WE said goodbye to Ray Treacy last week. He was 68 years young and only became old in the final months of his life when his body was savagely attacked by the onset of Motor Neurone Disease.
A gregarious man, whose penchant for storytelling was matched by a musical brain which allowed him share a stage and a long friendship with Luke Kelly, his passing is mourned by two families, his immediate circle and the football one.
"I'm actually too upset by the news to speak," said John Giles on Saturday when word had reached him of his friend's passing. Giles, who managed Treacy for Ireland, West Bromwich Albion and Shamrock Rovers, shared a deep bond with his fellow Dubliner. And he was far from alone.
"Well, Ray could was the life and soul of the party," remembers Eoin Hand, another former Irish manager, another friend. "Yet he carried that off very well." Sometimes the 'life and soul of the party' are bywords for loud and annoying individuals. "Ray was certainly never that."
Instead, he was a character who never lacked self-belief. Yet for people of a certain age, essentially those born around 1975 or after, Treacy's legacy is largely unknown. We rely on eyewitnesses to fill in the details, to put stories around the statistics. We know he played 42 times for Ireland and scored five goals.
What we didn't know was how he changed a mindset. The Ireland Treacy left in 1964 to pursue a career in English football wasn't the self-confident, sometimes brash place it can be today. "Football was in the ha'penny place," remembers Hand. "These were the days when our internationals played for their clubs on a Saturday and then caught a train to Hollyhead and travelled overnight by boat before playing for Ireland on a Sunday."
It was a journey worth making. Aside from the obvious nationalistic pride that stemmed from representing their country, there was also an unusual, genuine bond between the players. "We got on like a house on fire," Treacy once remembered. "We were all in the same boat, young men, who'd gone to England, who missed home, who loved our football and loved our country.
"The results weren't great for a long time but that didn't dampen our enthusiasm. If anything, it made us want to be the men who put it right."
On a dark, foggy evening in 1972, Hand and Treacy set about putting it right. On one of those sepia-tinted Dalymount Park nights, Ireland took on France in a World Cup qualifier and won 2-1, Hand delivering the cross for Treacy to head in the winner.
You could argue it was one of the most important goals an Irishman has ever scored - because the years preceding Treacy's coming-of-age moment, were grim. After beating Czechoslovakia 2-1 in Prague in 1967, Ireland played 13 competitive internationals over the following five years and lost 11 of them, the other two ending in draws.
"We had no confidence," says Hand. So Treacy went about providing them with some. "He was one of those guys who was positive, who'd go around each of us before a match and gee us up. 'Let's have a go at these feckers,' he'd say. Forget about their reputation. Let's build our own reputation."
They did. That win over France was followed by a draw in Paris. And then when the 1976 European Championship qualifiers began, John Giles was in charge, a teenager called Liam Brady was making his debut and the USSR were scalped, 3-0. "I got the hat-trick and the match ball, but I'd never had got anything if Ray hadn't been playing up alongside me," recalls Don Givens. "He was a brilliant player, a real honest pro."
The honest pro moved from Home Farm in Dublin to West Brom as an 18-year-old in 1964 before playing for Charlton, Swindon, Preston, and West Brom again over the next 13 years, returning home in 1977 to be part of Giles' ill-fated Shamrock Rovers experiment.
He was a Giles loyalist and it's easy to understand why. Once Treacy arrived in Dublin for an international without his boots. "So long as you've got your banjo, Ray, you can travel," joked Giles.
"The sing-songs were a big part of us building up our morale," says Hand of an innocent time when the night before games, players would gather around the lobby of their hotel, Treacy would take out his banjo and a young red-haired man, called Luke Kelly, would lead the chorus.
Songs of praise followed when wins were recorded over Turkey, Switzerland, Denmark, Bulgaria, and France (for a second time) in the remainder of the decade. Qualification may have escaped the team, but self-respect was gained. "Ray certainly played his part in that," says Hand. "A significant part."
Time catches up on all sportsmen. By 1979, he was winding down one career and building up another. A successful travel-agent - for years he acted as the FAI's official partner - allowing him to stay in and around the football scene for another 25 years. Along the way he managed Shamrock Rovers to the 1993-94 League of Ireland title.
As he grew older, his sense of fun never dimmed. Yet there was a sensitive side to the man, too. Once on a trip to Switzerland in 2005, he noticed a colleague fighting the tears after he'd ended a phone call home to his young son, whose birthday he was forced to miss. "Don't feel guilty," Ray gently told him. "It's your profession. You're here because this is what you do to support your family."
They were the right words at the right time. Can the appropriate words be found now to pay tribute to a genuine football man? "He'll be missed," Hand said. "Sorely missed."
