Liam Brady: ‘I was always confident in my ability to play football. It was what I was waiting for’

Liam Brady’s terrific new book opens in Ireland’s dressing room in Dalymount Park, before his first cap against the USSR in 1974.

It was poky and damp and neglected, and nearly half a century later Brady can recall the salty odours of pints and piss from the bar next door. He thought he was coping with his nerves until kick-off approached and he vomited the scraps he had eaten for lunch. Brady was 18 and about to fly.

“Once the game gets under way it’s like, that’s it,” he says now. “You can either do it, or you can’t do it. If you’re nervous two minutes into a match you’re f**king done, you’re no good – you’re no good. You don’t want the ball.”

The seven ages of Brady’s life in football have flashed before our eyes. In the beginning he was an exotic creature. His passing was sophisticated and sometimes surprising and sometimes risky; he could beat a man with a sudden fizz of acceleration and he had an explosive shot. Players like him didn’t come from here; he was some kind of glorious genetic detour.

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If you only know him from his perch in the RTÉ studio for 25 years, or as the head and heart of the Arsenal academy for nearly 20 years, or as Giovanni Trapattoni’s assistant with the Ireland team for a couple of seasons, you won’t remember what Brady was like in the 1970s.

In those days a lot of young men wore their hair down to their shirt collars; some of them looked like the Bay City Rollers; Brady looked more like Peter Frampton or Rory Gallagher, primed for the next riff.

On the pitch and in his life he took chances. Professional football is a borderless place now, but when Brady left Arsenal for Juventus in 1980 it was a sensation. Manchester United were prepared to pay a million pounds for Brady, at a time when seven figures still had a mesmeric quality in the transfer market. But he wanted to be bold.

“I wanted the adventure of going abroad, and the money that was on offer, to be honest about it. The money that Juventus paid me I couldn’t have got paid in England. But I had just got married [to Sarah] and it was like an adventure. I wanted to go.”

Back then, Italy was the biggest and most glamorous league in the world. Each club was only allowed two overseas players, which intensified the scrutiny. There were three daily newspapers devoted entirely to sport and, in this giant goldfish bowl, Brady was one of the tropical species.

“In the papers on a Monday morning there was a separate classification [in the coverage] for how the foreign players were doing. I had a couple of wobbles over there. I delivered at Juventus. At Sampdoria, I delivered. Then I went to Inter Milan, where we had a great team, and we were expected to win, and we didn’t do it. That was pressure.

“Then you read in the papers that you’ve not delivered for the club, and things like that. It could have been so much greater. You’ve got to look at yourself, always. ‘Did I do as well as I could have done?’ I don’t think I did. But footballers like to blame managers as well. We had a rookie manager and there were a lot of big personalities at the club.”

Brady was adamant that his second book, 43 years after his first, would only be about his life in football, devoid of introspection, or anything about his private life, save for his upbringing on Dublin’s northside. But he couldn’t recount his story as a footballer without revealing something of himself. That demarcation would have been impossible to enforce.

There are two stories about penalties that are telling. The one he took to win the league for Juventus in the final game of his second season – when it was already known that Michel Platini was coming to the club as his replacement – is a testament to his bottle that is forever quoted.

The other story concerns Malcom MacDonald, a brash, flashy, prolific centre-forward who arrived at Arsenal in a blaze of hype towards the end of Brady’s time at the club. He was the nominated penalty taker, but his strike rate was so risible that it impacted on the economy of the dressing room.

“In those days you’d get a 100 quid bonus for playing and a win bonus on top. Malcom’s success rate with the penalties was probably about 50%, and the ones he missed was costing us money on our win bonus. So I said to the lads, ‘To hell with this’. We had an inner team circle and they said, ‘Yeah, get him out of that job’. I said, ‘Malcom, you’re not taking them anymore’. He wasn’t happy.” Brady took over.

That confidence was essential to him. For seven years in Italy, it was his first and last line of defence.

“When I came back [from Italy] I was so much more – how can I say – I was so much more assured. I had kind of made my fortune, if you know what I mean. I’d made a lot of money and looked after it properly. I came back feeling good that I’d gone there.”

In his career there was turbulence too, from time to time. In the corrosive final years of Eoin Hand’s reign as Ireland manager, Brady’s performances drew sustained fire from Eamon Dunphy. When Jack Charlton took over word reached him that the new manager planned to “bomb Brady out”.

“I played great under Jack. I had maybe two or three years [under Eoin Hand] where things weren’t good with the Irish team. I wasn’t performing. Eamon was writing stuff. Two of his columns every month were about me. But I refound myself when Jack took over and I played in all eight games when we qualified [for Euro 88]. People forget that. All eight. I went into training and showed him what I could do. He reluctantly picked me and then he couldn’t drop me.”

Injury and suspension ultimately ruled him out of the tournament, but it didn’t end there. Charlton gave him another chance the following season, in a home friendly against West Germany. After 30 minutes, though, Charlton yanked him off; Brady bridled furiously at the public indignity.

“That was the only time I ever fell out with him. I thought it was out of order, and I started to tell him that at half-time in the dressing room. It was head to head, me telling him what a big f**ker he was, you know, and him shouting, ‘Shut up, I pick the f**king team, you’re out of order.’”

Months later, out of the blue, Charlton sent him a letter, mending the fence with as much diplomacy and conciliation as he could muster. Their paths crossed again at Brady’s testimonial match, and many years later at Alan Ball’s funeral, but Charlton’s letter had drawn the pus from the sore.

Like other great players Brady tried his hand at management. He was appointed by Celtic in 1991 at a time of weak boardroom leadership and in an era of bullish, cash-fuelled, Rangers dominance. It lasted 27 febrile months and 116 matches. Just 10 weeks later he took the plunge with Brighton, when they were second from bottom of what is now League One, the third tier of English football.

He led them to promotion, and for a while they were flying high in the Championship, but the owners had no money to invest in the team and the cost-cutting and asset-stripping became insufferable.

For one away match, Brady paid the bus company on his credit card because the club had failed to pay their bills for the previous three months. After 100 matches, he quit. That was it. He was certain then that he wasn’t wired for the gig.

“In the Celtic history books I’ll be lucky to get a paragraph, but I was manager of Celtic and it was a great club to manage and I’m sorry I didn’t deliver. They gave me a chance. I’m not making excuses. I bought badly and I didn’t deliver. But I did a good job at Brighton, so I’ve got no regrets about that.

“It’s a merry-go-round that I didn’t want to get onto. You’d have sleepless nights wondering what you’re going to do the next day in training. Who are you going to drop? I remember saying to Johnny Giles did he have sleepless nights? Did he hell? The best managers sleep soundly. When you’re waking up in the middle of the night, and putting notes down, I think it tells you that you’re not really cut out for it. You have to have that inner confidence that you’re the boss and you can handle anything.”

Brady says he found a “vocation” in the Arsenal academy. Scouting has become a global enterprise now, some teenage kids will have an agent, and all of that had to be navigated, but the essence of the work was care and nurture. In that process, though, failure was unavoidable too. The first intake of boys are just eight years of age and many are released at 12. Delivering that news was part of Brady’s brief.

“It was the worst thing I had to do in football. I dropped Packie Bonner when he was at Celtic, but telling a kid that he won’t be with us next year, with his parents there, you know. Sometimes his parents will say, ‘You don’t realise how good my son is’. ‘Well, if he’s that good, he’ll prove me wrong, won’t he?’ A lot of them had careers elsewhere, but I wanted them to have careers.”

Brady was 13 when he first went on trial to Arsenal; packed off on a flight by himself, put up in a London hotel, the clock on his childhood losing minutes by the second.

“If you wanted to be a footballer you had to do that. We all knew we had to do it. You wanted to go. I didn’t think it was daunting, I thought it was exciting. I was always confident in my ability to play football. It was what I was waiting for.”

He flew.

Liam Brady’s Born to be a Footballer, published by Eriu, is available in all bookshops.

Liam will be signing copies on Saturday, October 21st at 12.30pm in Easons on O’Connell St, Dublin.