was further proven when he was joined in Amsterdam by his wife, Enith Williamson, who left London behind to be with her husband. They both registered as residents in the country in October 1911. Subsequent seasons saw Kirwan lead Ajax to a period of relative stability, as they avoided relegation from the western division of the Dutch National Championships, finishing eighth and ninth in 1912 and 1913, respectively.

However, despite the club growing in renown and fanbase, the 1913/14 campaign saw Kirwan’s team finish bottom of the division, relegating them back to the second tier. A total of fifteen players left the club upon their demotion, including Ge Fortgens, a versatile midfield player who had the honour of being the first Ajax player to represent the Netherlands national team in 1911. Kirwan departed too, despite widespread assumptions in modern writing that he stayed on during their first season back in the second division. In fact, Ajax did not have a professional trainer during the 1914/15 season, and the role remained vacant until Jack Reynolds – who would go on to win eight titles across three spells at the club and is widely considered to be the founding father of Dutch football – took over in 1915.

For Kirwan, who left the Netherlands in 1915 after the outbreak of the First World War, a season in charge of Bohemian FC in Dublin followed before embarking on another continental challenge – this time at Italian side Livorno in 1923. Not much is known about his time in Italy, aside from, as was the case with Ajax, Kirwan being their first-ever manager. He stayed in Tuscany until 1924, guiding his team to a respectable third place finish in Group A of the twenty-four-team league, which then was comprised only of teams from the northern regions of the country.

Unfortunately, it is known that Kirwan endured hardship later in life. In 1924, upon his return to London following his time in Italy, the then forty-six-year-old was forced to seek a grant of £10 from the Irish Football Association to improve his circumstances. In the 1950s, as Kirwan approached the end of his life, a collection was also undertaken among Ajax club members to help him along. By that time, the club had established themselves as one of the leading sides in the Netherlands, a feat that may not have been achieved without the pioneering Kirwan. Decades on, his contribution during Ajax’s formative years had not been forgotten.

Kirwan was an example other Irish players turned managers soon looked to follow. James ‘Jim’ Donnelly was one such figure – not that Donnelly was considered a pioneer as such when he became manager of the Turkish national team in July 1936. Having grown up in Sussex, England, he sounded British and was considered that by most he encountered. He was the third ‘Brit’ to take the helm of the Turkey national football side, succeeding the Scot Billy Hunter and Fred Pagnam, a former Liverpool and Arsenal forward who came from Lancashire.

In reality, however, Donnelly hailed from Ballina, County Mayo. He was born on Clare Street, on the banks of the River Moy a week before Christmas in 1893. He lived there for some years before his family emigrated to England around the turn of the century. Like Jack Kirwan, here was an Irishman who was able to convert his experience of the English game – he had played for Blackburn Rovers, Accrington Stanley, Southend and Brentford between 1919 and 1928 – into a more meaningful career on the sidelines. As with Kirwan’s era, clubs on the continent were still keen to learn from those immersed in the British game, where it had all started. Likewise, the Football Association were eager to extend their influence in far-flung corners of the world.

Prior to that Turkish appointment, Donnelly had already managed in a variety of locations. Upon his retirement from playing, Donnelly took part in an FA coaching programme and was eventually shipped off first to Belgium, where he briefly held some early coaching seminars, and then to Zagreb, where he took the reins at Građanski Zagreb. In the Balkans, he replaced former Hungary striker György Molnár as coach, and while he was unable to guide the team to a trophy, he is widely considered to have helped provide the basis for near-future success under one of his successors, Márton Bukovi, who would win three titles with the club. (Bukovi is also one of the Hungarian coaches credited with pioneering the 4–2–4 formation.)

Already a long way from home, Donnelly travelled much further east for his next appointment, when he became manager of the newly formed Güneş SK, a breakaway club from the already-established Galatasaray in Istanbul. At the same time, another Jim – Jimmy Elliott – was in charge of their derby rivals Fenerbahçe, adding another element of intrigue to proceedings in the city.

Under Donnelly’s management, Güneş were a coming team in Turkish football (even if Donnelly would ultimately leave before they enjoyed their greatest day, lifting the national title in 1938). While in charge of the formative club side, Donnelly was surprisingly appointed as the coach of the Turkish side set to compete at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. It is understood by many football historians that Donnelly was personally tasked with heading up the Olympic team by the country’s president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. At the very least, it is unlikely that a foreigner would have been tasked with taking charge of the national football team without the say-so of senior government figures. Unfortunately, he was unable to repay their faith, as a 4–0 loss to Norway in the first round put paid to any hopes of making a dent in the competition.

Donnelly was at the helm for a number of friendlies after the Olympics in 1936, but he soon reverted to his regular job in club management. To this day, there remains some confusion over his time in Turkey. There are claims that Donnelly managed Fenerbahçe after Güneş, but this may be an instance of the careers of both he and Elliott becoming blurred in the fog of history. Historical records from Fenerbahçe do list a James Elliott Donnelly as their manager in the mid-to-late 1930s, however no birth nor death records list Donnelly as having a middle name, so it is likely that the two men have been conflated.

Donnelly’s management career in Europe spanned most of the 1930s, a time of extraordinarily hostile politics first in Eastern Europe and then across the entire continent. It is interesting to ponder what Donnelly’s attitudes were towards the environments in which he was working, especially when you consider that he left Turkey in 1937 to take on a coaching role at AS Ambrosiana-Inter – known widely to modern-day supporters as Inter Milan. The country at the time was under the fascist rule of Benito Mussolini, and it is something of a surprise that he was even appointed, given that a ban had been imposed on all foreign players from playing football in the country. He was a coach, of course, but it indicates the standing that he was held in that machinations were put in place to bring him in – even if he was kept in the background. On the face of it, you see, Donnelly was not the main man. That was the recently retired midfielder Armando Castellazzi, who was the manager as far as supporters and the press were concerned. The Irishman, it seemed, was brought in to form part of a coaching team that would guide Castellazzi, who was just thirty-six.

Research formed as part of an exhibition on his career by the North Mayo Heritage Centre in 2019 found documentation that listed Donnelly as having a whole host of roles at Inter, such as a scout, technical advisor, consultant and even B team coach, which further proves this background role. However, it is fair to say that he wasn’t completely in the shadows. An interview with the Italian football publication Il Calcio Illustrato gave him some exposure and saw him outline his own footballing philosophy – an attack-minded approach that relied on movement and the involvement of the entire team.

However, Donnelly, for all his efforts at Ambrosiana-Inter, isn’t remembered for his time there; he is remembered for what came next. He left in March 1938, after Ambrosiana-Inter chairman Ferdinando Pozzani graciously agreed to release him from his contract before their title-winning season had ended. He left Inter to take up the manager’s role of the Austrian national team. But this wasn’t just any iteration of the Austrian side; Donnelly was replacing the great Hugo Meisl, who, along with Englishman Jimmy Hogan, had helped develop Austria into one of the great pre-war international teams of European football. Meisl had died suddenly of a heart attack, aged fifty-six, and with Hogan back in England coaching Aston Villa, it was felt someone of Donnelly’s calibre was perfect for the role.

The opportunity to coach the great Austrian Wunderteam – featuring the celebrated centre forward Matthias Sindelar – was one he could not in good conscience pass up. The 1938 World Cup was to begin in France in little under three months’ time. It was a dream job. The Austrians had finished fourth four years earlier and won Olympic silver in 1936, while Donnelly had been presiding over that chastening first-round exit with Turkey. Now leading a sophisticated side playing football deemed by many to be ahead of its time, opportunity knocked not only to make a name for himself, but to make history.

Donnelly took up the role with immediate effect. However, world events were about to interfere with Donnelly’s dream move, and ultimately thwart his chance to manage the Austrian side to Olympic success. On 12 March, German troops marched into Austria to begin the ‘Anschluss’ (which translates as ‘annexation’) of the country. Donnelly would never arrive in Vienna. Their league was disbanded, Austria withdrew from the approaching World Cup, and Donnelly’s elite management career looked over.

Likely distraught in losing the role, Donnelly still refused to let a little thing like a burgeoning world war get in the way of his career. Soon he was managing again, in Kirwan’s old haunt, Amsterdam, where he became the coach of Amsterdamsche FC, the city’s oldest but much smaller and less celebrated club. He is understood to have fully gained the confidence of his squad of players, and his time in Amsterdam also saw the club’s existing team selection committee resign, as Donnelly insisted upon picking the team himself, in a move that suggested he viewed himself as much more than a traditional trainer. And his approach clearly worked, as the team enjoyed an impressive 1938/39 season, where Donnelly helped the perennial relegation battlers finish second in the Dutch league.

Unable to ignore the war any longer, however, Donnelly ultimately returned to England, living with his wife Jane in her mother’s boarding house in Morecambe. The far-right’s ascension in mainland Europe essentially ended a coaching career that delivered much, but had promised even more. He was only forty-five years old. But this Mayoman will always have the distinction of being the first Irishman to coach a foreign national side.

While Kirwan and Donnelly achieved some success on the continent, it was a man by the name of Patrick O’Connell who would become the first Irish manager to land major silverware on European soil. In fact, to this day he remains the only Irishman to ever win a major trophy in Spanish football. But that fact fails to do justice to O’Connell’s Spanish adventure, where his legacy at one of world football’s great clubs in Barcelona runs deeper than the teachings that he first brought to Spain a century ago, or the trophies he won during a twenty-seven-year spell in the country, which encompassed the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

His life was undoubtedly a remarkable one. It would have warranted that billing even before he left England behind at thirty-five for Spain, where he would spend the majority of his life. O’Connell was a one-time captain of Manchester United and Ireland international of some repute, despite earning just six caps across seven years spent representing his country. At the time, international fixtures were not as commonplace as in the modern day, but O’Connell nevertheless earned his place in the history books by leading his country to success in the 1914 British Home Championship, courtesy of wins over Wales and England before a 1–1 draw with Scotland in Belfast sealed a first Irish victory in the thirty-first edition of the tournament. O’Connell played the full game at centre half, despite leaving the field at one point to receive medical attention. It would later transpire that he had broken his arm.

O’Connell arrived in Spain in 1922, leaving his wife Ellen and children Patrick Junior, Nancy, Nell and Dan behind in Manchester, to take on the role of Racing Santander manager. In a letter addressed to his brother Larry in London, O’Connell went into great detail, informing his sibling of his trip to Spain and his new surroundings by the sea. His boarding house was ‘a goal shot away from the beach’, which he didn’t appear particularly taken with. ‘All told it puts me in mind of Ireland,’ he wrote (all letters are drawn from the biography of his life, The Man Who Saved FC Barcelona). By contrast, the first correspondence sent to his wife back in Manchester was curt and to the point. He issued instructions on how to exchange the enclosed Spanish pesetas for pounds sterling, and did not begin the letter, as is customary, with his current address (as he did to his brother). He simply asked Ellen to ensure the children were behaving themselves before adding a brief line about the weather. It lacked much of the colour and descriptive qualities that the letter to Larry had possessed.

O’Connell managed Racing for seven seasons, leading the team to five regional championships. With the founding of La Liga in 1929, he left for Oviedo and then to Seville with Real Betis, who had just earned promotion to the top flight. In 1935, against all odds, he led Betis to the La Liga title. It was a victory underpinned by a watertight defence, Betis shipping just nineteen goals in the twenty-two-game season. That steadfast backline was all the more important when you consider that Betis were outscored by six of the seven teams directly below them in the table. However, the shackles did come off when ultimately required – namely, during a final-day 5–0 win over former club Santander that meant they finished one point ahead of Real Madrid, thereby confirming the league title.

Despite his previous successes with Santander, a national league success with Betis was a real moment to savour for O’Connell, especially given that the club were relatively tiny in comparison to some of the country’s leading sides. (In fact, as if to underscore that point, it remains their only title win to this day.) ‘What more can a manager want than to take his team to the very top? It was a great moment of triumph. A singular event. Raise your glass to us,’ he wrote in a letter to his brother Larry in London.

Prior to taking over at Betis, in 1931, O’Connell had applied for the Barcelona manager’s job. They declined, but once he led Betis to the title, Barca’s newly elected club president, Josep Sunyol, was more accommodating to the idea of appointing this impressive Irishman as the club’s new boss. O’Connell joined in the summer of 1935.

Still, O’Connell could not have picked a more tumultuous time to become manager of the Catalan club. Civil War was brewing, and an all-out war had begun within twelve months of his arrival in Catalonia. Even a high-profile figure like Sunyol, who had numerous left-wing and pro-independence militant connections, was not immune to its dangers. A little over a year after taking over as club president, he was captured by Francoist forces on 6 August 1936 and executed. It put into stark context Barcelona’s defeat to Real Madrid in the Copa del Rey final six weeks earlier – the first El Clásico final in the competition’s history – when two early goals put paid to any hopes of O’Connell’s men claiming the cup. (The Civil War meant that match was the last Spain would see of the tournament until it returned in 1939 under its new title, Copa del Generalísimo.)

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of 1936, O’Connell was actually back in Dublin on a holiday, and despite an expectation in Barcelona that their Irish coach would remain in the country of his birth, he did return – for a time, at least. La Liga, like the cup, was suspended during the Civil War, and with Catalonia within sight of Franco’s forces, O’Connell and his team were soon forced to flee. Luckily, they received the opportunity to tour Mexico and the United States, where they could play exhibition matches – a potentially lucrative move for the club. Of course, extricating themselves from Barcelona for their own safety was paramount too.

O’Connell found himself at the forefront of this tour as, in May 1937, he led a delegation of twenty staff – including sixteen players – to Paris and then on to Mexico via Havana. There they played ten games in Mexico and four in New York over the course of a four-month tour, on which the Barca stars were treated like superstars. The club made $12,500 in profit, which O’Connell was eventually able to deposit in a French bank account he had opened before the team set sail. He did not wish to risk bringing the money back to Barcelona, which was not yet under Franco rule but was a de facto stateless territory. His actions had nonetheless assured the future of the club during the most troubled time in their history.

Widely known in recent years as ‘The Man Who Saved FC Barcelona’ (his grandson’s wife Sue wrote the book with that very title), the story of the club’s tour of Mexico and New York is now the stuff of legend. And O’Connell has become a hero himself within the club, despite his failing to bring a major trophy to the club during his five years as manager (though, as you will see, that was hardly his fault).

It isn’t known how exactly O’Connell avoided sanction upon his return to Franco’s Spain, but he continued to live unimpeded, even continuing as Barcelona boss. However, as with Donnelly and the Austrian Wunderteam, an outbreak of war ended O’Connell’s hopes of replicating his Betis success with Barcelona. They had won the league just once before his appointment in 1935, but with the league suspended amidst the fighting the club were forced to make do with competing in a Mediterranean League – which they at least did win once – and the regional Campionat de Catalunya, which Barcelona claimed twice. Still, these did not have the sheen of a La Liga or Copa del Rey success.

He returned to Real Betis in 1940 after five interrupted years as Barca boss, and then had a spell at their city rivals, Sevilla. He ended his managerial career in Spain with two seasons back where he began: Racing Santander.

O’Connell was considered an innovative coach during his time in Spain, one that focused on defending and quick transitions between defence and attack. For all his achievements, though, it should be stated that O’Connell was undoubtedly a flawed man. He committed bigamy when he met and married another Ellen, Ellen O’Callaghan, in Spain in 1934. (To differentiate his new wife from his first, he called her ‘Ellie’.) O’Callaghan was an Irish nanny working for a British diplomat in Seville, and O’Connell hid the existence of his first family from her entirely. He only told his brother Larry about the marriage, via one of his regular letters to London. But correspondence to his wife and children in Manchester had long since ceased. In fact, when his youngest son from his first marriage, Dan, came to visit O’Connell in the early 1950s, Patrick told Ellie he was a nephew, not his son from his first marriage.

In a letter to Larry, O’Connell was matter-of-fact in his justification of his actions. He wrote: ‘This is a somewhat unconventional approach however, all that is past is past. It was a different life in a different country and what is past is finished.’

Despite his early successes with Racing, Betis and then Barcelona, the last decade of O’Connell’s managerial career in Spain was trophyless. By the early 1950s, O’Connell was seen as an outdated coach, and work in Spain became difficult to find. It signalled what would be a fall from grace for the Dubliner, in the game he gave so much to, and in life in general.

Soon O’Connell resigned himself to leaving Spain. He was sad to say goodbye after thirty-three years in the country. He and Ellie distributed his possessions among their friends in Andalusia and, just as he arrived with one suitcase in 1922, he left with his life packed into one in 1955.