Searching for Shels in Spain
20 years after the most vertiginous game in Irish club football history, I went looking for signs of Shelbourne in Spain.
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, Jorge and a few other 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 could tell me 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 involving one of our club sides has since come close to matching the prestige of opponent and the prize at stake, a cocktail that had me, as a 16 year-old in Kerry, cheering on a team from Dublin against a Goliath that would, 20 years later, become my local team.
Deportivo slogged past Shelbourne in August 2004 just four months on from reaching the Champions League semi final after that comeback against AC Milan. Remarkably, they would fail to score a single goal in a group that contained Olympiakos, Monaco and Liverpool, the team who would eventually go all the way after that comeback against AC Milan in Istanbul.
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. The Atlantic-facing winters up here are long enough.
Out of the well
By three o clock, the previa — Spain’s version of pre-gaming but with good food and nice beer — in and around Calle San Juan was pleasantly rowdy.
I spoke to other older fans wearing blue and shirts from an age when Spain was transitioning from the peseta to the euro. The names on the back explained how Depor were able to swap the currency of surviving for winning. They met the same trivia question with even blanker stares, the cold local beer going down in a hurry on a hot May day. The opponent may have been FC Barcelona’s B team but Estrella Galicia had never seen match day beer sales like it, not even when the very best teams in the world came to town.
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 13 wins and zero losses in the 16 games dating back to late January, Depor had three match points to seal promotion. In the end they only needed the first serve. A Lucas Pérez free kick.
With the previa quickly morphing into fiesta, I abandoned my search for Shels on the Galician coast for the day, and ordered a beer. But then Sito ushered me, cerveza in hand, 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 office for a quarter of a century.
Reflecting 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. When I mentioned Irlanda, I had his attention. Now in his eightieth year, Lendoiro still remembered the trip to Dublin. Having got my spirits up, however, he then assured me that it was an “amistoso,” a friendly.
Depor fans may have viewed the tie against Shelbourne ostensibly as a pair of pre-season games ahead of the new La Liga season, but a dark cloud of financial uncertainty had already begun to shroud the club. Not advancing would have been apocalyptic.
“Depor stakes its prestige and a lot of money in Dublin,” wrote La Voz de Galicia ahead of the first leg in Ireland. “It’s dizzying to think of the numbers and the economic impact of this uncomfortable engagement. In Dublin, Depor will have to dig in and resist.” Shelbourne had already 21 league games and a couple of European ties in the legs and the stage, Lansdowne Road, was to be anything but comfortable.
Spaniards are adept at Jenga-like living, packed together in dense urban areas, but even for them the narrowed pitch in Dublin 4 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 Valerón, not leaving him out of his sight for a second. He was Shelbourne’s best player alongside the pacey Houlihan.” Byrne had done his homework. It was the first time he watched game tapes ahead of a man-marking assignment on Juan Carlos Valerón: videos of that epic 4–0 comeback against AC Milan and the semi-final against Porto, the eventual winners led by José Mourinho.
Shelbourne were rolling with the big boys, and they were heading to Spain with house money.
Someone else’s money
In Nos parece mejor, a book with personal stories about his local club, Coruñés writer Nacho Carretero described how, “Depor gave us the best and most unsustainable years.” The words of past Irish politicians — Charles Haughey’s “We are living we beyond our means” and Brian Lenihan’s “We all partied” — come to mind.
U2’s Vertigo, released 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 the stories of the two teams who battled it out for a place in the Champions League in August 2004, a collective gold rush giddiness riding a wave of turbo-charged 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 a region whose identity is inextricably linked to mass waves of emigration and the sense of morriña — the longing for a land, a person, the past. A morbid, romantic, and fatalistic kind of melancholy. Like us, the Galicians are a nostalgic bunch.
But the second Sunday in May was a day for looking forward, not back.
Under the beating sun, I followed the pre-match procession from San Juan down along Europe’s longest promenade towards Estadio Razor. Deportivo brought the then Borussia Dortmund-bound Bebeto here in July 1992. I could see why the club was able to convince the future World Cup winner and his wife that Riazor beach and A Coruña were tapas-sized versions of Copacabana and Rio de Janeiro.
After beating Barça B, A Coruña was a carnaval. 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: Carlos Pereira.
Celtic connections
Sitting out in Plaza Maria Pita with a café con leche…
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