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On a November night in 1993, when the Troubles were in full spate, a run-of-the-mill meeting was held at Clontarf FC to select teams for the following weekend. The senior side were due to travel north for a longstanding friendly fixture with Dungannon. The meeting, however, was dominated by uncertainty over the availability of a few players. A week earlier, seven people had been shot dead in the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel, Co Derry. An eighth victim would die a few months later from injuries sustained in the attack. It was a UDA reprisal shooting, coming hard on the heels of the Shankill Road bombing, which claimed 10 lives. Even allowing for the scale of the Troubles, the carnage from both scenes represented disturbing escalations. A handful of Clontarf’s players were having second thoughts about the wisdom of going north for a day out. The context, though, was that rugby saw itself as an important symbol of normality against the soundtrack of mayhem. Clontarf’s representative on the Leinster Branch attended the selection meeting in Castle Avenue to clarify the consequences of not fulfilling the fixture. “Ned van Esbeck was on to me for half an hour today and he’ll be ringing me first thing in the morning,” he said, clearly rattled. “I’m telling you, he went through me for a shortcut.” READ MORE The gist of it was this: it would be very bad for business if a link in the rugby chain came loose. It was instructive that this message was being reinforced not by a committee member from the Leinster Branch, or indeed the IRFU, or even a representative of the Ulster Branch. Rather, the call had come from the rugby correspondent of The Irish Times. The passing of Edmund ‘Ned’ van Esbeck last week is less the end of an era – for his typewriter went silent 24 years ago – and more a reminder of a time when the dedicated sports correspondents on newspapers were players themselves. Not in the sense of blood, sweat and tears, but as an integral part of the show nonetheless. Ned was front and centre. It’s hard to think of a man less suited to the modern role of influencer, but before that podium became popular he was in the gold-medal position. Consider the way the game looked when he was coming around the bend in the summer of 1979, as Ireland were preparing to tour Australia. He was rock solid in his position as rugby correspondent of a newspaper that valued its coverage of the sport higher than either of its rivals, the Irish Independent or Irish Press. Ireland were travelling with hopes of being very competitive. In Tony Ward, they had a talented, high profile and photogenic outhalf who was the European Player of the Year. Sensation was not a word lobbed into many sentences about the game here, but it bounced around like a ping-pong ball when Ward was dropped for Ollie Campbell ahead of the first Test. Suddenly, rugby was big news – but where could you access it? There was no email, no internet, no mobile phones, no WhatsApp. No range of talk radio options. No podcasts. If you wanted to find out what was going on Down Under, you bought a newspaper and relied on the version of events supplied by its correspondent on the spot. Of the journalists covering that tour, Van Esbeck was the best equipped to deliver. If other writers enjoyed the gig for its own sake, then Ned was the hunter gatherer who dominated the landscape and revelled in the pursuit. He loved rugby and he loved having the best seat in the house. For a time, he even controlled which other journalists would get seats in the press box at Lansdowne Road. In Hollywood of the 1930s-60s, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were the feared correspondents who kept the movie producers and their array of talent on a short leash. In Irish rugby coverage, Ned understood that relationship better than any of his rivals. Moreover, he saw the value in giving some love to the schools game, specifically the Leinster Schools Senior Cup. This in turn laid building blocks into the brand of The Irish Times as Ireland’s rugby newspaper. If your school were lucky enough to lift the trophy on St Patrick’s Day, then you enjoyed the double whammy of a front-page photo of the winning captain, receiving the trophy from his mother, with a report of the game from the newspaper’s rugby correspondent leading the sports pages. Quite the statement. It became part of rugby’s establishment, of which Ned was an integral part. Equally, it would cause him much heartache when the dawn of the professional era drew a dark cloud over amateurism and its skewed values. Like the committee men with whom he had such a close bond, that transition was one he could never learn to love, and he didn’t try too hard. By then, his influence over the comings and goings of the country’s clubs had waned, as had their place in Ireland’s pecking order. As it happened, Clontarf travelled to fulfil that fixture in 1993. Of several moving parts, it would be naive to think his intervention was not a factor in the decision to saddle up and ride north.