I’ve begun writing a series for each Bohemian FC match programme giving a short history of the key events in Irish Football season by season, beginning with the first League of Ireland season in 1921-22. I’ll be adding them to the blog for anyone who cares to read them. Part one begins below. Thanks to Alan Bird for the suggestion to write it in the first place.

In the first of a new series, we look at the major points of interest during a League of Ireland season from the past, and for the first in the series we’re going way back to the first ever season in the League, the 1921-22 season.

That first season is a bit of a misnomer the entire fixture list of 14 games (featuring just eight, Dublin-based, league sides playing each other twice) was completed in the three months between September and December 1921. Bohemians and Shelbourne, as the two sides from outside of Ulster who had competed in the Irish League against the giants of Belfast football, started among the favourites for the title. Bohs v YMCA game was the inaugural league fixture to kick off, in what was described as a “poorly filled” Dalymount, those who did turn out though witness a masterclass from Bohemians. It was Bohs’ striker Frank Haine who had the honour of scoring the first ever LOI goal, getting the opener in a 5-0 win.
However, league honours ultimately fell to St. James’s Gate, the brewers pipping Bohs to the title by two points.

It shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise though, as the Gate had won both the Leinster Senior Cup and Irish Intermediate Cup just a season earlier. Several of that successful James’s Gate side would go on to represent Ireland but it would be the Paris Olympics in 1924 before they’d have the chance to pull on the green jersey. Among the Gate players from that season were Charlie Dowdall, like Ernie McKay and Paddy “Dirty” Duncan who joined five Bohemians in the squad. It was Duncan who would get the first goal in an international competition for the Irish Free State, grabbing the only score in a 1-0 Olympic victory over Bulgaria.

Of course, the political tumult in the country was never far removed from football, Bohemians began the season playing a pair of friendlies in Dublin and Belfast to help raise funds for the workers locked out of the Belfast shipyards, expelled because of their religion or their politics. The season then ended with pistols drawn in a Dalymount dressing room at a Cup final replay. St. James’s Gate won the double beating Shamrock Rovers (the of the Leinster Senior League) after an ill-tempered game which ended with infuriated Rovers players storming the Gate’s dressing room.

Bob Fullam of Rovers advanced on Charlie Dowdall when Charlie’s younger brother (and an IRA volunteer) Jack stepped forward and produced a pistol. Fullam and his Rovers teammates were outnumbered, and now out-gunned and they sensibly beat a retreat from the James’s Gate changing rooms!

Read the review of the 1922-23 season here.