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sense that it was all very close to ending. Which
it was.” Lambert says that members of the club and people in the community helped in any way they could. “If it wasn’t for everyone who put in a collective effort – the club would have gone. There is a debt around Dalymount Park so we managed to enter in negotiations with Dublin City Council. It was all about resolving that.” To aid in the fundraising, Lambert organised Dan Lambert Bohemian FC Commercial and Marketing Manager Meeting at the famously graffiti lined walls of Dalymount Lane on a horrifically wet afternoon, Daniel Lambert directs me to the bar located inside The Jodi Stand. The space is decorated with posters, plaques and trophies commemorating the club’s successes throughout their long existence. On the wall, above the bar, the years of The day the bulldozers come in everybody will be pretty emotional. It won’t be a nice day. As long as you’re playing the music that people want to hear, age doesn’t really matter. league and cup triumphs for the senior team, are inscribed. Pointing at the most recent victories, Lambert explains what the club has been through over the past decade or so. “Look at 2008, we win the double. In 2009, we win the league. If, on paper, you’re a person looking back and you see that, you’re like, that must have been a great time. In fact, that was a really bad time.” “That was when the club lost a lot of money and got carried away with itself. Those successes, as fantastic as the manager and team were back then, they should never have been given the budgets they were given by the club. Looking back, that’s an anomaly.” He says that due to over-spending and a property deal that never manifested during the “boom years”, the club racked up an enormous amount of debt. There were times, he tells me, that they feared the end was near. “There have been a lot of lows within the last ten years. If you go back, there was a point in 2013 where we thought the club was going out of existence, it came very close to that. There weren’t any oneoff things on or off the pitch, there was just this two concerts in the Olympia Theatre and Vicar Street which were hosted by boxer Bernard Dunne and TV presenter Martin King. The concerts featured comedians such as Eric Lalor and Ardal O’Hanlon and musician Brush Shiels. “Fans auctioned off their memorabilia. One lad did a fast for four days – he raised about ten grand. It really was just different groups coming together and doing whatever they could.” Coming out of those dark days, that collective spirit of fighting for the benefit of something larger than oneself is indicative of what the club, and its ethos, stands for now, Lambert says. Officially launched in March 2016, the Bohemian Foundation is a non-profit organisation set up with the intent to give back to the local community via working with local schools, elderly citizens and The Irish Prison Service. The foundation organises walking football events for over 50s, coaching sessions for inmates of Mountjoy Prison and helps local school children with advice on well-being and nutrition. “By going into the local area and Bohemians giving to the local area, we’re going back to what the club was built upon. It sort of lost its way a little bit during the boom years – like a lot of Irish society where it was a society of the individual. That’s where the motivation comes from, to try and re-establish what we kind of lost during those years.” “Everybody is proud of Bohs now. This is the best feeling around the club that I could ever remember. I speak to older members in their 50s and 60s and they’re saying it’s the best they can ever remember. Which is something special, I think. The foundation has been a big part of that.” Lambert speaks with a conviction and a clear passion for Bohemian Football Club. In many ways, he and everybody else who volunteers and works at Bohs have earned that right. In addition to the community work, Bohemian FC hire a club poet, (which Lambert thinks is a world first for a football club) to write poems about Dalymount and the area. A percentage of all profits made on away jerseys sold goes to bringing people in Direct Provision to matches and recently they attracted 1,700 fans to an under-19 UEFA Youth League between themselves and Danish side, FC Midtjylland. “For me, that’s my favourite moment over the past decade,” he says. “It was a Wednesday night, seven o’clock – not too soon after people finished work and we had 1,700 hundred people out on the stand there for an under-19 game. That was brilliant, that was really, really brilliant.” Regarding the upcoming demolishment of Dalymount Park and groundshare with Shelbourne FC, Lambert tells me that, “it’s a good thing for the club. It’s a good thing for Dublin. Having said that, the day the bulldozers come in everybody will be pretty emotional. It won’t be a nice day. We’ve played here since 1901, it hosted the first ever Republic of Ireland home football match in 1924. Pele, Zidane, Van Basten, Gullit, Best, Charlton – you can list them all – have played here. It has an amazing, rich history.” For fixtures and updates go to: bohemianfc.com / shelbournefc.ie and if you are otherwise inclined we suggest shamrockrovers.ie / stpatsfc.com 28