A flying visit to Ruislip... again

Cavanman's Diary

Talk about taking a leap. Shane Connaughton left Duleek on February 29 – note the date – in 1960 and went to join the RAF. After being there a while, among the toffs from Eton and Harrow, one night he found himself strolling around with a new buddy from Yorkshire when he was dazzled by the bright lights.

“I was walking round the barracks with him one night, he was a big, tall guy, he must have been about three inches taller than me, and he was wearing sort of a school uniform, grey flannel trousers, brown brogues and a jacket with brass buttons,” Shane told me once.

“And I said ‘what’s that big glow in the sky there?’. He looked up and said ‘oh, that’s London’.

“I said ‘wow. Tomorrow, I’m going to be in London’.”

That was me last Friday week, only without the romance, or the excitement. When Cavan were drawn to play London away, I had groaned. First time a virgin, second time a whore, Shane once wrote. Third time going to Ruislip in eight years? A pain.

But anyway – it was a first world problem. Driving up the M3 that morning at 5am with my colleague riding shotgun, he reminded me that it’s a privilege to be paid to cover football matches. And now we were off to London and sending home reports and colour and interviews. This is brilliant, he said! Quit your crying, he added, adding some choice nouns.

“Right, right,” I dismissed him. But he was, in fact, right, so I pledged to leave my grumpiness on the runway.

As it turned out, the flight was spot on. At Heathrow, we hailed a taxi via an app, a relatively new experience for these travelling bogmen. As it counted down the minutes, though, we started to wonder where our ride was.

The app was playing it cool, not giving much away. All it told us was that, like dozens of other taxi men in the general area, our driver was in a Toyota Prius – and his name was Cristian. I patrolled the rank, squinting over windscreens like a guard, leaning into passenger windows, a procession of Priuses as far as the eye could see.

But there was no sign of our man. Ten minutes passed since the app told us he had arrived. At that, what must have been the 50th Prius pulled up.

“I wonder is he Cristian?” I thought aloud, exasperated.

My travelling companion, always both pro and hyper-active, took the initiative and leaned in the window towards a driver, a middle-aged man with a beard and a turban, before turning to me, wearing a crestfallen look.

“Ah no,” he said, totally seriously. “I don't know what religion he is.”

I shook my head. This was going to be a long day.

Eventually, the bould Cristian rang me – “Ello, mate” – and soon we were Ruislip-bound, heading for that little corner of a foreign field that will be forever Ireland.

It always catches me pleasantly by surprise to come round the corner near McGovern Park and notice that the pitch backs on to a farm yard, something I’m sure helps some of the travelling supporters from rustic parts of the country feel at home – although not if, like me later on, they spotted some rats scurrying around on top of the wheelie bins at the back of the clubhouse, near the haysheds.

I froze to the spot when I spied the furry fiends but, inside the bar, 20 feet away, life was continuing as normal, albeit it was notable that there was no rush to get served this time. When Cavan last visited, it was a perfect storm – a four-day St Patrick’s weekend, coming so soon after pandemic restrictions were eased. Thousands made the trip; a local told me it was the biggest crowd he had ever seen at the west London venue.

This time, there was no danger of any records being broken. Aside from relations of the players and Cavan natives living in the UK, only the true diehards, God help them, made the trip across the water.

And who should I meet only one of their number when I landed in only the aforementioned Connaughton, ambling in with his son Tom. And, big news: the man who brought Beverly Hills to Redhills is working on another Cavan-related project. I’ll say no more.

The next familiar face I encountered was Lorcan Mulvey’s. The big Butlersbridge man, former Cavan midfielder, is now a selector with London, making the 90-minute trek from his country pile in, I think, Kent to trainings. How would it go? “It’s been a difficult year for us,” said Lorcan, who admitted his boys faced a big ask against, well, his other boys.

We took our place in the middle of the stand. The pitch is over-looked on one side by a row of houses. At the end one – think the right corner-forward position – two men were power-washing a roof, another holding their ladder.

The anthem began to play. The men were taking a break from their work and I watched them intently as they momentarily gazed across the fence at the Irishmen and women standing to attention. I was too far away to clock their facial expressions or hear their mutterings but I’m going to say they looked bemused by the whole thing. ‘Blimey!’, they may have said.

Soon, the game was on. Cavan played into the teeth of the wind in the first half and went in a point up. They softly put the game to bed in the third quarter but it got up again, cranky, and threatened to pull the house down for a while before a couple of late points closed it out.

Ruislip, like that other outpost, Gaelic Park in the Bronx, marches to its own beat. There’s no special treatment. As a high-falutin’ pressman, I had a report to file don’t you know but that didn’t cut much ice here, guvnor.

I wandered with quiet intent around the building, trying doors like a cat burglar, before taking refuge in a back office, where I found an extension lead – always a bonus – and a table and chair. But The Man soon came on his rounds, jingling a big bunch of keys, like a warden. “Can you give me 10 or 15 minutes?” I asked, channelling my inner Michael O’Hehir with his “five minutes more” plea down the line in the Polo Grounds.

“Which is it?” he replied, “10 or 15?”. That put me in my place.

But, remembering the dawn commandment, I decided this, too, was part of the privilege. Ok, boss, I said, hitting ‘save’ just as the match was getting good and slamming the lid on the laptop with the faintest hint of pique.

With lights-out drawing near, there was nowhere else to go but the bar, where I made it my business to speak to some of the supporters: a Cornafean man via Enniscrone, Galligans and Shanaghys from Lacken, London-based Lavey man Sean Maguire, Alistair Denning (from Surrey with a Drung father) to name a few.

And then it was into another Prius with a couple of county board officials and back up the M4 to the airport. True to form, I was pulled out of the line at security to be patted down.

“Anything sharp on you?” the security man enquired.

“Only my sense of humour!” I exclaimed glibly, immediately regretting my impromptu stand-up routine, cheeks reddening with embarrassment as soon as the words left my big gob.

“Excuse me, sir?” he demanded, alarmed, as he stepped backwards, arms akimbo.

“No, no,” I mumbled, “forget it… it was… a joke. Nothing sharp.”

He searched me anyway and, not unlike readers frisking this column, found nothing much of interest and moved on.

Perhaps out of pity, a nice man from Aer Lingus invited us to hop on the next flight rather than waiting for the later one we booked. We greedily obliged and by 10 O clock, we were back where we started and the unexpectedly earlier arrival even left us time to toast another day on the Breffni beat in a couple of the local hostelries.

Cheers, mate!