A look back on new England boss Sam Allardyce's time at Limerick FC

Hogan Park and Wembley. Never before have those two stadiums been mentioned in the same breath.

Then again, never before was the little ground in the Limerick suburb of Rathbane the place where the new England manager cut his managerial teeth.

He was a young man then. Thirty-six years old. Released by Bury and staring at the rest of his life wondering how and where the money was going to come from to feed his family. Was he searching for divine intervention? Maybe he was because when his phone rang in the summer of 1991, it was a priest who was on the other end of the line.

“Sam, my name is Father Joe Young,” the then Limerick FC chairman said.

“Are you f**king with me Reidy?” Allardyce replied, believing Peter Reid, his friend, was playing a practical joke on him.

Reid wasn’t. And nor was Father Joe. “We needed a manager,” the priest recalled last week. “I’d supported West Brom all my life, spotted Sam’s name on the list of candidates that we had and selected him the way my father used to choose his horses – by sticking a pin in the paper. That was how I found Sam.”

Sam Allardyce: Irish priest who gave new England manager first job 'will say mass for him': An Irish priest w... https://t.co/4TYl36Pmid

— BBC SPORT NI (@BBCSPORTNI) July 21, 2016

And that was how Allardyce found himself in football management. Thirty-six years old. On £175-a-week, working at a club that had fallen on hard times and had been seduced by the idea of employing a young manager who could double up as a player.

Featuring in all bar three of Limerick’s league games in his one and only season at the club, Allardyce chipped in three goals from centre-half, insisting on a three-man-defence ‘because I didn’t have the legs to run anymore’.

Yet if his legs were slow, his mind was not. Limerick may have had its issues - “it was nicknamed stab city at the time,” Allardyce would later write in his autobiography, “but I loved the people and the place.”

He had every right to. Money was tight but the generosity of the locals stayed with him. Billy Kinnane, his assistant, opened the door of his Henry Street home to put a roof over his head for the three days a week he stayed in Limerick (he spent the rest of the week with his family in Manchester). “He was ahead of his time,” Kinnane said last week.

“We’d plan tactics out at the kitchen table at home and then write them all up on a flip chart to bring to show the lads. They bought into it.”

That much is true. On route to the First Division title, Limerick’s 3-5-2 policy baffled a succession of managers who were devotees of 4-4-2 and long balls. “He certainly seemed clever and imaginative,” Alfie Hale, the then manager of Waterford United, who were pipped to the title that season by Limerick, said.

 

And his creative mind wasn’t confined to tactics and formations. One of his more talented players liked a drink – and his performances were suffering accordingly. But Allardyce had noticed the presence of an enthusiastic young supporter, and aspiring coach, who he reckoned could be utilised.

“You,” Allardyce said to Noel O’Connor, who would later become a successful manager of the club, “are to be his (the maverick player’s) minder.” O’Connor took his job seriously, dragging his pal away to the family farm on the weekends, keeping him away from the bar. And his performances improved.

So, for that matter, did Limerick’s. Yet as they neared promotion, disaster struck. A fire destroyed their Hogan Park clubhouse and the club’s piggy bank was empty. "The money at the gate was not enough and we needed 1200 punts a week to operate,” Allardyce wrote.

"We had a regular meeting with Limerick directors on a Friday with two or three games left, the bombshell dropped. The money had run out.

"Joe said, 'We've got to carry on, we've got to find a way.' "We drove off and pulled up ten minutes later on a street corner. 'He'll be here in a minute,' said Joe. A lad came up to the window and passed Joe some money. "On we went, stopping at petrol stations and shops with people passing him money. I've no idea who they were or where the cash was from, but it got us to the end of the season."

By then, Allardyce was ready to move on. Preston called. And he answered them. “We were devastated when he left,” Kinnane recalled, “because he’d had such a major impact.”

Nonetheless, the friendships endured. Allardyce, consistently, speaks fondly of his time in Limerick. “I loved it,” he said. “It was fun. Hard work but fun. The team had a great bond, the people running the club were lovely and we all wanted the same thing. How could I not enjoy something as special as that?”

As the years passed, and his star rose, the phone calls to his old Limerick friends would steadily decrease. But they wouldn’t completely disappear. Two years ago, Fr Joe received a West Ham tracksuit in the post. “I’ve just made you honorary chaplain of the club,” Allardyce explained, just before he left Upton Park.

“That tracksuit has pride of place in my front room and no-one will touch it,” says Father Joe. “I’m not saying it’s up there with a statue of Jesus Christ, but it’s not far away.”

Nor is Allardyce from Limerick – even if the footballing company he hangs out in now is worlds apart from where he started.