EMBLAZONED on the front cover of Liam Brady’s autobiography: ‘Born to be a Footballer’ is a close-up image of the former midfield star in the prime of his youth, ready to play a game for Ireland.
On the back cover is how he looks now, a 67-year-old man contented with his lot in life.
For obvious demographic and commercial reasons, if you happened to be browsing in a bookstore in England, you’ll find a different front cover – a photograph of Brady playing for Arsenal, right arm raised and celebrating a goal.
It’s not the first book the former Arsenal, Juventus and Irish international midfielder has written. He still winces at the mention of his first clumsy attempt, entitled: ‘So Far so Good’.
The elder Brady scolds his younger self for putting his “life story” in print at just 24-years-of-age.
It was a book - as he explains in this more definitive and thoughtful second attempt at telling his life story - which landed him in court.
“I obviously knew a lot more about what you must do when it came to writing this one,” Brady says.
“The first book was [from] a naïve young footballer getting bad advice. I wish I had left it alone. It kind of put me off doing another one but this pal of mine – Nick Callow – is a journalist and he was very persistent.
“Lockdown got me thinking that it might be something to do when you can’t do anything else, and I began to look back and research and speak to people.
“That was the foundation of the book and then I wanted to make it a fun book so that people might chuckle when they read things and to see that a footballer’s life is extraordinary, and that we all make bad decisions and there are ups and there are downs.”
‘Born to be a Footballer’, superbly ghost-written by Irish Examiner sports journalist Larry Ryan, is a fantastic read where Brady certainly conjures that everyman appeal.
Filled with funny anecdotes and wonderfully insightful stories of his six successful years in Italy and Arsenal days, you won’t read a better football book.
From the legendary Giovanni Trapattoni, his Juventus manager, arriving at Brady’s new apartment to wire up his stereo - to contemplating jumping out a window three floors up in “a comedy capers chase” around Mr Armalei’s office of Ascoli Football Club after the small provincial club in Italy didn’t quite live up its contractual obligations.
“Ascoli was a very nice town,” Brady says. “The supporters were right behind the club. It was a provincial Italian town – like Ipswich or Norwich. The president was a nutcase, and I hadn’t encountered that in Italy before as I had been at very professional clubs there [Juventus, Inter Milan and Sampdoria] but I regretted that move, obviously.”
Or the time when John Fashanu of the infamous Wimbledon threatened to kick him up and down Plough Lane during Brady’s latter playing days with West Ham.
After calling Brady a “Paddy b******”, the Irishman gave as good as he got with the once-feared ‘Crazy Gang’ ringleader.
‘You’re not fit to lace my f***ing boots,’ Brady responded. ‘You’re useless. You couldn’t trap a bag of cement.’
“Built like a light heavyweight boxer, sprinting towards me he was like a charging rhino,” Brady writes. “I pretended to pass but at the last second rolled the ball through his legs and he ploughed straight into the advertising hoardings…
“The rest of the game I made sure I never got myself in such a precarious position again.”
The story of ‘nutmegging’ Fashanu is told for comedic value rather than a former footballer boasting about his former glories on the field because Brady, in many passages, was his own harshest critic.
As his international career was approaching an unsatisfactory and bitter conclusion under Jack Charlton in 1989, he recounts his final game – a friendly against West Germany – when he was controversially substituted after 35 minutes.
“I cringe at a lot of old footage of my playing days,” he writes. “At my efforts to tackle, especially. There’s an embarrassing moment early in the game against the Germans.
“Thomas Hassler shapes to cross and I sell myself cheaply. Jack would have hated that. Afterwards, he said he knew after 15 minutes I couldn’t hack it at this level anymore. That was harsh.
“I was sure I could still play at this level but maybe I couldn’t play the football he wanted to play. But I still think he was wrong to do it, to haul me off after 35 minutes.”
Reflecting on the flaws in his own game, Brady says now: “I see a lot of games I played in and there were things I was really good at but there were also things I was really bad at.
“I never really sorted out the defensive side of my game. If I was playing now, I’d probably be put in a position where I didn’t have to defend. I watch players playing in the number 10 role – the likes of [Martin] Odegaard playing for Arsenal and [Kevin] De Bryune playing for Manchester City and there isn’t a great emphasis on them winning tackles or anything like that.
“I played central midfield for a lot of the time, and you needed to be good in there. Sometimes I watch games and I think, ‘I was terrible at that.’”
Some of the book’s best passages revolve around his fractious relationship with Charlton.
After being subbed off in that friendly, a war of words erupted between Charlton and Brady at half-time.
The lauded midfielder quit in the immediate aftermath without getting the chance to play in a major tournament.
A couple of seasons earlier, suspension - reduced on appeal - and a subsequent injury ruled him out of Euro 88 entirely, and the blow-up with Charlton put paid to him ever playing at Italia ‘90.
“I think Jack had it in his mind that he wasn’t going to put up with me for too long,” Brady says.
“I adapted my game, we qualified for Euro 88 and I’d a big say in that – nobody can take that away from me.
“People forget that. They just remember when we were at the Euros – they don’t remember us getting there.”
The book opens with Brady’s vivid recollections of the moments before his senior international debut against the Soviet Union at Dalymount Park.
“The changing room is a bit of a dump,” he writes. “Damp floorboards, chipped panelling on the walls… I can recall that day’s smells and sounds clearly. A cocktail of liniment oil from players’ rubs and Guinness and urine from the bar next door to the home dressing room…”
And, later, after his row with Charlton that ended his international career, Brady reflects: “Sixteen years after the innocence and magic of Dalymount and the USSR, it was a terribly sore way to wrap things up with Ireland.”
Of course, Charlton went a long way to mending bridges with Brady, later writing him a hand-written letter of apology for the hurt he’d caused him and the Englishman also helped greatly with his testimonial match.
When Brady was seeking a return to Arsenal after six fruitful years in Italy, he was the kind of player who didn’t fit easily into George Graham’s plans either.
The kid who learned his trade at St Kevin’s in Dublin ended up returning home and playing out the rest of his days with West Ham United.
“I can never see that style of football ever coming back again,” Brady says of the Graham and Charlton eras.
“Hitting it straight up to the striker and feeding off it. In Jack’s case it was a case of kick it into the corners and chase after it, harry the opposition into making mistakes.”
Although Charlton remains Ireland’s most successful manager, Brady contends that the same outcomes could have occurred had the team decided to play a more attractive brand of football.
“I’d be well up for the argument that we would’ve done equally as good or even better by playing the ball through midfield and using the skill that we had given the skilful players we had in the team,” Brady says.
“All you have to do is look at the number of goals we scored when we reached a European Championships or a World Cup – we didn’t score many goals at all.
“It was practical football and a way to make us hard to beat. In that respect, we became one of the toughest teams to play against.
“However, if we’d expanded a bit more with the skill element in the team I think we would have done better. But I can’t prove that; it’s just my opinion and nobody’s going to change that.”
Brady also keenly rejects the observation that the account relating to Charlton, who died in July 2020, carries an embittered tone.
“I don’t feel embittered at all towards Jack – I’d just have a different point of view. That was Jack’s way. I’d been in management as well, it’s all about getting results because that’s all the supporters want.
“Yes, they’d love to see you playing good football - but they want results.
“You look at the Irish team at the minute and there’s a craving to get back into contention for qualifying as we’ve been so far away from it for so long, that’s what the supporters want.”
If it was possible, Brady arrived back in England 1987 to resume his playing career a more cultured footballer.
He won back-to-back Serie A titles under Trapattoni at Juventus before the Italian giants signed Michel Platini – the darling of French football – ushering the Irishman out to the more modest environs of Sampdoria due to the limit on foreign players per team at the time.
He’d watched on television as his Juventus team-mates – Dino Zoff, Marco Tardelli, Paolo Rossi, Claudio Gentile, Antonio Cabrini, Franco Causio and Gaetano Scirea went on to win the World Cup in 1982 with the Azzurri.
Brady was a huge fan of Scirea – the classy libero for both club and country – who tragically died in a car accident in 1989 during a scouting trip for Juventus while in Poland.
“I think there was a petrol shortage in Poland at the time and he had some in the boot of his car. Terrible,” Brady remembers.
“Scirea didn’t get the recognition he deserved. He was up there with Franco Baresi and Franz Beckenbauer. He was the sweeper of the team, but he could have played anywhere. He’d get you seven or eight goals a season.”
Brady had learned so much from the Italian mindset and how they looked after themselves to prolong their playing careers.
“They were miles ahead of British and Irish players. We were all having a good time when we played our football and that went on from season to season.
“Very few of us thought of football being a 15-year career. That just wasn’t the outlook in England, whereas I learned very quickly in Italy that it was.
“They kept themselves in great shape because they wanted to stay on at Juventus and get their contracts renewed.
“The longer they could stay there, the more successful they would be and the more money they could earn. Players didn’t look that far ahead in England.”
While he played with some of the greats of the game in Turin, Brady rates Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, his Inter Milan team-mate for a couple of seasons, as the best he ever played alongside.
“The thing that struck me about Karl-Heinz was he’d get the ball 40 yards from goal and the next thing it would be in the back of the net.
“Very, very few players can do that – Messi and Ronaldo in the modern-day game could do that and going back to my time Maradona could do that. And going back to when I was a kid, Georgie Best could do that.”
Learning Italian was also key in Brady maintaining life-long friendships from his time in Serie A, and which also resulted in him persuading Trapattoni and his former Juventus midfield team-mate Marco Tardelli to take the Ireland job in 2008.
“The thing that struck me about Trapattoni above everything else was the respect the Juventus players had for him because he treated everybody equally and he was a very successful player himself.
“There are a lot of good players that haven’t made it in management and that’s probably down to character rather than knowledge – but Trapattoni had the character and the knowledge and he just gained the respect of all his players.”
Brady’s football management stops at Celtic, aged just 35 when he was appointed, and Brighton are some of the most candid parts of this fascinating autobiography, but he always felt his job at Arsenal in later years, Head of Youth Development, was an infinitely better fit.
Throughout his life, his mentor and friend John Giles has been a constant source of sage advice – influencing Brady’s decision to try his luck in Italy in 1980 and then persuading him to join RTE alongside himself, Eamonn Dunphy and the late Bill O’Herlihy.
Now having hung up his microphone, Brady was more than a little sympathetic towards Ireland’s outgoing manager Stephen Kenny insofar as he never had enough quality resources to work with while in the job.
But that’s another pundit’s gig these days. The image on the back cover conjures someone that has enjoyed over 50 years in football.
One of Ireland’s greatest, Liam Brady is contented with his lot – and he should also feel the same about his second, less clunky, attempt at telling his story. It’s a brilliant, engaging read.
