The team that went to hell and back

Belfast Celtic were one of the best football clubs of their day. But then a riot made them throw in the towel, as a new play recounts. Shane Hegarty reports

There won't be 50,000 people in the audience, but when Paradise begins its run at the Lyric Theatre next week it will attempt to evoke the spirit of Belfast Celtic Football Club. Written by Padraig Coyle, Conor Grimes and Alan McKee, the play will tell the tale of a club that was famous in its day but left the game 50 years ago after a match of unparalleled infamy.

In 1948 a riot at Windsor Park, where Celtic were playing Linfield, left one player with a broken leg and others seriously injured. After that the club withdrew from the league and, following a tour of the US during which they beat Scotland 2-0, quit football altogether. The spot on which the great stadium once stood has been replaced by a shopping centre.

Paradise looks back from the vantage point of the team's last match for charity, in 1952, when their opponents were Glasgow Celtic, the team they had always tried to emulate. "It would be like reading Manchester United have decided not to play football any more," says Coyle. "That was the impact. Today it would be back-page headlines at least. Back then there was one paragraph in the Irish News. At that stage they had already gone to America to represent Ireland. They sailed from Cobh, went out to America and beat Scotland, came back and disappeared."

It was while he was working in radio during the 1980s that Coyle began to learn about a club that might have been long gone but carried on as a powerful folk memory in a community that, during its time, had no vote, little money and few jobs - but a great football team.

"It has left a memory, and it is right inside people now, because when [Belfast Celtic\] went there was this vacuum. That was not filled. There was no adequate explanation as to why they went. Perhaps the tactic was to withdraw and to come back again," says Coyle. "But in between things changed, and they never came back."

After compiling an oral history of the club, Paradise Lost And Found, Coyle began working with Grimes and McKee, both of whom starred in The History Of The Troubles (Accordin' To My Da) at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn last year. For the play they have created a fictional journalist as a narrator, but they have included many of the club's greatest figures. Through that last match, for instance, they have imagined a meeting between the club's manager, Elisha Scott, and the player Charlie Tully, a Belfast Celtic star who had gone on to become a Glasgow Celtic legend.

"Tully would have been as high profile as Roy Keane or George Best," says Coyle. "He was one of the first players to be sponsored. He had his own newspaper column in the Glasgow Evening Citizen; he had an ice cream named after him. A tailor in Glasgow provided him with all his suits; there was a bar in Glasgow and they paid him to frequent it."

One of their first tasks was to remove the ball from the action. There is no football, with the only on-pitch scenes involving a sending-off and the subsequent riot at Windsor Park. There are obvious comparisons with Alone It Stands, John Breen's play about the 1978 match in which Munster beat the All Blacks, but at least that play could choreograph action around rugby's set pieces. Soccer, though, has a long and ignoble history in drama, with the spontaneous flow of the game thwarting the best efforts at reconstruction.

Grimes says: "We decided to take the ball out of it not for any philosophical reasons but because, as actors, Alan and I know exactly what happens the minute a prop like a ball arrives on stage: no one can do their lines. The minute you put dialogue in to it you look ridiculous. Actually, it's dangerous: you fall off the stage or something. Even Maradona would look ridiculous trying to do lines and ball juggling at the same time."

Grimes says they looked for natural drama elsewhere. "There was a good device we had, which was the manager's half-time talks. So you can actually report what's going on, bring everybody up to speed on that particular game, whether they're getting beaten or whatever. And you see the passion of the manager, Elisha Scott, who was really far-sighted and used psychology and all that to get what he wanted. Because Padraig's background is journalism and our background is drama - in fact comedy - you can never have a boring line in it, in theory. Or we baulk at that. So it's combining those two things. We all shared an interest in the story. But whenever you do drama from history you try and capture, even in one sentence, how someone feels."

For some the Belfast Celtic legacy is a precious one, and the trio are already finding themselves under watch by those who consider themselves to be its guardians. "There are going to be anoraks," says Grimes. "We have stalkers already, people who are sniffing about who would be really serious grade-A fans." Coyle adds, only half in jest: "There might be people who say Celtic didn't wear green and white hoops, that they wore white and green hoops. There's been a certain amount of artistic licence. For anyone who thinks this will be a full and accurate history of Belfast Celtic, it's not that kind of play."

They had Coyle's history to refer to when it came to the facts, but they refused to allow the mythic elements to weigh them down. "I think rather than being wary of the legend of it," says McKee, "it spurred us on to wanting to tell it and to do it justice and to not have an agenda - just to tell it and let people make up their own minds. We've made, I think, our minds up over what we think went on, but it's not for us to impose it on others."

Are they not concerned that simply approaching the subject will prompt accusations of an agenda? "I think one of the things about this part of the world is that as soon as you mention the word 'Celtic' people assume an agenda," says McKee. "I think that's something that's been uppermost in our minds, to make sure that it's not in any way any sort of flag-waving escapade. We keep coming back to the founding principles of Belfast Celtic. One of the main reasons why they worked so well as a club and on the pitch is that they wouldn't allow something like sectarianism to get in the way of winning trophies and making money. We're not going to allow anything as petty as that to get in the way of telling the story, which is particularly about Belfast but which has a resonance for lots of places around the world."

Grimes believes the events help them in this. Belfast Celtic had many Protestant players. "There's a lot of heroes in this story, and they're from all different places. For example, when the riot happened, the Linfield footballers protected, shepherded and took blows to get their fellow footballers off the pitch." Six of the team attacked in 1948 were Protestant, including Jimmy Jones, whose leg was broken. He will be among the former players coming to see the play.

Paradise is not a typical sports drama. It does not end with a player being carried in triumph from the pitch after a last-gasp winning goal. Like a lot of Belfast stories, this history is incomplete, frustrating. "In terms of drama it gives it a more, dare I say it, dark edge," says Grimes. "It's about decay, deterioration. The destruction of the stadium itself is like a key part of the play. The players and all the rest just disappeared in to folklore, and it wasn't even big folklore, although it is when you turn the stone. But I'd never heard of Belfast Celtic: they were just a rumour to me. There are no plaques, no statues, no nothing."

Yet they wanted it to be a reminder of glorious days, even if they were followed by grim silence. "What we wanted to do was show that when the club was there, in its prime, they were all happy. There were 30,000 people going to watch Belfast Celtic, and the players were great, winning lots of trophies. And the play is full of the crack of Belfast and the eejits that existed, so that's what we're telling the story of. The fact of what happened afterwards to them, that they were brushed under the carpet and all forgotten about, is the harsh reality of life here. It couldn't have happened anywhere else. It couldn't have happened in Glasgow or in Dublin. But the reality is that things in this neck of the woods are a wee bit different."

The writers are still brimming from having travelled to Glasgow Celtic's final league match of the season, to record the crowd. They conducted supporters in a rendition of It's A Grand Old Team To Play For, an anthem to both Celtics, and in chanting Charlie Tully's name. Finally, they asked the crowd to sing Will Ye No' Come Back Again, just as the crowd did as the whistle blew on the last game in 1952. It was, says Grimes, an emotional moment, a haunting echo of the day it all ended. Belfast Celtic may never come back, but Paradise will likely ensure that the memories not be allowed to slip away so easily.

Paradise opens at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, on June 8th, with previews from Friday. It is due to run until July 3rd