ALTHOUGH he was treated like “royalty” when he played for Glentoran back in the early 80s, Dermot Keely recalls incidents that would make a ‘Catholic from Dublin’ run all the way home again.
Signed by Ronnie McFall in 1981, Keely was approaching his car after a game and found the RUC checking it for booby trap devices.
He received a threatening phone call telling him he was no longer safe if he continued to play for Glentoran – before meeting with “shall we say, a delegation” insisting that he would come to “no harm”.
And he also has vivid memories of Glentoran team-mate Rab McCreery’s BMW car coming towards him in the carpark one day.
“He was not trying to run me over, or at least I do not think he was,” Keely tells biographer Neil O’Riordan, “but I am fairly sure he did mean to frighten me.
“He succeeded. He had just lost his place in the team and the captaincy. He had a right to be annoyed. If the roles had been reversed I would have done something similar.”
‘Better Without The Ball’ is a compelling page turner about one of the most colourful characters in Irish football.
Now 70 and living in Lanzarote with his wife, Jane, since 2017 where we works as a part-time bar-man, the retired Dublin schoolteacher recounts some fascinating stories from his playing and managerial days which span over four decades.
A no-nonsense and highly rated defender who starred for Dundalk, Glentoran (where he won an Irish Cup in 1983) and Shamrock Rovers among others, Keely recounts the time when Celtic tried to sign him.
It was not long after Dundalk had lost a 1979 European Cup two-legged affair when the Glasgow giants came calling.
Famously Keely turned Celtic down and continued to work as a schoolteacher while earning a second income with the Lilywhites.
The so-called dream move to Celtic felt more like an offer of serfdom to Keely. He tells O’Riordan Celtic insisted he sell his house and surrender his passport in case he got homesick and wanted to go home.
“I was a teacher,” Keely writes, “I was not prepared to be treated like a child and I explained that I was well capable of minding my own passport.”
Celtic also wanted him to shave off his beard because they felt it was having a negative impact on his disciplinary record.
“Now I had no great affinity for the beard but the fact that they could ‘ask’ me to shave it off bothered me. I mentioned that Danny McGrain had a beard and it did not seem to cause him any problem.”
Revelations unfold in every chapter of Keely’s brilliant memoir – the successes, the failures, the funny stories and the desperately sad ones too.
In 2021, he lost his son – Alan – just a week short of his 39th birthday. Keely’s foreword is one of the most powerful passages you’ll read.
“Alan was a postman. He got up that morning, did his round, came back, went for a nap but never woke up...
“Losing a child is like a sledgehammer and it sits with you every day. You do not get over it, you just learn to live with it, but you are in a different space, you have changed fundamentally.”
O’Riordan forged a friendship with Keely while ghost-writing his weekly column for the Irish Sun for 17 years, until he moved abroad in 2017.
The idea of writing a book began five years ago, hitting the hard shoulder for 18 months during COVID, before it was finally released this season.
“Because I’ve heard a lot of the stories, you realise that maybe a lot of people haven’t heard them and putting them together we felt it was worth doing.”
Reflecting on Keely’s time at Glentoran, O’Riordan says: “Dermot would say himself he probably thought he had a knowledge of the north and realised he didn’t when he was up there.
“And his reaction to the assumptions people made about him because he was from Dublin was interesting.
“He was obviously born a Catholic but it meant nothing to him, he’d no religion at that stage. But he tried to turn it on its head by playing up to it by blessing himself while playing against Linfield in the Irish Cup final…”
Keely writes: “Blessing myself as I went off the pitch was perhaps not the wisest course of action but if they were going to insist on viewing me in a certain way I decided I might as well play up to it.
“Both sets of fans spilled onto the pitch and were involved in hand-to-hand fighting. It was a complete riot situation… The RUC then came into our dressing room looking for me and I was convinced I was going to be arrested for inciting a riot.
“It turned out they were offering me protection…”
Dermot Keely and Neil O’Riordan will be at The Oval on Saturday at 1pm for a Q&A and where copies of ‘Better Without the Ball’ will be on sale. Cash or Revolut or it can be purchased via choicepublishing.ie