Paddy Coad

Paddy Coad, widely considered to be the best player never to leave League of Ireland football, was born in Waterford in April 1920. Having impressed for local junior side Corinthians (he had already become a Munster champion at table tennis), he made his debut for Waterford F.C. in a League of Ireland Shield match against Brideville in October of 1937, but would have to wait another six months before being used in the league itself. By the time the 1938-39 season rolled around, however, the youngster had become a key part of the squad, and though the club finished bottom of the League of Ireland table that year, Coad finished as the club’s joint top goalscorer.

A financial crisis at Waterford meant the club were unable to guarantee adequate pay to their players for the 1939-40 season, and having previously rebuffed their approach, Coad agreed to join Irish League outfit Glenavon in time for the beginning of the new campaign. The outbreak of the Second World War threw the northern league into uncertainty, however, and Coad returned to his hometown club not long afterwards. Although the side were again struggling in the league, eventually finishing eleventh, the following season would be a very memorable one for Blues fans, but perhaps not for all the right reasons.

A season-long struggle between Waterford and Cork United resulted in a tie at the top of the League of Ireland table, and though Waterford had the stronger goal average, a play-off was scheduled to decide the destination of the title. But with the Waterford players seeking remuneration for the extra match, and the club chairman not willing to accept this, several players, including Coad, made themselves unavailable. Waterford consequently withdrew from the play-off, and the championship was awarded to Cork. Other repercussions included Waterford being fined heavily, their enforced absence from the following season’s league, and Coad and the others being suspended from league action for one year. This compounded the disappointment of losing an F.A.I. Cup final replay to Cork a number of weeks earlier.

Though unable to contribute to anybody’s league campaign, Coad’s suspension did not apply to the F.A.I. Cup, and having joined Shamrock Rovers in January of 1942, he made his first team debut the following month in a first round cup tie against Brideville. Scoring in the Hoops’ 3-1 victory, he went on to score three more as the club progressed to the semi-finals, gradually endearing himself to the Rovers faithful. Finishing as top scorer for the club in five of the next six seasons (and joint top scorer in the League of Ireland in 1947), he won F.A.I. Cup winner’s medals in 1944, 1945 and 1948 (scoring in the 2-1 win over Drumcondra), and so when the unexpected death of Rovers’ coach Jimmy Dunne occurred in 1949, Coad (now a son-in-law of the Shamrock Rovers’ owners, the Cunninghams) was asked to step into the breach.

Reluctantly accepting the player-manager mantle, Coad soon began signing up young players from Dublin’s junior and schoolboy football leagues (it was said he signed virtually the entire Irish schoolboys’ team), hoping to mould the Rovers squad into one capable of once again making a challenge for the title (the Hoops had not won the league since 1939). Between 1950 and 1953, players like Paddy Ambrose (who had been one of Jimmy Dunne’s last signings), Ronnie Nolan, Liam Hennessy and Liam Tuohy began maturing into very useful footballers, and with the help of Coad’s progressive training methods (he attended F.A. coaching courses at Rhyl and Lilleshall) and his introduction of a passing style to replace the traditional “kick-and-run” tactics, the league championship pennant returned to Milltown in April of 1954.

In a decade seen as the “golden era” for League of Ireland football, “Coad’s Colt’s” (a nickname first used by W.P. Murphy of the Irish Independent in 1953) were the most successful team of the 1950s, with the trophy haul including three league championships (1954, 1957, 1959), two F.A.I. Cups (1955 and 1956), five League of Ireland Shields (including four in a row between 1955 and 1958), four Dublin City Cups and two Top Four Cup victories. Coad himself was as crucial to these successes as a player (he turned up at inside left, inside right, outside right and wing-half during his time with the club) as he was as a manager (unlike his predecessors at Glenmalure Park, he had the final say over team selection), and by the time he left Milltown to return to Waterford as player-manager in January 1960, he had scored 104 goals for the Hoops in the league and 37 in the F.A.I. Cup, with his total of 41 in the cup being a record that still stands.

Masterminding an F.A.I. Cup win over Rovers at Milltown in 1961, Coad led his hometown club to the league runners-up position in 1963, before overseeing Waterford’s unlikely league championship victory in 1966, the first time that the trophy had ever come to the south-east. Parting company with the Blues soon after this, he had laid the foundations for the remarkable league success that the club would achieve in the forthcoming seasons.

While Coad enjoyed remarkable success at club level, he also made an important contribution as an Irish international player. Cutting short his honeymoon to win his first cap against England in 1946 (he would probably have been capped much earlier only for the war), he played a starring role in Ireland’s next match against Spain, scoring one, and laying on two more for his fellow Waterford man Davy Walsh, as Ireland recorded a 3-2 victory at Dalymount Park. Although Ireland would lose their next five international matches, Coad was retained in the side throughout all these games (he was the only home-based player in the team for two of them), and his goal from the penalty spot against Portugal at Dalymount in May of 1949 saw the team’s winless streak come to an end.

Lining out in a World Cup qualifying defeat against Sweden the following month, he was then squeezed out of the international picture for a period of two years, but announced his return with the winner in a 3-2 victory over Norway in Oslo, having come on as a first-half substitute for Limerick’s Tim Cunneen (he was the first substitute to score for the national side). It was not enough to secure him a berth in any of the next three games, however, and Coad was to win his eleventh and final cap in a disastrous 6-0 defeat by Spain in Madrid in 1952. He proved he still had much to offer at the highest levels of the game some five years later, though, when he turned in a man-of-the-match performance for Shamrock Rovers in their European Cup second leg match against Manchester United at Old Trafford in 1957.

A professional, disciplined footballer, with vision, skill, and leadership qualities in abundance, Paddy Coad died in Waterford in 1992, aged 71. Capped 26 times by the League of Ireland representative side, his Shamrock Rovers testimonial in 1955 saw the Hoops famously hand English League champions Chelsea a 3-2 defeat at Milltown. Seen as a legend by both Rovers fans and the natives of Waterford city, Coad received a P.F.A.I. Merit award in 1983 for “services to the game in Ireland”, and was one of three inaugural members of the League of Ireland Hall of Fame in 1991. The Shamrock Rovers “Player of the Year” trophy is named in his memory.