After fighting extinction, Shamrock Rovers savour unlikely Hoop dreams

The fact that Shamrock Rovers chairman Jonathan Roche spent the aftermath of his side's unlikely victory over Partizan Belgrade figuring out how to get from the Balkans to Monaco for Friday's Europa League group stage draw suggests he may not have been hugely confident of success in last night's second leg. Playing their football in an Ireland where the majority of grown men watch perched on bar stools and have long referred to Premier League clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool as "we", the men in green and white hoops have spent decades dealing with everything their sport has to throw at them except acclaim.

Champions of a domestic league where the highest earner trousers approximately €50,000 per year and the average salary is less than half that, the Irish champions went into last night's second leg desperately needing to score after a 1-1 draw in Dublin. A first-half Vladimir Volkov goal for Partizan, who played in last season's Champions League group stages, meant Rovers still needed a goal, which arrived in the scarcely credible form of an astonishing 30-yard screamer on the volley from full-back Pat Sullivan, to restore parity just before the hour. Substitute Stephen O'Donnell's extra-time penalty may not have been as aesthetically pleasing as his team-mate's strike, but will go down as the first spot-kick in football history to prompt the name of a League of Ireland club to trend worldwide on Twitter.

It's one hour and 34 minutes from Belgrade by plane, a short hop but plenty of time for Roche to have contemplated the long road the 16-times League of Ireland title-winners have travelled since their demotion to the second tier of the League of Ireland in 2005. While flirting with extinction and suffering the ignominy of relegation after years of financial mismanagement, Rovers were eventually saved by a consortium of supporters, including their current chairman, who have since turned the most successful club in Irish history into a model of prudence: one owned and run by its own fans, with a sustainable financial plan and loyal local support in their Dublin home of Tallaght.

The Rovers garden hasn't always been this rosy. For over 20 years the club's name was a byword for homelessness after their owners, the Kilcoyne family, enraged fans by selling their Milltown ground to property developers in 1987. As a cub reporter on Hot Press magazine in Dublin during the mid-90s, I vividly remember hailing a taxi to a post-pub house party in a Dublin suburb, only for the driver, a Hoops fan, to point-blank refuse the fare because our destination was the housing estate for which Rovers' ground had been sold to make way. Not long afterwards I began attending Rovers matches on a fairly regular basis, as their home fixtures were played in my then locale of Fairview at Tolka Park, a stadium they shared with landlords and local rivals Shelbourne. It was one of five different grounds in and around Dublin the nomadic Rovers were forced to call home throughout two decades after the sale of Milltown, not counting a handful of occasions when circumstance and penury forced them to play home fixtures at the grounds of opponents.

Such dark days seem a thing of the past since their takeover by the 400 Club, who quickly purged the dressing room, assembled a young new squad on a shoestring and slowly but surely got the club back on an even financial keel. Having secured promotion back to the Irish top flight after just one season in the doldrums (they conceded 13 goals in 36 games on their way to the title), the next step of their plan was to move into a 10,000-seater stadium owned by the local authority in Tallaght on Dublin's southside. Thwarted at every turn, after seemingly interminable wrangling over planning permission followed by an unsuccessful legal challenge for use of the ground from a local Gaelic Athletic Association club, Rovers eventually ran out as sole tenants of the Tallaght Stadium (revised capacity 6,000, much of it standing) on 13 March 2008. The official housewarming was staged the following July, with Newcastle United, Hibernian and Real Madrid among the guests of honour.

In the wake of last night's heroic victory over Partizan Belgrade, Rovers find themselves with a raft of new problems to contend with, not least how best to spend the £1m windfall which is guaranteed as a result of their qualification for the Europa League group stages. Under existing Uefa regulations, the club could be forced to stage their home games at Dublin's Aviva Stadium, although the cheaper and more romantic alternative is to install the seats that would bring their own ground up to the required standard. Of more pressing concern is the small matter of the Irish domestic football season played through the summer these days, with fiscal necessity dictating that the contracts of Rovers' players expire in November. It is a state of affairs that is less than ideal, not least because their European campaign will last until the middle of December at the earliest.

Shamrock Rovers are no strangers to European adventure, their most notable near miss coming in the early rounds of the 1966 Cup Winners Cup, when it took a late Gerd Muller strike in the Olympic Stadium to spare Bayern Munich's blushes in a 4-3 aggregate win. Only time will tell whether Rovers can run Rubin Kazan, PAOK Salonica and Tottenham Hotspur as close, but the fact that they're even scheduled to play such fixtures must surely be beyond their loyal fan base's wildest Hoop dreams.