Guest of honour Tuohy to recall Collingwood Cup glory with Trinity College

Many former players will help Trinity College celebrate 125 years of football tonight, writes EMMET MALONE

LIAM TUOHY will be the guest of honour as Dublin University’s football club celebrates 125 years tonight at the college’s Dining Hall and remembers the team which the former Ireland boss managed to Collingwood Cup success some 30 years ago.

Around 125 people – the number may not be a complete coincidence – including a multitude of former players are expected to be there, with the likes of Hugo McNeil, the former Ireland rugby international who scored the winning goal against Maynooth in the 1979 Collingwood final in College Park, among them.

“The club has a marvellous history,” says former player, current manager and Trinity head of sport, Terry McAuley. “But the Collingwood has proven to be something of a holy grail for us. We’ve only won it twice, back in 1966 and then in ’79 which was sort of the culmination of a four-year plan for him (Tuohy) to come in and build things up to the stage where we could win the competition.”

Tuohy’s involvement, McAuley recalls, gave rise to strong connections with the Shamrock Rovers side of the day, several of whom, he notes with a laugh, took to hanging around the place. Mick Meegan and the Trinity Ball, indeed, are mentioned in the same sentence at one stage. The success came just a few years short of the club’s centenary year.

Their first game had been back in 1883, and during the early years it had been a force in the development of the game.

“There were ourselves, Bohemians and one or two others down here,” McAuley says, “and a few teams up around Belfast too. The first game between north and south, if you like, was between Trinity and Belfast Athletic.”

The club would have been well represented in the early international teams, and until 1895, when the growth of the game really began to gather pace, it was regarded as one of the country’s leading sides even if the timing of the Irish Cup’s first round made an early exit pretty much an inevitability as college term would still be several weeks away.

More than a century on, much the same sort of difficulty prompted the club to withdraw from the League of Ireland’s under-21 league last year as they finally admitted defeat in the battle to do themselves justice through the middle section of the league’s “summer” season.

Instead, they made a somewhat triumphant return to their roots in the Leinster League, winning both their division (1D) and the Joe Tynan Cup.

The Collingwood eluded them again, but four of the first team were capped at Irish Universities level and, with a little luck, the college will be represented at this year’s World Student Games in Belgrade.

McAuley, who is compiling a history of the club, admits the nature of its origins is both a help and a hindrance to his work. Records from the very early days aren’t too bad at all, but everything rather falls apart around 1913.

“It was that sort of place, of course, back then. Everybody more or less upped and headed off to fight in (the first) World War.”

Perhaps a little oddly, the paper trail resumes on the eve of the second World War, and McAuley hopes that a good many of the teams since then will be represented at tonight’s event. George Wheeler, Bobby Prole and Tommy Nolan are all due to appear.