In League With Gaddafi, RTE 1, Monday at 9.35pm
So in the 1980s an Irish ‘select’ soccer team (half pretending to be the Irish international team) was paid to travel to play a match in Africa in front of one of the world’s most feared dictators.
The team was made up of players from the Dublin sides, St Patrick’s Athletic and Bohemians, and the dictator was the weapons supplier of the IRA, Muammar Gaddafi.
It couldn’t be true, could it?
It was. It was 1989 and an enterprising Brian Kerr (the then Boes manager who later took charge of the Republic squad) was being creative about keeping the books balanced.
Bohs and St Pat’s had both been knocked out of the FAI Cup on the first weekend and therefore had two weeks free and no gate revenue to pay the players’ wages.
It was around the time that a broke Irish government, led by Charles Haughey, was negotiating beef contracts with Libya and somehow the idea of the football match in Benghazi arose to the agreement of the PR hungry dictator.
Apparently, Kerr had form for this kind of stuff. Around the same time, Bohs also travelled to Iran and Tunisia to play cash matches.
The joke in the dressing room, a couple of the players said, was that the squad used to ask Kerr “what war zone” they were travelling to this year.
It was just months after the Lockerbie bombing and Gaddafi was ostracised, so getting to Libya was a physical and political challenge.
There was some political fuss, but it seemed no one was too bothered about what League of Ireland players got up to.
Except the Libyans that is. It seems Gaddafi’s people may have been allowed to believe that the Irish select them were in fact the Republic of Ireland team who had beaten England in the European Championships the previous summer.
Either way, Gaddafi thought it important enough to make sure the stadium was packed (somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 people) and put on a political parade before kick off. The parade seemed to consist of soldiers holding pictures of the great leader.
The Irish players didn’t quite know what to do and spent an age in their changing room waiting. When they finally went out onto the pitch there was another two hour wait before Gaddafi arrived on a white horse to send the crowd into raptures.
Somehow, despite all of this and a prehistoric artificial pitch, the Irish lads managed to draw the game 0-0 and after some confusion about the currency of payments, headed home with a story to dine out on.
The best and funniest sports documentary of the year, it’s well worth a watch if you have access to the RTE player.
***
Presidents Cup. Sky Sports, Wednesday at 9.30pm
Another strange sporting contest returned to our screens this week.
The poor man’s Ryder Cup sees the US take on the rest of the world (minus Europe) in the bi-annual Presidents Cup golf tournament.
It’s the tournament no one really cares about, except of course the Americans who are desperate for an away win in international golf.
Still, there are some compensations. This year’s event is Down Under, meaning we get a rare sighting of the fantastic Royal Melbourne course in the sand banks of South Australia.
We also get to see Tiger Woods captain a team for the first time.
The greatest golfer of all time has reinvented himself in recent years as everyone’s best mate, but watch out this weekend to see if he can maintain that posture if things start to go wrong.
