Playing Footie

John Cosgrove grew up playing football in the small Ulster village of Enniskillen, just north of the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. It was odd, he said, playing pickup soccer in the intensely nationalistic region. “There we were—kids pretending to be players from Manchester United or Arsenal. Kids of IRA men, yet running around the schoolyard pretending to be Englishmen kicking a ball.” He said, “It didn’t make any sense. But then, if it’s Northern Ireland, it’s not supposed to make any sense.”

They’re not playing in the schoolyard any more, but Cosgrove, who is the manager of the Local, and his boss, Kieran Folliard, proprietor of the Local and Kieran’s, in Minneapolis, and the Liffey, in St. Paul, still kick the ball around with a group of Irishmen. Until this year, their adult recreational league team was sponsored by Kieran’s Irish Pub. But this year, in a fit of Irish solidarity, they changed the team name to Gaelic Stormz and started going to a different Irish pub after each game, instead of always showing up at one of Folliard’s places.

“We’ve got Irishmen from eleven different counties on the side,” said Cosgrove, “so we thought we should just spread it out to all the Irish pubs in town. We wanted to be the Irish side, not the Kieran’s side.” The team, while clearly dominated by Irish, is not so chauvinstic as to exclude other players. The Gaelic Stormz includes an Icelander, a Norwegian, a Canadian, and a recent addition from Lebanon. They even have admitted two Americans—one from Colorado and one from Pittsburgh. There are no native Minnesotans playing for the Stormz.

“We’ve sort of adopted people who’ve come here as foreigners,” said Cosgrove. “The first question we ask when we meet someone is, ‘Where are you from?’ The second is, ‘Do you kick football?’”

Because of roster changes and the change in affiliation, the team had to accept relegation to the lowest level of the league this year. The Stormz are in second place in the bronze division and are planning to move back up next year to where they came from, the silver division. That’s where their traditional rivals, the Englishmen from Brit’s Pub, currently occupy third place. In the past, the annual Kieran’s vs. Brit’s match has drawn as many as five hundred spectators to a recreational-level game that normally attracts only two or three wives or girlfriends. The rivalry, now in its tenth year, stands Brit’s 5–Kieran’s 4. This year, the August 27 game at Fort Snelling won’t count in the standings, but that doesn’t matter to the teams. They are playing for pride and a trophy put up by the Guinness beer distributor. “But we don’t care who puts up the trophy,” said Cosgrove. “I don’t care if it has dog’s bollocks’ name on it, I just want to hold it up in Brit’s team’s face.”

When Folliard opened the Local at Tenth and Nicollet five years ago, he jokingly described the location as being “just a stone’s throw from Brit’s Pub.” But the rivalry between the two traditional hangouts is a friendly one—when it comes to business. When they’re talking soccer, it’s a different matter. Cosgrove fans the flames with his occasional publication The Irish Raconteur, a one-page newspaper he distributes by email. It seems mostly to exist to make fun of the other teams—particularly the one from a block down Nicollet Mall. “Some of the Brit’s guys get a bit angry about the emails,” said Cosgrove. “But it’s all good fun. And being English, for the most part they don’t understand humor.”—Oliver Tuanis