Athlone's title win was 'one of my best days in football' - Roddy Collins

In his new memoir, Roddy Collins describes the night in 2013 when his Athlone Town side won the First Division title in Lissywollen as "one of my best ever days in football".

The Dubliner, one of the most colourful and outspoken characters in Irish soccer, spent a season with Athlone Town as a player in the 1980s and then went on to have two spells managing the club in the 2010s.

In his most successful managerial role he won the league and cup double with Bohemians in 2001, and he also had spells in charge of several other clubs including Carlisle United, Shamrock Rovers, Derry City and Maltese side Floriana.

In his recently-published book The Rodfather, written with Paul Howard, Roddy looks back with fondness on his season as an Athlone Town player and his first spell managing the club.

Athlone Town and Bohemians legend Turlough O'Connor was the manager at St Mel's Park when he recruited Collins from Bohs in 1983 after seeing him score a hat-trick in a tournament in Inchicore.

Turlough "has always been a sort of surrogate father to me," Roddy states in the book. "He came into my life two years after my Da died and was the strong male role model that I was missing in my life.

"Outside my own family, I can honestly say there was no man whose opinion of me mattered more to me. It still matters to me to this day."

The Athlone team he joined had just been crowned league champions in the 1982-83 season, and they were "a brilliant bunch of blokes" he says.

His teammates included players such as "Stefan Fenuik, who came to Athlone from Stoke and never went back... Noel Larkin, who would win seven League of Ireland titles at three different clubs, and Padraig O'Connor, one of Turlough's brothers, who never drank and would go for an ice cream after a match when everyone else went for a pint."

Roddy's role in the side was "up front next to Michael O'Connor, or Socksy, another one of Turlough's brothers who was a brilliant player and should have played in England."

Aged in his early 20s, Roddy married his wife, Caroline, shortly after he signed for Athlone. As a result, "instead of a honeymoon, Caroline got a trip to the Isle of Man for a pre-season tournament with Athlone Town."

The club was drawn to play Belgian champions Standard Liege in the first round of the 1983-84 European Cup.

Roddy scored in the first leg, a game played "on a manky night at St Mel's Park" where "you could hear the rain drumming off the corrugated steel of the stand". It ended in a 3-2 defeat for Athlone.

Arriving in Belgium for the second leg, the Irish visitors were "given a police escort from the airport to the hotel and the same treatment when we went to training."

"We thought we were the Beatles. You could see the fellas growing in confidence, trying out things on the training pitch.

"We started to feel like we were professional footballers with a chance of knocking Standard Liege out of the European Cup. That didn't last long," Roddy recalls. Standard Liege took the lead very early in the second leg, and ran out 8-2 winners.

Roddy scored eleven league goals in his single season playing for Athlone, after which he was sold to Drogheda with Terry Eviston being brought in to take his place.

He explains that it was Turlough O'Connor who phoned him in 2013 to tell him that Athlone were looking for a manager.

The job "appealed to me because it was Turlough's home club and I knew how much it meant to him. It also meant a lot to me. I spent some of my happiest days as a footballer at Athlone Town, not including our humiliation against Standard Liege, of course."

He says the managerial role came with "two provisos" - one was that Michael O'Connor would be the assistant manager and the other was that half of the players had to be locals.

"I admit that I put a generous interpretation on what was considered 'local' to Athlone," Roddy states.

The team gained momentum as the 2013 season progressed and soon promotion to the Premier Division, where Athlone had not featured since the mid-1990s, was on the horizon.

"For the last two or three home games of the season, the town was buzzing. When we beat Waterford 1-0 at home, we were champions with three games to spare," he writes.

"I'll never forget the scenes on the pitch afterwards. People told me that they thought Athlone Town would never be a Premier League club again. The whole town got a lift. Caroline and all the family were with me that day.

"It was the first thing I'd won in football since I did the double with Bohs twelve years earlier. I can honestly say it was one of my best ever days in football, not just because I loved the club, but because I knew how much it meant to Turlough."

After that season, he writes that he was "back in demand as a manager" and wanted to leave Athlone.

"The club didn't have the money to push on the following season… I wanted to go out on a high, so I asked (chairman) John Hayden to let me go and he agreed."

In 2017, he returned to manage Athlone Town for a second spell, saying he was told Portuguese investors were "interested in using Athlone as a sort of centre of excellence" and planned to "develop the players and sell them on".

Athlone finished bottom of the league that year, winning just four of their 27 matches.

"I couldn't believe that this was the same club Turlough led to the League of Ireland title, the same club whose jersey I was proud to wear. When the season was over at the end of 2017, I left."

Roddy has not managed a club since, though he says he was offered an opportunity to coach in China and had been looking to pursue this when the Covid pandemic hit in early 2020 and the country's borders closed.

* 'The Rodfather' by Roddy Collins, with Paul Howard, is out now having been published by Penguin Sandycove in October.