Après Match star takes on the tale of Irish football legend Ollie Byrne

Irish Examiner

13-05-2025

In late 1975, Cork Celtic lured George Best into playing in the League of Ireland. His best years, excusing the pun, were behind him. It was a decade since he'd won his first title with Manchester United, but Best could still draw a crowd. Cork Celtic made a deal – covering his expenses and match fees while holding onto gate receipts.
The arrangement was for home games (in Flower Lodge and Turner's Cross), but somehow, Ollie Byrne, Shelbourne FC's legendary chairman, got wind of the deal. In January 1976, with Cork Celtic due to play Shels away, Byrne brokered a deal where his club covered Best's expenses and wages for the match, provided Shelbourne kept the gate receipts.
Best played the match in Dublin's Harold's Cross stadium. A huge crowd showed up. Shels won 2-1, with Best missing a chance late on to tie the match. It was Best's final game for Cork Celtic, and the first and only time a club paid an opposing player's wages to play against them, but that was the contrarian genius of Byrne.
Gary Brown, a playwright and former Shels footballer and chairman, will première his play about Byrne's life, one of Irish football's endearing rogues, entitled Ollie … One Love, One Life, in Dublin's Helix Theatre later this month.
Gary Cooke, the stage comedy actor known to television audiences as part of the Après Match triumvirate, stars as Byrne.
'The play is about Ollie and his devotion to Shelburne Football Club, and a deeper look into a man,' says Cooke. 'He's a nearly man, a man who got in his own way. It's quite sad – Shelbourne was a family heirloom thing. His father was a chairman. Ollie desperately wanted to please him.
'His father was a solicitor's clerk. They had a comfortable life, living in Ranelagh. His father wanted Ollie to be a solicitor. He went to law school, but he left, breaking his father's heart. He managed bands – managing Joe Cocker for a while – and he lived a pretty wild existence, but then he came back to football.'
Ollie Byrne celebrating at Tolka Park in 2004. Picture: INPHO/Morgan Treacy
Byrne served time in Shelton Abbey open prison. In 1983, he was arrested at a Garda checkpoint, at the time of the Shergar kidnapping, smuggling cigarettes from the North in a horsebox.
The prison stint was a reformative experience for Byrne. He gave up alchohol and cigarettes (both smuggling and smoking them), devoting himself to Shels.
'Shelbourne became the key relationship in his life,' says Cooke. 'As he says, 'I never had room in me heart for a woman.' His woman was Shelbourne. The club's success was a life's mission. There are mishaps and misguided ideas. There's a hapless quality to things that happened, but he was a passionate, highly charged man who skirted around the rules. He got involved in fracas – he hit a ref once.
'In the play, he tells a story about the time St Patrick's Athletic fans threw a flare at him and his pants went on fire. Then a bunch of them attacked him. He was trying to put out a fire and punch people at the same time. You couldn't make it up. Rival fans goaded him to the hilt. He encouraged it, I'd say. He said, 'How did I put the fire out? I got [St Pats manager] Pat Dolan's overcoat to put it out. Of course, Pat was wearing it at the time.' '
Byrne was famous for coining malapropisms and spoonerisms, known as 'Ollieisms'. In 1998, when a Shels UEFA Cup tie against Rangers was moved to a neutral venue in England because it risked causing tension at a delicate moment in the Northern Ireland Peace Process, Byrne put the squeeze on Bertie Ahern.
'We have to get something out of it,' he insisted. 'I've got a meeting with the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. He's always trying to curry flavour with me.'
The play's arc hinges on Byrne's dreams for Shels in the Champions League. It's appropriate that Shels are back at the top table of European football's premier competition next summer – thanks to the Damien Duff revolution – for the first time since Byrne died in 2007. What would Byrne make of 'Duffer', a shoot-from-the-hip merchant?
'They might have sparked off each other, but they'd probably have gone great,' says Cooke. 'Byrne looked after his managers. In the play, he speaks highly of Pat Fenlon, Dermot Keely and others. If you were Shels, he'd do anything for you, but if you were agin him, you were in trouble.'
Ollie … One Love, One Life starring Gary Cooke, The Helix Theatre, Dublin, Saturday-Sunday, May 17-18. See: www.thehelix.ie