MASTER McGRATH
No matter how turbulent life was off the pitch, he retained so much grace on it — never more so than in Giants Stadium
ON A busy Saturday evening in Dublin around 20 years ago, three men in their early 20s spill onto the street, wondering where the night will take them. The lively debate ends when they spot a totemic figure from their childhood, a sporting god made flesh, walking towards them.
He stopped to chat. Even though he was known to be chronically shy and had better things to do than listen to us talk about his greatness in Giants Stadium, Paul McGrath was unfailingly polite. Excitement got the better of one of us. As the rest of our party stumbled from the pub, he shouted: ‘Look lads, it’s Ireland’s greatest-ever footballer.’
That is when McGrath became uncomfortable. Maybe, he didn’t want to talk again about Roberto Baggio or, perhaps, he didn’t consider himself worthy of the lofty title my friend had bestowed on him. Whatever the reason, he shook our hands, wished us a good night and darted up George’s Street as fast as his two fragile knees could carry him.
It was only when reading the brilliant and harrowing biography, Back From
The Brink, a few years later that it dawned on me how awkward that short, good-humoured exchange must have been for McGrath. Even though he remains, by some distance, Ireland’s most adored sportsperson, he has never been comfortable with the adulation.
We were reminded of this when he appeared on The Tommy Tiernan
Show last year. The host was as star-struck as anyone in McGrath’s presence but did his usual excellent job of bringing the conversation into revealing and hidden places. Near the end, McGrath mentioned how long ago, ‘the people of Ireland took me under their wing.’ Taken aback, Tiernan protested: ‘But you’re as Irish as I am.’
And he often seemed the best of us. His remarkable talent meant that he could appear superhuman on a football field, but his insecurities and vulnerabilities, the struggles with alcoholism and mental health, proved that he was as human as any of us. An ordinary person who happened to have an extraordinary gift.
Those three friends who bumped into him on a Dublin street were 17 on his greatest day. The Leaving Cert was finished, the summer was young and Ireland were playing in a World Cup. Life didn’t get much better. But there was no air of confidence surrounding Ireland’s opening game.
We were part of a generation taught to appreciate and love Italian football through James Richardson’s irreverence on Channel 4. Every Saturday, we would tune in religiously to Gazzetta Football Italia followed by a live match on Sunday. Serie A had the cream of world football at the time. And many of the star players were Italian.
Roberto Baggio was the best footballer on the planet. Paolo Maldini had a strong case for being the world’s best defender, although that case was a little flimsy when set against McGrath in Giants Stadium. There was Alessandro Costacurta and the ageless Franco Baresi, Roberto Donadoni, Dino Baggio and Guiseppe Signori. They were not just the favourites to beat us in New Jersey, they were the smart bet to go all the way.
Everyone knows the rest. At 34 years of age, with knees like dust and a virus eating into one of his shoulders, McGrath delivered the finest performance in Irish football history, perhaps the finest in Irish sport. Time and again, he kept Il Divine Codino (the Divine Ponytail, aka Roberto Baggio) at bay, the most famous sequence ingrained in the mind of every Irish supporter.
As the second half wore on, whether watching the game on a big screen in a pub in Ballyshannon or in Giants Stadium, it felt that it had been reduced to Italy against McGrath. Think of the closing minutes. Baggio lining up a shot from the edge of the box only for McGrath to appear from nowhere with one of those perfectly-timed sliding tackles, that were his trademark.
Donadoni whips in one of his wicked crosses only for McGrath to leap like a salmon and head the ball clear. Signori unleashing a thunderous strike and McGrath, on all fours, blocking it with his face. As Eamon Dunphy said on his
The Last Stand podcast recently: ‘In all my years, watching football, I can’t think of another match where one player did as much for his team as McGrath did for us in Giants Stadium.’
In the days that followed, stories emerged of how taken the Italians were by our hero. Baresi asked for his shirt, a clear example of game recognising game. There was even a story that former AC Milan star Alberigo Evani asked for his autograph, which didn’t even seem outlandish.
That would be the high point of a World Cup, and maybe a summer, that had promised so much.
But in the dizzy hours after the final whistle, nearly anything seemed possible with the team because we had Paul McGrath.
My earliest memory of him was the FA Cup final nine years earlier. Sprawled on the siting-room floor, staring up at a television screen. The Cup final meant endless hours of football on the telly, heaven for an eight-year-old. Switching from Bob Wilson on BBC to Saint and Greavesie on ITV before McGrath delivered the most masterful of performances.
It was an infuriatingly inconsistent United, but McGrath’s excellence stood out. He was exceptional as Ron Atkinson led them to 10 straight wins at the start of the following season. Even as United’s form deserted them in the second half of the season and their title hopes evaporated, McGrath’s grace and elegance in defence was the only thing they could count on. He finished runner-up in the PFA Player of the Year poll, behind Gary Lineker.
Big Ron would be gone a few months later, replaced by a Scottish disciplinarian. Alex Ferguson’s arrival coincided with the worst of McGrath’s knee problems.
The injuries didn’t help matters with the new United boss determined to break up the infamous drinking club of McGrath, Whiteside and Bryan Robson.
We would only learn later that Ferguson tried to talk McGrath into retirement. There was interest from Napoli and Tottenham, and another suitor was Liverpool, whose chief executive Peter Robinson made an enquiry.
‘There was no way in hell I was selling him to them,’ Ferguson later recalled.
Even after all the success Ferguson brought to United, the idea that he tried to coax McGrath into ending his career leaves a bitter taste. At best, it was deeply cynical, attempting to pay off one of his most talented players so none of his rivals could get him. It also feels irresponsible. Ferguson knew McGrath had problems with the demon drink and yet was willing to hand over a cheque for £100,000 – on top of what would be made from a touted testimonial in Ireland – and take away the one place that McGrath felt safe and free. The football pitch.
Gordon Taylor, that eternal head of the players’ union, mentioned when handing McGrath his Player of the Year award in 1993 that he had been dispatched to Manchester to smooth out details of his retirement. Imagine! Ireland would have been without their best player for Italia ’90. There would have been no giant of Giants Stadium. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Yet, he went to Villa Park and became the most popular player in that club’s history. McGrath’s rebirth at Aston Villa stands as one of the most remarkable stories in English football. Ferguson had given up on him largely because of the state of his knees. Medical advice suggested his days as a top-level footballer would soon be over. Terry Venables had been discouraged from signing him because he was told he only had two seasons left and may miss a dozen games in each campaign.
The fatherly encouragement of Graham Taylor, and later Big Ron, along with a training plan, or lack of one, devised sensibly by physio Jim Walker, allowed McGrath to flourish into the best defender in the league. Taylor knew it wasn’t important what McGrath did in training. He was bought for his telepathic ability to read a striker’s mind, his courage and the sense of anticipation that meant he was always in the right place at the right time. As the main pillar of a three-man central defence, he
ensured Villa had a mean defence that season, ending up runnersup to Liverpool. He was named Player of the Year in 1993, after being runner-up for a second time in 1991. Despite his knee problems and his life off the pitch often in disarray, McGrath played 252 times for Villa. The Holte End still sing his name louder than any others.
Going into Italia ’90, McGrath was widely recognised as one of Europe’s best centre-halves. Jack Charlton had an embarrassment of riches in that position, though – David O’Leary, Mick McCarthy and Kevin Moran – and so his best defender was stationed in the centre of the pitch where he happened to be Charlton’s best midfielder, too.
Italia ’90 was a national party, but the football was, by and large, forgettable. The one exception, as always, was McGrath. He was Ireland’s best player throughout the tournament – and those who tuned in to the nervy secondround encounter against Romania on TG4 recently were treated to McGrath in all his splendour.
During that game and indeed the whole tournament, he was both Ireland’s most creative force – think of the chance he created for Kevin Sheedy, via Niall Quinn’s knockdown, in the first half – and their most reliable defender; think of his wondrous, perfectly-timed sliding tackle to dispossess Gheorghe Hagi in the second half just as the little magician was getting a foothold.
McGrath made the game look simple, the art of defending look easy. No matter how turbulent things were off the pitch, he was magnificent on it. And if he so often represented the best of us, McGrath’s problems also stemmed from the worst of what Irish society once was. His mother, Betty, was forced to give him up at just a few days old and he was brought up in an orphanage in
Monkstown. The embarrassment of being a single mother of a biracial child in the repressed country that was 1959 Ireland saw his mother leave for London to give birth to her son.
His difficult upbringing resulted in the chronic shyness. It was only on the football field that he felt he could express himself fully. When on a trip to Germany with Dalkey United as an 18-year-old, McGrath drank for the first time and found the only thing, other than football, that made him feel comfortable.
The stories regarding his alcoholism have been well-documented. He tried to commit suicide on four occasions, and once played against Everton at Villa Park with wristbands on both of his forearms to hide the marks from an attempt just days before – not that it matters, but he was still exceptional that afternoon. There have been plenty of tales of him playing under the influence of alcohol. When contemplating McGrath, it is nearly impossible for the mind not to wander and think of how good he could have been, if he had perfect knees or his life away from the field was less turbulent. Perhaps, that is why McGrath’s beautiful and haunting rendition of The Contender, the famous song about Jack Doyle, has made such an impact recently on YouTube and social media.
But the idea of what could have been seems almost meaningless when you consider what McGrath had come through. The feeling that he didn’t belong, the mental health struggles, the alcohol addiction. And somehow, he still became one of our greatest-ever sportspeople and one of the most popular figures in Irish life.
He was blessed with an ability on the field that none of us can relate to, but his vulnerability off it was something we could all understand. As the late Graham Taylor put it once: ‘Paul is a world-class footballer who is also a human being.’
And that encapsulates why he is such a hero to so many of us, even if McGrath himself is probably a little uncomfortable with that tag.