Chris Hughton could be exactly the kind of ‘safe option’ Ireland need as manager

On the day after his debut for Ireland the Irish Examiner carried a close-up shot of Chris Hughton singing the national anthem.

It was an unusual choice of picture that reflected the storylines of a low-wattage friendly against the USA. The caption underneath read that Hughton had been “word-perfect”, which is not something that many of us could claim in our match-day mangling of Amhrán na bhFiann.

On an October Bank Holiday Monday, 45 years ago, Hughton became the first black player to represent Ireland. Only a couple of months earlier he had become just the second black player to line out for Spurs, and the first since Walter Tull at the beginning of the century. Garth Crooks was next. Three black players in eight decades didn’t put Spurs out of line with their peers; that was the scale of the inequality.

Britain was a far more multicultural society than Ireland in the 1970s and 80s, but for much of Hughton’s playing career the face of British football was white.

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Looking around the Premier League now, with its global scouting networks and its multinational, multi-ethnic squads, it is hard to imagine how difficult it was for Hughton to break through, and it is much too easy to forget.

Having played for the country of his mother’s birth Hughton is now managing Ghana, the country of his father’s birth, a rare double in the history of international football.

Next weekend the Black Stars open their campaign in the African Cup of Nations with a match they will expect to win against Cape Verde, but Ghana are not among the favourites for the tournament. Results have been patchy in recent months and optimism is scarce.

For Hughton, though, it represents another milestone in an extraordinary life in football. Have we celebrated that enough? Watching his professional life unfold in front of our eyes for nearly half a century, have we really appreciated what a pathfinder he has been?

Everything Hughton has achieved in the game ran contrary to the status quo and the oppressive norm. Only 11 black men have been managers in the Premier League since it started, more than 30 years ago. Some of them had a very short innings. Only Hughton has managed at three different Premier League clubs: Newcastle, Norwich and Brighton.

The odds against him ever getting a job in management as a black man were stacked from the beginning. At one stage in 2017, the only two black managers in the top four divisions of English football were Hughton at Brighton in the Premier League and Keith Curle at Carlisle in League Two. At that stage, about a third of players in the Premier League were either black, Asian, or came from an ethnic minority.

Those numbers didn’t add up, but the absence of diversity in the dug-outs has never caused a shrieking outcry.

A report released by the Black Footballers Partnership last March showed that only 4.4 per cent of all management-related positions were held by a black man across the 92 football league clubs in England and Wales; only a handful of black men were in a manager role.

It brought to mind something Hughton once said about his time as a player.

“The perception of black players,” he said, “was that ‘they can play on the wing, and they’re really quick, but they’re not captaincy or organisation material.”

It was the same kind of prejudice and racial stereotyping that stymied the development of black quarterbacks in the NFL for decades.

Hughton convinced people to see him for what he was, or what he could be. After his playing career finished, he spent 14 years on the coaching staff at Spurs, serving under 10 different managers. On two occasions, after Spurs had sacked the incumbent manager without a ready replacement, Hughton stepped into a caretaker role.

The club would have seen him as a safe pair of hands, and around the game Hughton would have been regarded as an ideal number two: smart, supportive, steady, calm, unthreatening. Hughton could have accepted this typecasting with its inbuilt limits and pursued a fine career in the shadows.

Instead, he surrendered to his ambition. When he led Newcastle to promotion in 2010 they had the title race in the Championship wrapped up by the middle of April, a record at the time. When he brought Brighton into the Premier League in 2017 they had been absent from the top flight of English football for 34 years.

Anybody who has been in the game as long as Hughton builds a reputation for something. The perception of Hughton as a manager was that he produced teams that were well-organised, defensively sound, hard to beat, but not exhilarating to watch.

The clubs that appointed him, though, knew what he would bring, and would have concluded that he was perfect for their circumstances. When he took over at Nottingham Forest, for example, they were bottom of the Championship with no points after four matches. They weren’t looking for flamboyance. Forest lost just one of their next seven matches as Hughton steered them carefully away from peril.

After Stephen Kenny’s reign ended, Hughton’s name inevitably appeared on various lists of prospective replacements. He had been involved before as Brian Kerr’s assistant and his career in management was an open book.

His name, though, hasn’t generated any groundswell of support. Immediately, he was characterised as a safe option. Does that mean he might make Ireland hard to beat again? In any case, he doesn’t seem to be part of the conversation.

Kerr said that he received hate mail for having Hughton and Adam Bux on his staff, and for picking black players on the Ireland team.

“I hired those men because of their ability,” Kerr said years later, “and I was also aware that the staff should be representative of the team. We had black players in our team so the staff should have black people in it too.”

Not everybody that Hughton has encountered in football shared Kerr’s enlightened views. Dealing with racism has been part of his professional life. It never stopped him, or deflected him. He carried himself with stainless dignity, always.

We like to believe that our sports people represent the best of us. In some cases, we trail miles behind their lead.