‘The Viet Celts are coming!’
A half-remembered tale about a ragtag bunch of men in Hanoi forming the Viet Celts Gaelic Football Club in 2007. This story first appeared in 'Grassroots: Volume 2' (2023), edited by P.J. Cunningham.
EVERY NOW AND THEN, as at least one poet would know, there are places where a thought might grow – Peruvian mines, Indian compounds, lime crevices. A disused shed in county Wexford.
So, for the sake of posterity let us remember a time when a travelling evangelist met with a modest flock of Irish and English emigres in Hanoi and planted an unlikely thought that would grow – against the odds – in the heat and humidity of the Red River Delta.
And that thought?
To muster a squadron of men, in less than seven weeks, that could, and would, represent Vietnam (for the first ever time) at the next Asian Gaelic Games.
This historic summit occurred on the mezzanine of a mildew scented, all-purpose pub, where drinks were ordered, and where drinks were drunk, as the unlikely thought grew, and then grew some more.
Representing Vietnam at the games greatly appealed to the Hanoi contingent, but there were some practical and logistical concerns. It was 2007, a time when only a scant number of Irish men lived in the city, and even less of those men had played the sport. There were zero O’Neills balls in town, and it was a 19,000km round trip to Elvery’s in Dublin. Across the capital of Vietnam, there were also no grass pitches with grass growing, never mind the lack of high posts.
Nonetheless, the evangelist – a persuasive diplomat by the name of Peter Ryan, a former player with Synge Street and, at that time, a missionary for the Asian County Board – was assured a Vietnam-based club could and would be formed and attend the games to be held that year in Singapore.
Having completed his mission, the evangelist slid over a bag with two spanking new O’Neills balls and then disappeared into the night. And just like that a club had been formed. Three reasonably wise men – Colm Ross of Ardee, Gareth O’Hara of Ashbourne, Sean Hoy of Enniskillen – were quickly elected onto a dedicatory board. Everyone in attendance made it into the committee, even those who’d only come for the beers.
The first item on their agenda? What to christen the club…
From a hastily compiled short list of monikers, there was one clear standout: The Viet Celts. It wasn’t the simplicity of the name that sold it. “We just started to imagine the other teams shrieking ‘The V.C. are coming! The V.C. are coming!’,” one of the founders would later recall (confess).
On the same occasion, the inaugural committee also discussed recruitment. To have worthwhile training sessions, the inchoate club would need to convert some able-bodied men to the Gaelic code. They first turned to Minsk F.C., a local football team named after a Belarusian two-stroke motorbike, a notoriously unreliable steed, once commonly found belching smoke across the northern mountains of Vietnam.
Known for their epic weekend drinking sessions (whether or not they had won a game, or were even playing a match), Minsk F.C. had a smattering of mercurial Irish footballing talents in the squad, who at least knew the terminology and (some of) the rules.
Among the club’s books there were other, more tentative, connections to Gaelic football and Ireland. A Glaswegian who had played shinty as a teen. A strapping Englishman whose great-grandfather Thaddeus Forde Dockery upped sticks and left Roscommon in the 19th century. A Londoner whose great grandfather was an O'Sullivan who swapped a life in Cork for the English capital’s east end. They were all game to give Gaelic a go.
Others were, too, and so a training session was duly arranged. By then it was exactly six weeks until the tournament, and – more alarmingly – the month of May, when the stultifying heat of Hanoi could hit 40 degrees Celsius and render the city’s population motionless. Training would be held at a shadeless, sun-baked ‘grass’ pitch (called ‘Thuy Loi’ which means, ironically enough, ‘irrigation’ in the local lingo), which was only free between 11am and 3pm. But that day a dozen men – the mad dogs of Hanoi – turned up, slathered in sunscreen, sweating buckets at the mere thought of chasing a ball.
After a brief explanation of the rules to the uninitiated, and while the rest of the city sensibly cooled off under electric fans, a historic throw in was made. Seconds later, Patrick Cooney of Cork soloed between a stationary American and a confused antipodean before rattling the dust off the well-worn net in a goal (with no keeper).
Over subsequent sessions, dribs and drabs of reinforcements bolstered numbers, mostly out of curiosity, and the promise of post-match refreshments. Some identified their place in the game straightaway. A broad-shouldered, red-haired Australian who bore the surname Lambert (disappointingly, unrelated to the puppeteers of Wanderly Wagon) was a natural at cleaning out anyone with notions of soloing a distance. A schools rugby player raised among the northern pastures of Albion revealed a flair for punting the ball right into the ‘breadbasket’ of his teammates, which came as a surprise to him as a former front row forward.
Others who joined – a svelte French DJ with baggy basketball shorts; a handful of Englishmen, mostly soccer players and cricketers; an American whose punk band once supported Nirvana in Seattle; a man from Dublin 4… well, they’d all need a little schooling from Colm Ross – the only resident of Hanoi to possess a pair of Gaelic shorts, a memento from his days as a county player in Louth – who had assumed the role of player-bainisteoir.
In gruelling conditions, Ross ran various drills and led pitch-side discussions to help the non-Irish recruits wrap their heads around the basics. At the ‘Chùa Bộc Club House’ (a local beer joint that operated under the shade of a Banyan tree down the road), there was a new vernacular to be taught, too: ‘Steps!’, ‘Drive it in!’, ‘Take yer point!’, ‘Clatter’im!’
Word of the Viet Celt’s formation had spread beyond the Hanoi parish to the port town of Haiphong, 120km to the east, where an electrical engineer by the name of Bernard Casey, once a champion hurler for Kilmacud Crokes, was stationed and tanning himself for free, “like yer man out of the Harp ad”, as someone astutely noted. He gamely made a weekly trip and helped to inculcate some of his old school footballing skills into the minds of the recent recruits, including two Vietnamese soccer players –let it be noted that two men by the names of Huy (pronounced ‘whee’, and fittingly a ‘pocket rocket’ of a player) and Toan were the first Vietnamese to ‘kick the leather off’ an O’Neill’s ball in Hanoi, and the first of many more .
To supplement Colm's crash course in Gaelic football, the club’s inaugural chairman, Sean Hoy had asked a friend in the Old Country to send out some DVDs of classic matches. When the package arrived in Hanoi, a squadron of men duly assembled at Finnegan’s – the city’s only Irish bar, run by a Vietnamese woman called Moon and a young man called Fergus Broderick from Kildare. The non-Irish were especially eager to sup on canned Guinness (for poetic inspiration) and feast their eyes on this exotic sport. Sadly, the official GAA disc wouldn’t play on a machine hardwired to read bootlegged films from China. Class was dismissed (though the drinking continued).
With the tournament fast-approaching, ESBI, Terotech and Enterprise Ireland all made welcome donations to the campaign’s coffers; the club’s treasurer, Gareth O’Hara crunched the numbers and declared there was just enough funds to cover some cheap red jerseys and subsidise AirAsia flights and shared rooms in the hallowed halls of YMCA Singapore for two teams.
Just a few more able-bodied men were needed to round up the numbers – a hasty communication was dispatched to Saigon. Three Irish emigres – all unknown quantities to those in Hanoi – would answer the call and agree to unify the country under a single flag.
The northern squadron all arrived in Singapore only to have more questions than answers. “Can you drink the water from the taps in Singapore?” asked a young man representing the Flemings of Castleisland, foreseeing the chronic dehydration to come. Another young man from Roscrea continued to explain the rules to his English and Australian comrades on the steps of YMCA, despite not being sure of them himself (he’d been reared for rugby, not Gaelic, in the Irish midlands).
As the whole squad walked wide-eyed through the bright lights of the Lion City it would be soon discovered the price of a pint was eight to 10 times the Hanoi average. An emergency meeting by the squad’s leadership group was held. It would be agreed there was no shame in smuggling cans from 7/11 into bars for the duration of the weekend.
Little did the Viet Celts know what awaited them. On the eve of the tournament, a lavish reception with free-flow Guinness was held for all of the teams. Not believing their luck, each member of the squad felt duty bound to horse down a rake of pints before hitting the town. Let it be noted there are no reliable accounts of when players returned to their beds, but suffice to say, the sun rose much earlier than requested. Yet every groggy, Guinness-scented Viet Celt was accounted for at the tournament, which went better than expected. One of the two teams even managed a 100% record in the group stages (winning all four games).
The AGG was a 7-a-side tournament in those days, leaving ample space for the heat-hardened Viet Celt’s singular ‘brand of play’. While the opposition teams often stuck to points, the upstarts representing Vietnam continued to go for broke. They had also unearthed a secret weapon. One of the three Saigon players was Bernard Hartigan – son of Bernie Senior, and nephew to Pat, the two Limerick hurling legends. A fine hurler himself (a demonstration of his skill with the sliothar would be witnessed on the Sunday), Hartigan junior spent the weekend running rings around defenders and finding the top corner again and again.
But really it was the V.C.’s collective, incomprehensible mishmash of talents and playing styles that proved to be Kryptonite for many of the opposing teams. Some of their antics didn’t always go down well with the purists on the sidelines. At one stage, the shinty player of Glasgow, also a nifty winger when playing soccer, drew boos as he continually dribbled the ball on the ground. The French DJ was even throwing in some basketball moves while the Australian Lambert – despite stern words from exasperated referees – never managed to modify his AFL tackle technique and repeatedly ‘broke up the game’, instigating a shemozzle or three.
On the second-day of play, the great-grandson of Thaddeus Dockery exemplified the foolhardy, diehard spirit of the Viet Celts – after splitting his head open, he rushed to a nearby hospital, flirted with a nurse called Mary, fell in love (with another patient’s girlfriend), received umpteen stitches (while apologising for the stink of his socks, the same pair he’d worn the day before), and then returned to the field of play (waving off a concerned referee), all in the space of two hours.
But arguably it was after heroic losses in the quarter final stages of the men’s cup and bowl competitions, which ended their tournament, that the Viet Celts hit their stride. After ample pitch-side pints, multiple bouts of cramp and a few well deserved power naps, the whole platoon returned to the YMCA to plot one final ambush at the after party, an open-theme, fancy dress affair.
Before departing Hanoi, the Londoner with Corkonian roots, and whose grandfather had fought in World War 1, had purchased military clobber for one and all. So donning army surplus pith helmets, and clad in olive green shirts, the Viet Celts proudly marched toward the entrance of a beach club, brandishing a large red flag with the golden star, singing in unison: ‘🎵🎶 Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh! Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh! 🎵🎶’
Alas, when entering the club, they would discover none of the other teams had yet to arrive in their kimonos, silk pyjamas and Hawaiian grass skirts. An emergency meeting was held and the leadership group agreed the squadron should retreat to the bar, where drinks were ordered and where drinks were drunk. “Let’s just do that again at 1am when everyone is here,” someone shouted. “Then they’ll hear the V.C. coming,” said another.
And that thought would grow, too, through the night and the morning after, and then it ran headlong into a future that has yet to be written 1.
Postscript: After the AGG of 2007, the ‘thought’ of Gaelic football in Vietnam would continue to grow from year to year, with the V.C. introducing the game to a broad mix of nationalities in Hanoi. In 2008 a ladies team (dubbed the ‘Duracelts’) would form, and at a later stage formally merge with the Viet Celts and start attending the AGG on an annual basis. In 2010, a visionary from Mullingar by the name of Jim Kiernan would initiate a ‘youth programme’ and with the assistance of a Dubliner, Dave Cunnigham, and many others promote the game at Vietnamese schools, which continue to play the sport to this day. The sport also migrated south. A Saigon Gaels men’s team formed in 2011 and a women’s team in 2013. As for the ‘V.C.’, well, by all accounts, they’re still a wild bunch, but they also got a bit better at football. In fact, in 2018, the Viet Celts men’s football team won the Southeast Asian Games, besting Singapore in a final played in the savage heat and humidity of a May day. Proudly watching from the sidelines were Colm Ross and several members of the original 2007 VC veterans, who first nurtured the thought of Gaelic in the Red River Delta, helping it to grow, and then flourish.
A note on the original publication: The journalist P.J. Cunningham has gathered, edited and published two volumes of tales about Gaelic sports for the Grassroots Anthology. The above essay featured in Volume 2.
This is great.