St Andrews, Scotland 1999, World Clubs

Ireland's first entrance to a world championship event, Pookas are there...

The lead up...

Before I even talk about what a talented team this was on the pitch, and yes, surprisingly, it was. It is important to celebrate the fact the team had some good moments off the pitch as well as on it.

The team mascot was "dolly" a mangy old sheep found in a skip and brought to every match, tied on someone's back. There were also some catchy songs, based upon the venga boys song, "the pooka bus is coming and everyone is jumping" and then something about a chicken tikka. The green wig of shame also emerged from this tournament. One player in particular seemed to be awarded it a lot, Brian Lavery, but I think this was just because he was American rather than because he played that badly.

The crowning moment for our evil genius and impresario of the team, Conor Lawlor, was when he got the whole team onto the beach in front of the town at St Andrews. We stripped off our shoes and socks, some even bare breasted and jogged along the beach. A photo was taken and submitted to the daily tournament newsletter with the caption "chariots of eire". To explain why this was funny, and this was necessary for some of our team, this beach was where the movie chariots of fire and that scene was filmed, set to Vangelie's Oscar winning score.

There was a lot of excitement and pride about being Ireland's first representative team at an Ultimate Worlds event. On the ferry over to Scotland the team excitedly told anyone that would listen that they were off to represent Ireland. Naturally the looks then became more bemused when frisbee was mentioned but that's not much different today either really.

I was fortunate enough to be the captain. Or unfortunate because back then that meant you were the one who arranged the entry fees, the kit, training, practice, teaching sidearms and hoping there would be enough players. For several years before I had watched the location of various worlds, hoping to enter a team. By ’99 we seemed to have enough interest, helped by it being only across the water.

The early years of Irish ultimate was helped by many talented foreigners playing for Ireland. The ultimate goal was always to have truly Irish teams. However at first it was difficult to get many Irish players to commit to even showing up at Herbert Park on any given Sunday, let alone travel anywhere to play. The overseas players, Canadians, Americans, Anglais and 2 great Dutch players provided the glue and experience to blood the new Irish players. This gave the team 5 or 6 very good players, (well least 4 anyway). Beyond that there were a lot of raw rough diamonds, athletic enough to play good d.

Apart from the American team and the Japanese who beat us very badly and very quickly, we actually competed well with most of the other teams. In game after game, at least 3 or 4, we even took the half, but then lost the game as superior fitness, technique, experience, won out over passion and enthusiasm.

The longer the week went on we began to wonder when we would win our first game. I tried shaking it up and changing our tactics. Using less of the squad for one game, this resulted in another close match, even reaching over time, but still we lost. By the time we got to the Tsetse fly match the team was perhaps a bit less harmonious. In terms of alcohol consumption the team had been good, generally drinking moderately. Apart from one evening when it was suggested we have a cocktail night, in the middle of the week, when nothing much else was going on. This was a great success, or not considering the hangovers. Generally after nights like that we’d get a game against an intense serious Finnish team. We’d then take a small lead against them, 5 – 3 or something and then they’d get really pissed off with each other, and perhaps us too, and then come back and beat us.

The match finally...

With the game against the South Africans coming up I tried to mix up the tactics again. This seemed like a winnable game, but of course I had thought that about quite a few of the others too. For this game I decided to play our B team players for the first half. Most or all of the key players were rested for this half. Our team came out fresh, firing on all cylinders pulling out all the stops, relishing their opportunity for more playing time than usual and to prove how much they had improved over the week to date.

We took the half 8 - 6. This captaincy job seemed pretty straight forward surely, and from here we would claim Irelands first win at worlds. Or not. The ‘A’ players were then introduced into the proceedings for the second half, to finish ‘em off. This was perhaps the difficulty all week, how to keep the intensity going for a length of time much longer than the whole squad was used to – no one had played worlds before. The weather also began to deteriorate and got wetter, greasier and more slippery. Points got harder to come by, and then they took the lead. It got worse and it drifted to 12 – 14, double match point to the bad guys.

Then the weather finally kicked in, the heavens opened and what had just been wind and rain turned into thunder and lightning. I was still aware of the incident in the mid 90’s where lightning actually hit the pitch during a game in the states and several of the players were hit and one even died. Both teams came off the pitch and huddled together under the only cover for miles. It wasn’t possible for any Machiavellian discussion of tactical changes with your opponents right there. However it did serve as a fantastic moment to focus and think about how I wanted this game to finish.

Back on the pitch we then played each pass as if it might be our last and that the whole game depended on it. Passes were narrowly caught as opposing bodies flew by narrowly missing vital d’s. I think for myself fear was a big factor. We gritted our teeth, kept it simple, patient, saved the match points, went behind again, levelled, and then held on, 12 – 14, 13 – 14, 14 – 14, 14 – 15, 15 – 15, 16 – 15, 17 – 15! We’d done it, we’d won. Yes we made a huge meal of it and had to invoke extreme weather conditions to see off the saffers, but we’d finally done it. The team were pleased but not completely wildly jubilant because most of the key players had expected we would win at some point, and were perhaps more surprised we hadn’t won already. To illustrate this point we then held match point in our next game too against Red. 15 – 15 a full length high horizontal layout in the end zone would have done it, but I couldn’t quite get to it, and unfortunately they went up the other end and we were denied our second win.

What happened next

This whole tournament hopefully opened the door for what was to follow. I always felt we were small in terms of our player base but that we had a disproportionate amount of quality. Throughout the past 11 years we have always had some fantastic players and athletes. Not many, but enough to ensure in many games we would always be in with a chance of scoring and possibly winning too. Now with a wider player base hopefully this is the case even more so.

It had been inconceivable that we wouldn’t win a game, However someone has to come last and thankfully we weren’t losing debutants. It would have been nice to have won more games, but then before the tournament some of the team wondered if we could win the whole thing. The reality check experienced then hopefully helped to inspire the growth that followed over the next 11 years. One young debutant at that tournament for example was Dominick Smyth. He seemed to enjoy his time there, just don’t ask him about the spiking incident against the French, but that’s a whole other story and we were all young once.