Tallafornia Dreams - From Tallaght to the Premier League

Watching a football player perform at the top of his game is something special. Particularly when it is a player you respect and admire, for me that provides the greatest pleasure and can be almost an emotional experience. When that player is someone who grew up around the corner from you, who tread the same streets as you and played his junior football in the same leagues …that is an experience on a whole other level.

Richard Dunne’s magnificent performance for Ireland against Russia recently provided me with such an experience. Richie Dunne comes from Tallaght, an area which has been the punchline of easy jokes and putdowns since my childhood. When you grow up in an area like Tallaght in South Dublin, “working class” for those looking for a label, then local pride takes on an extra meaning. So when you see Richie Dunne perform near miracles on a football pitch that pride means you are very quick to remind everyone who will listen to you just where he came from.

Richard Dunne in action for Ireland

Obviously this isn’t a trait unique to football; be it an athlete, an auditionee on the X-Factor, a local businessman doing well for himself …we want to see our own kind succeed. However, growing up in Tallaght most of us didn’t dream of being a businessman, or a popstar, we dreamt of being a footballer. When the reality of life and the limitations of physical ability caught up on our childhood dreams it woke almost all of us up to the realisation that an apprenticeship in carpentry or plumbing was more realistic than a footballing apprenticeship in England. Why had we dared to dream in the first place? Why would we have such lofty ambitions? With barely a marked football pitch to play on why would we have the right to a career in the game? Ask Richie Dunne I guess.

The beauty of football is that this is not a single anomaly, within 20 minutes of Richie Dunne’s childhood home he could have been running with a ball at his feet and bumped into Robbie Keane, Keith Fahey, or a bit further up the road Damien Duff, and countless other players who have made a career in football. In an era obsessed with stardom, the local hero for me is always the greatest.

It follows then that once our local lad “makes it” he is held forever more in the highest regard, but that is not quite true. Robbie Keane is without doubt the most talented footballer to emerge from Tallaght but for all his goals Robbie is a player who can be hard to love. Through a perception of arrogance, frustration at his onfield performances, puzzlement at his career moves which now see him based in Los Angeles, California – for any number of reasons Keane divides opinion like few others in the game. Buried here is a significant realisation – there’s no hero like a local hero, but at the same time there’s no leeway for that hero. As soon as he is viewed as getting too big for his boots, or losing touch with our world then we want to knock him down a peg or two. This is the terrible beauty of local hero status.

Robbie Keane isn't Tallaght's favourite son!

Tony Cousins is a footballer who grew up literally a stone’s throw from me. His obvious talent was recognised and saw him move to Liverpool as a young player in 1990. Hampered by injuries he never really made the expected breakthrough, instead he would return to Ireland and become a League of Ireland legend. He went on to spend six seasons with Shamrock Rovers and score 65 goals in 190 appearances. Tony is a footballer that few, if any, in England will remember, but every kid within a 10 mile radius growing up in those times will remember Tony, even if he hadn’t had that League of Ireland career. I remember seeing him in the Liverpool squad photo; Tony Cousins who had played in the same local field, now in Anfield and another stratosphere.

Imagine Celtic’s European Cup winning team of 1967, a team of players who all hailed from within 30 miles of Glasgow, a feat which will never be repeated in modern football. Premier League teams have since selected sides without a single Englishman in the lineup, a swing from one extreme to the other in little over three decades and a reminder of just how we should value our local heroes when they come along.

The next player from Tallaght to break through at Liverpool won’t just have been a better player than could be sourced in the Merseyside youth leagues, he will be a footballer who has come through a structure set up to source the best Africans, South Americans and Europeans. All in an era where a talented left foot can mean not only a scholarship for the footballer but a job for his father, a house for his family, and a boot deal before his plane has arrived from Lisbon to land in John Lennon Airport.

They say never meet your heroes but in my mind you will have already met them in the greenspace at the back of your estate. Jumpers for goalposts and 16 a side games, give me a hero who has shared that experience with me any day over an imported, poster pin-up, hyped up “superstar” every day of the week.

PS. Just before signing off on this article I discovered Tony Cousins and Richie Dunne are cousins. I can’t say I’m surprised by that.