Glorious Fifties
The 1951/52 season would see Gibbons and St Pats stun Irish football by winning the league championship in their first season. Gibbons was the top scorer in the league with 26 goals in 22 games. In May 1952, only 15 months after playing non league football, Gibbons made his debut for the Republic of Ireland senior team in Cologne against Germany. In 1952/53 Gibbons was again the League's top scorer with 22 goals in 22 games, including five in one game against Raich Carter's Cork Athletic. The 1953/54 season was a disappointing season for Gibbons as he struggled with only 9 goals. He did however win his 2nd full international cap in a World Cup qualifier against Luxembourg .
He was controversially dropped for the 1954 FAI Cup final and St. Pats lost to Drumcondra. In 1954/55 Gibbons scored 28 goals as St. Pats won the league for the second time. The following season he again topped the league scoring charts with 21 goals as St. Pats won an amazing 3rd league title in their first five years . He earned the last two of his four international caps in the autumn of 1955 in games with Yugoslavia and Spain . Throughout his St Pats career Gibbons played many times for the League of Ireland selection at a time when they were seen as equal to full international games. Gibbons only played a handful of games for St. Pats in 1956/57 season but still managed to score 2 goals to bring his St. Pats tally to 108 goals in little over 5 seasons.
Read more about this topic: Shay Gibbons
Famous quotes containing the words glorious and/or fifties:
“‘O glorious Life, Who dwellest in earth and sun,
I have lived, I praise and adore Thee.”
A sword swept.
Over the pass the voices one by one
Faded, and the hill slept.”
—Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938)
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)