Words Louis Rossi
Ireland’s west coast is an area characterised by its extreme beauty and equally extreme climate.
Mountain peaks pierce the sky. Sheer cliffs fall away to the roiling ocean hundreds of feet below. Treacherous bogs wait to snare the unwary. Storms march in off the Atlantic to hammer the tiny coastal communities that call this part of the world home. It’s a place where the full majesty of nature is on constant display.
In the midst of all this grandeur and violence is Achill Island. Achill is an island within an island, connected to the west coast by a fragile umbilicus – a single road bridge spanning the Achill Sound. It’s a landmass of a little under 60 square miles, and most of that is bog, mountain or otherwise uninhabitable terrain.
It’s a strange place to find a football club – let alone one of the best football clubs in Ireland. And yet in July 2015, the FAI named tiny Achill Rovers the Aviva Club of the Year.
Achill’s Fr O’Brien Park can accommodate around 500 fans, provided they don’t mind standing pitchside. Most weekends during the Mayo Association Football League calendar, they can expect considerably fewer than that.
And yet Achill Rovers is a club with an almost limitless capacity to surprise. That Aviva Club of the Year award came as recognition for Achill managing to increase club membership numbers despite the island’s dwindling population – it’s currently fallen to around 2,500.
This is a club that conspired to win the Mayo Association Football League in 1998 and still get relegated – incoming rules regarding club grounds and facilities meaning Achill failed to qualify for the division they’d just conquered.
It’s a club that competes in the eighth tier of Irish football, yet boasts not one but two former African internationals on its books.
It’s a special club.
“During the economic crisis this area was on its knees,” says Achill Rovers Vice-Chairman Seán Molloy. “Not only were young people leaving, but whole families were leaving. When you lose families, you lose players. You lose coaches. And you lose people who work behind the scenes – people who sponsor the club and keep the money coming in. With a population of about 2,500, if 10 families move away in a year… that’s a big number. We had to change the club. We were in a position where if we struggled on and hoped for the best, we were going to fail”.
Thanks to Seán and the rest of the Achill hierarchy, that didn’t happen. What did constitutes one of the most remarkable stories in Irish football.
“We asked ourselves: ‘in six years time, where do we want this club to be?’” recalls Seán. “First of all, we wanted the club to be still going. That sounds pessimistic, but The club set about achieving those modest aims, and soon something much grander had been set in motion. “Because there wasn’t much money in Achill at the time, we reduced our membership fees,” says Seán.
“We decided to get busses – we removed every single barrier that was preventing people from coming to play. We wanted to give kids other ways into the club. We got involved in community projects”.
“Even though times were bad, the club finances recovered. And within a year or so, we were nominated for the last eight of the Aviva Club of the Year. From almost annhilation to being top of the whole crop in three years”.
Incredibly, the good times had only just begun for Achill Rovers. The Club of the Year win spurred a glut of positive press coverage for the club. The previously unheralded Mayo League outfit had captured the imagination of all kinds of people, including one Joseph N’Do.
“He’s an inspiration for me – my life has been richer for the fact that I know Joseph N’Do,” says Seán of the former Cameroonian international midfielder. N’Do has led a fascinating and nomadic life. The 42-year-old has worn the shirts of 14 different clubs across six countries and three continents, as well as representative teams for both the Mayo League and the League of Ireland. He has 21 caps for Cameroon, and travelled with thesquad for both the 1998 and 2002 World Cups.
“He had a massive impact on the morale of Irish soccer when he came to the League of Ireland”, explains Seán.
This is a true man of the world, and a genuine League of Ireland legend. Now, miraculously, this cult hero would fetch up as player/coach of Achill Rovers.
“The bad times were over” says Seán, “so we thought ‘why not ask Joseph N’Do down, get a bit of star quality?’ Joseph is a very spiritual man, and only wanted to work with a club that was about more than football – that was based in the community and using football to do good work. So we sent him all we’d achieved. Joseph liked what he saw. He rang me back and said: ‘I think this is a good match for me, but I’ve an idea. I’ll come down and work with your teams for three matches. If you don’t like me, you can tell me to go and we’ll still be friends. If I don’t like the club, I can leave and we’ll still be friends.’ After three days, we knew he wasn’t going anywhere.”
At that time, N’Do had hung up his boots and was focussing on his coaching career. But a conversation with Molloy convinced him to return to the pitch. “Over the winter we asked him ‘what do you think of coming out of retirement to play for the club?’” Seán recalls. “He said ‘I won’t play all the time, but I’d like to come back and play with the boys.’ You can imagine – we thought it was an April Fools thing.” “I had to send a press release to the Irish papers. Sky had it on their ticker. It went all over the world. FIFA heard about it, and we ended up on the homepage of FIFA.com, which was amazing. That was as good as it gets.”
“I went there on the first day and it was raining like you cannot imagine” recalls N’Do. “But every player was so enthusiastic. It was amazing. I felt: ‘I’m gonna learn a lot’. I had that feeling. So I decided: ‘you know what, I’ll stay’. That was one of the best decisions I’ve made”.
The arrival of such an iconic figure had a galvanic effect on the club. “It raised the bar considerably for the other players”, says Seán. “We got promoted to the top division for the first time in about 16 years. We weren’t really ready for it”.
Off the pitch, his impact was just as significant. A host of African footballers contacted the club in the hopes of following in N’Do’s footsteps. As a result, Cyril Guedjé – a former Togolise international with five senior caps to his name – joined the club a year later. And unlike N’Do, this was a footballer whose best years were still ahead of him. Guedjé is just 25 years old.
All of a sudden we had two internationals playing on an island off the west coast of Ireland” says Seán. “He’s a very, very good player,” N’Do adds. “He has a bright future.”
As if from nowhere, Achill Rovers’ playing staff was bolstered by a pair of inspirational African forwards. This was now a competitive outfit, but Seán’s vision was never directed by on-pitch matters alone. The new-look Achill Rovers was about creating a club with the community at its heart, and tapping into a centuries-old passion for football in this isolated part of western Ireland.
“There’s a huge connection going back about 130 years with the game of soccer here, which is very different to other parts of Ireland” says Seán. “We used to have a lot of immigrants leaving Achill and going to Scotland to work as seasonal farm labourers. They went there during the summer months and they learnt to play soccer.”
As a result, and almost uniquely for the west coast of Ireland, soccer emerged on Achill before Gaelic football did. Achill Rovers’ pitch – built on an inland sand dune known as a machair – has been in use since the 19th century.
At one point during the ’70s and ’80s, there were no fewer than three Mayo League teams based on the island. Football runs in the veins of Achill residents, throwing up sometimes surprising connections.
“Kevin Kilbane’s father is from Achill” says Seán, “and Darren Fletcher’s mother was born here. His cousin owns a pub here, and Darren worked there after he’d made his debut for Manchester United in the Champions League. That’s the kind of tradition we have here”.
Ireland’s beautiful west coast, it’s welcoming people and its surprising depth of football talent have certainly got their hooks into Joseh N’Do. The Cameroonian now lives in Sligo, and commutes to Achill for training and home games. “It’s my hometown, you know? I call Sligo people my people” he says.
“I’ve played in front of 100,000 people and I’ve played in front of 500 people. For me, it doesn’t matter where I play to have an impact – to make people enjoy themselves. Going to the stadium is no different from going to the cinema – people want to be entertained.”
N’Do offers fascinating insights into the Irish football landscape. Having played in so many leagues across so many nations, this is a man who surely knows a talented footballer when he sees one.
“I didn’t know how much talent the league had,” N’Do says. “Ireland has so many talented players. They’re not well-known, they’re not highlighted – maybe because of the idea of Irish football. There are so many talented players, and all they want is for someone to give them a chance.”
Soon, that someone will be Joseph N’Do. While he continues to work with Achill Rovers, the Cameroonian has recently launched his own academy to help young players realise their own footballing ambitions.
“I always saw myself as that little boy from Cameroon, you know? I never expected to have this career. I never thought that I would play so long. I’m always thankful for everything I have” says N’Do. “I want to give players the chance I had. I want to make them understand that you can achieve everything. People don’t want to talk about development because they want the end product straight away. The best practice is to enjoy yourself. There’s gonna be a time when people are gonna demand a lot from you, but now is not their time – it’s your time”.
Seán Molloy and Joseph N’Do are pillars of their club. But they don’t have to look far for a reminder that football clubs are only so great as the places they’re tied to, and the people who support them.
“On Slievemore Mountain – which is the mountain that overlooks the pitch here – there are remains of houses going back to the Iron Age and the Bronze Age” says Seán. “There’s a sense of pride in your parish here. I like the kind of tribe mentality, where we’re all in this together. We have traditions that go back thousands of years. Even though we’re very close to Britian and in many ways we have the same football culture, we have our own version of it that we manage to hold”.
By writing the latest chapter in the remarkable story of Achill Rovers, Seán Molloy and Joseph N’Do have helped make Irish football culture that little bit more unique. that’s where we were at the time. So if the club’s still going, what kind of club do we want? We want to get girls’ teams, and even if we’re not going to compete with the top clubs, we want to field teams and compete with clubs at our level”.
Originally published in Issue 4; Ireland.
