Bray Wanderers

History

It will shock no one to find out that Bray’s footballing roots lie in bogball. Indeed, some argue that they still play as if every point counts. In 1922, a handful of scumbags decided that they didn’t fit in with the muck savage ethos of St. Kevin’s GAA and split to set up a proper football club. Due to a policy of fielding ringers, they were known in their early days as Bray Unknowns, and entered the League of Ireland in the late twenties. In some sort of shady back door deal, Bray Wanderers were a junior club of the Unknowns at this time, and apparently they were fairly decent, winning the Miller Cup in 1928. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t to last.

The club went under in the thirties, but pulled the old dodge of reforming under a new name. Now in the AUL Division 3, they reached the semi-final of the Leinster FA Shield in the early forties, but were kicked out for skulduggery. Also, they fielded an illegitimate player, a trick which survived right up until the end of last season, when Maurice Farrell retired. The forties saw them pop in and out of the league, eventually wheedling their way into the AUL Division One. In 1951, they won a couple of junior cups, hardly out of nappies. Egg cups, we’d call them. It just doesn’t seem right to tear them away from their mothers like that. Anyway, unhappy at rule changes which prevented them from cheating, the club moved from the AUL to the Leinster Senior League.

Some more minor cup successes were followed by an LSL victory in the 1958/59 season. This formed part of a three in a row, and further fun in the cups, including a brief visit to the senior cup. The LSL has since ruled tilting pitches illegal. In 1960/61 they withdrew from the LSL and returned to the AUL. From 1963, however, they once again folded, as a result of difficulties concerning the ownership of the Carlisle Grounds, the team bus, the tap on the ESB lines, the club car fleet and a traffic cone marked “Dublin City Council”. By 1973, Bray Unknowns were representing Bray in the LSL and, in a bid to avoid the revenue commissioners, the management changed the name to Bray Wanderers. Inventive.

Wanderers finally rejoined the LoI in 1985, winning the new First Division that year. Of course, their competition consisted of the Trade Union of Clowns, Jazz Musicians and Accountants; a small village from Norway (their application to join the Mo-i-Rana amateur league was lost in the post, subsequently arrived at the FAI, and was misread) and a team of one-legged blind men, to name the better ones. More cup fun was to follow (along with relegation in 1988), culminating in an FAI Cup in 1990, when they beat the mighty St. Francis in the first final held in Lansdowne Road. John Ryan became only the second person to score a hat-trick in an FAI Cup Final. In an earlier round, when Shelbourne were defeated on a penalty shoot-out, Wanderers became the first club to win an FAI Cup tie on penalties. They also became the first ever First Division side to win the trophy. The following season, their first ever European adventure ended abruptly with a 2-0 defeat away to Trabzonspor, meaning Bray lost 3-1 on aggregate. An attempt by the travelling fans to beat up the Turkish players ended with them making their way home on a small raft, completely naked. The narrow victory for the Turks meant that Barcelona avoided a trip to Bray in the next round; that day is still a day of celebration in the Catalonian city.

A decade later, Bray were once again relegated Cup winners. Ah, the humour of fate! This time, they drew Grasshoppers Zurich of Switzerland. In one of the more embarrassing mistakes of all time, manager Pat Devlin assumed the opponents were a team of insects (or at least very small players who would be easily intimidated by Maurice Farrell) and decided to try and flog players to an English team for ridiculous sums of money instead of doing any scouting. Devlin is reported to have been “surprised” on seeing the opposition, and an 8-0 aggregate defeat resulted.

The recent years have seen Bray doomed to a meagre existence as a yo-yo club, destined to freeze the arse off travelling fans from both divisions under the stewardship of Pat Devlin. In October 1995, in a close season signing from Cherry Orchard, Graham Coughlan was transferred to Blackburn Rovers for a club record fee without ever playing a league game for the club. Devlin had send them a tape of Zico, dubbing over the Brazilian commentary with crowd noises from Bray. Not having crowd noise from Bray lying handy on a tape and it being close season, he recorded the sounds of the sea, little children taunting a crippled boy, a bar fight and the sound of vomit freezing, and mixed it all together. When demanding their money back, Blackburn were unable to prove that the sounds weren’t those of a Bray crowd, and lost their court case. Bray have won the first division twice since, and have been promoted twice more. Most pundits and augurs STIG has consulted suggest that they will continue to achieve regular promotion.