This is going to be a huge weekend for Irish sports fans; there are some big GAA games at home and important action in London also. Leinster supporters will be hoping their team win the European Rugby Champions Cup for the fifth time when they play Toulouse at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in North London and thousands of Irish Manchester United fans will be hoping the club they love will rescue what has been a poor season for them by beating Manchester City in the FA Cup final at Wembley.
The latter event is a repeat of the 2023 final when City won 2-1 to lift the famous cup for the 7th time. United have won the cup 12 times, but their last success was in 2016. A win on Saturday would guarantee United a Europa League place next season. Down through the decades we always had some Irish connection with the FA Cup, but not so much in recent years. Caoimhin Kelleher picked up a winners’ medal as sub goalkeeper with Liverpool in 2022, but the last Irish player to start a Cup final was Damien Delaney with Crystal Palace in 2016.
This year neither team has any Irish players, so our only connection is the hymn “Abide With Me,” which is always sung before kick-off. The hymn was written by Scottish-born Reverend Henry Francis Lyte, who lived in Sligo with his parents, was educated in Enniskillen and Trinity College and served as a curate in Taghmon in County Wexford before moving to Brixham in Devon.
Meanwhile the game in Tottenham could be a battle of scrum halves — Leinster’s New Zealand-born Jamison Gibson-Park and Toulouse’s Antoine Dupont. Gibson-Park, who spent the first 10 years of his life on the small Great Barrier Island in New Zealand, joined Leinster in 2016 and later qualified to play for Ireland under the residency rule and has now won 35 Irish caps. In the semi-final win over Northampton Gibson-Park was the fulcrum of everything that went well for Leinster, setting up three tries for fellow New Zealander turned Irishman James Lowe.
Leinster scrum-half Jamison Gibson-Park in action during the May 4 European semifinal against Northampton at Croke Park. Inpho/Ryan Byrne
Leinster have so many Irish internationals to call on and James Ryan and Hugo Keenan, both of whom missed the Northampton game through injury, should be fit to challenge for a place in the starting XV on Saturday and Gary Ringrose might also be fit in time. Dupont is also a class act and Irish people may have forgotten how good he is as the scrum half didn’t play for France in this year’s Six Nations as he was concentring on playing for the French Sevens team as they prepare for the Olympics Games later in the summer.
