In this loudest of countries, all it took to silence a group of socialising Spaniards was a routine football trivia question.
Sitting around a table outside Matilde – a bar tucked into a corner of A Coruña – Diego, Sito, and friends scratched heads and exchanged puzzled glances. For a team whose folkloric five-year European run attracted admirers from far beyond this northwest corner of Spain, nobody knew that the last goal Deportivo La Coruña scored in Champions League competition was against a team from Ireland.
A Coruña, it seemed, didn’t remember the tie that many Irish football fans have never forgotten. No game has since come close to matching the prestige of the opponent and the prize at stake – a place in the group stages of the Champions League.
Deportivo slogged past Shelbourne in that tie 20 years ago, August 2004, just four months on from reaching the Champions League semi-final after that comeback against AC Milan. Remarkably in the 2004-05 season, they couldn’t manage a single goal in a group that contained Olympiakos, Monaco and that Liverpool team.
Back outside Matilde, the lads were quick to justify their amnesia.
“That was the summer after we finished high school,” said Diego with a knowing grin, code for a group of 18-year-olds doing what they do in the bowels of summer. During those languorous August days, Riazor beach was the place to be. Even the Shelbourne players popped down for a dip.
For Diego and co, football matches in the stadium of the same name across the road could wait. But I was determined to find someone who could remember the tie.
Out of the well
By three o clock, the previa – Spain’s version of prematch festivities, but with good food and nice beer – around Calle San Juan was pleasantly rowdy.
The older fans were wearing blue and shirts from an age when Spain was transitioning from the peseta to the euro. The names on their backs explained how Depor were able to swap the currency of surviving for winning, but they met the same trivia question with equally blank stares. The cold beer was going down in a hurry on a hot May day earlier this year, and who could blame them? It was going to be Depor’s day. The day they dragged themselves out of the pozo, the well, after four years in Spanish football’s labyrinthine third-tier.
With the previa quickly morphing into fiesta, it seemed like time to abandon the search for Shels on the Galician coast, until I was ushered towards a hive of blue and white shirts buzzing around a well-dressed, elderly gentleman.
“If anybody will know about the game it will be this fella.”
It was Augusto Cesar Lendoiro, the man who became president of Deportivo La Coruna in 1988 and held the office for a quarter of a century.
Looking back on the six titles and the exorbitant debt accrued during his mandate, Panenka magazine referred to Lendoiro as the “best and worst president in the club’s history”. In 2014 he departed Depor with the club drowning in debt.
“We were earning minimum wage and bought a Mercedes,” he once said. The mention of Irlanda caught his attention. Now in his 80th year, Lendoiro still remembered the trip to Dublin. Having got my spirits up, however, he then remarked that it was an “amistoso”, a friendly.
Depor fans may have viewed the tie against Shelbourne ostensibly as a pair of preseason games in advance of the new La Liga season, but a cloud of financial uncertainty loomed over the club.
“Depor stakes its prestige and a lot of money in Dublin,” said La Voz de Galicia in advance of the first leg in Ireland. “It’s dizzying to think of the numbers and the economic impact of this uncomfortable engagement.”
Lansdowne Road was to be anything but comfortable for the visitors.
Spaniards are adept at Jenga-like living, packed together in dense urban areas, but even for them the narrowed playing surface in Dublin 4 – Shels manager Pat Fenlon had narrowed the Lansdowne Road pitch to the minimum width of 64 metres, the same as Tolka Park – was a squeeze.
After a 0-0 where boxing judges might have given a hometown decision, the Galician newspaper saluted the Irish engine room: “Stuart Byrne did a great job marking [Juan Carlos] Valerón, not leaving him out of his sight for a second. He was Shelbourne’s best player alongside the pacy [Wes] Houlihan.”
Byrne had done his homework. It was the first time he watched game tapes in advance of a man-marking assignment: videos of that epic 4-0 comeback against AC Milan and the semi-final against Porto, the eventual winners in 2004 led by José Mourinho.
Shelbourne were rolling with the big boys, and they were heading to Spain with house money.
Other people’s money
In his book Non Parece Mejor, local writer Nacho Carretero described how “Depor gave us the best and most unsustainable years”. Charles Haughey’s “We are living beyond our means,” and Brian Lenihan’s “We all partied,” come to mind.
U2′s Vertigo, released in late 2004, was an appropriate soundtrack for what was to come for Shelbourne and Deportivo, Ireland and Spain. Galicians share a bloodline with the Celts and there was something very Celtic Tigerish about this tie and the story of the two teams, a collective gold-rush giddiness riding a wave of turbocharged globalisation.
“Deep down the city knew that we couldn’t keep it up,” wrote Carretero, “that we were dining in the wrong restaurant and sooner or later we would end up being kicked out.” Eventually, both Deportivo and Shelbourne ran out of other people’s money.
Like Ireland, Galicia is an Atlantic region whose identity is inextricably linked to waves of emigration and the sense of morriña – the longing for a land, a person, the past. But for Depor, that day in May was about looking forward.
Back up to the Segunda Division after beating Barça B, A Coruña was a carnival. As the city nursed a week-long hangover that was four years in the making, it turned out that there was a local who knew Shelbourne long before their name was drawn out of the Champions League pot.
Celtic connections
Sitting out in Plaza Maria Pita with a coffee, Carlos Pereira was telling his sons Javi (15) and Carlos (11) about the Bloody Sunday of 1920, a tangent during a chat where the weekend’s GAA came up. Carlos knew his history because of a grá for Ireland that dates back to the mid-90s. Working weekends in a local A Coruña bar, a customer from Dublin, Tony O’Hagan, soon became a friend.
Carlos visited Ireland and the O’Hagan clan came to A Coruña. Tony had no interest in football, but his younger brother Seán was a Shelbourne supporter. Carlos presented him with the football shirt of his local team. Seán soon returned the favour. A few years later a sea of those red shirts would flood A Coruña’s plazas.
Most of Carlos’s memories of those days are muddled like out-of-focus photographs, but some remain in high definition.
“There was an ambientazo, a fantastic atmosphere, around the city,” said Carlos. He had seen fans from the north invade the city before – Arsenal stood out – but with Shelbourne it felt different.
“The most noticeable thing was the amount of families who were here. All the bars on the way to Riazor were full of Irish, but it wasn’t like other games. There were fathers with sons, mothers.”
1-0 down with 25 minutes left in the tie, Shels were still alive. The Dubliners resisted where Maldini, Nesta, Cafu and Pirlo had wilted. An away goal off someone’s backside could have changed everything. Victor’s second goal – Byrne later said it was the best he ever saw live – was a fitting way to end a fearless dream. Walter Pandiani added one more. The 3-0 result fooled nobody. In its ratings, the local press handed out fives and sixes to all those who featured except for Victor, who got a 10.
Deportivo and Shelbourne would fall from different heights, but they both fell hard. Until May, young Depor fans like Carlos’s sons had only known hardship. Here they are known as generación barro, the down-in-the-mud generation.
Twenty summers after League of Ireland fans united against a Spanish Goliath, Depor’s first promotion in a decade coincided with Shelbourne’s first European adventure since 2006. It’s been a long way back, but they’re on their way. Ready to forge their own histories, the new generations have decided that it’s time to rise again.
A Coruña was recently confirmed as a host city for the 2030 World Cup. Wouldn’t it be great to see the Irish return to Riazor?
