Roddy Collins - The Rodfather: Inside the Beautiful (Ugly, Ridiculous, Hilarious) Game

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First published by Sandycove in 2022

Copyright Roddy Collins and Paul Howard, 2022

The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted

Cover photograph Paul Stuart

ISBN: 978-0-241-99525-9

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There is only one person to whom I could dedicate this book, and thats the person who has dedicated so much to me my wife, Caroline. I love you, pal.

I was watching football on television not so long ago when the supporters of Drogheda United, one of the teams involved, launched into a spontaneous chorus: Roddy Collins is a wanker, is a wanker!

I can tell you this its a very strange feeling to be sitting at home with your wife, sipping a glass of wine at the end of a week, and to suddenly hear a crowd of people calling you a wanker on the telly.

Welcome to my life.

Ive never managed Drogheda United and most of the fans doing the singing would have been far too young to remember me playing for the club when we got relegated in the mid-1980s. But Roddy Collins is a wanker! has become a sort of generic terrace standard a bit like, He wears a suit, he wears a tie fuck Delaney and the FAI.

And God knows, Ive beaten that drum once or twice myself.

I started wearing glasses a few years ago after I hugged a man who was running towards me in the Phoenix Park. I thought it was John Toal, whod played football for Shamrock Rovers.

Toaler! I said, throwing my arms around him. How are you, me old pal?

It turned out it was just a fella from the country out for a jog.

So glasses have become part of my life, although Im too vain to wear them all the time. Instead, I carry them around with me in a little man-bag with a cross-body strap and I pull them out whenever I need them. One day I was walking along the quays when a fella in a lorry shouted, Collins, you wanker what are you doing with that drug-dealer bag?

And that was the first time it occurred to me. I turned to my wife and I said, Do you know what, Caroline? Maybe I am a wanker.

Ive been hearing it for so long now that I wouldnt be human if I didnt occasionally wonder.

But Ive also been around football long enough to know that most of the people who say they hate me dont really hate me at all. About ten years ago Shamrock Rovers played Tottenham Hotspur in the Europa League and I was asked by RTE to do co-commentary on the match. I arrived in Tallaght early and went across to the Maldron Hotel to meet a mate of mine for a 7-Up.

The bar was full of Rovers supporters, who had more reason to dislike me than the fans of Drogheda United. I was the manager for most of the season when they got relegated for the only time in their history although I still say I would have kept them up if they hadnt got rid of me.

I hadnt even reached the bar when the singing started. All the old favourites. I could have taken the easy option and walked out. But I decided no, Id brazen it out. I ordered my drink. The chanting stopped. And soon the fans started drifting over to me.

Fair play to you for staying, they said, shaking my hand. Soon we were having a laugh and talking about the thing we all had in common our love of football.

Im not an innocent. A lot of the abuse I got over the years I brought upon myself. When I was a manager, I enjoyed the notoriety. Id throw on my most expensive Louis Copeland suit and a nice overcoat with a pair of spats and it drove people mad. I was an actor, hamming it up for the audience. Football grounds were my stage. And the people who screamed and roared abuse at me were booing a pantomime villain. Too often we forget that football is about entertainment. Its supposed to be enjoyable or else whats the point?

Looking back over the course of my life, I used to focus a lot on the unlucky breaks I had, especially the broken legs I suffered during my playing career.

But I also had the luckiest break of all. I met Caroline when I was fifteen years old. She was my first girlfriend. I fell in love with her and I got to spend my whole life with her.

Caroline sacrificed everything while I pursued my dreams in football. Wherever football took me, she upped roots and came with me. We lived in bedsits. We ate baked beans for dinner. And when it didnt work out, and my confidence was on the floor, she urged me on, telling me, Rod, keep going, even as we were packing everything we owned into the back of another removal lorry to return home yet again. I believe in you.

So how unlucky have I been, really?

We have five beautiful children and four equally beautiful grandchildren. And I love my wife as much today as I did the first time I laid eyes on her. I hug her every day. I cant help myself. And when we go to bed at night, I say to her, I love you, pal, and she says the same back to me.

Thats not a bad bottom line in the audit of any mans life.

We go out walking a lot. Our first date when we were teenagers was a stroll through the Phoenix Park. And now were in our sixties, its still our favourite place in the world.

Most days we walk from our home in Castleknock into Dublin city centre, through Cabra, Smithfield and all the old haunts of our childhood, stopping and talking to people along the way, old friends and, yes, sometimes football fans.

Usually, I buy a few packets of cigarettes and I give them out to homeless people that I see. Its not the healthiest thing to give them, but the cigarettes arent the point. The cigarettes are just an opener to social contact. Ive known loneliness in my life, especially when I was a kid, living in London, when I was a triallist with Fulham and Arsenal. Its a horrible, corrosive thing that eats you up inside. You might be surprised to discover how many people who spend their days on the streets just want someone to talk to, if only to make them feel seen.

So I always ask, Where did you stay last night? or, Do you have anywhere to stay tonight? and if the conversation progresses any further: So, where are you from originally?

Sometimes Ill see a flicker of recognition in a face: Ah, youre the boxers brother.

Thats right, Ill say. Stephens my little brother.

I remember he beat your man Eubank. Hows he doing?

Hes doing brilliant.

Or sometimes itll be: Youre your man the fucking Rod Squad!

The TV programme that made me sort of famous is still following me around nearly twenty years later. The internet has given it an unexpectedly long half-life. Every so often a clip from it will do the rounds on social media, introducing me to a brand-new audience. Kids who are far too young to remember the reality TV series about my time as the manager of Carlisle United point their phones at me now and ask me to quote lines from it: