Capital gains for the Treaty
and these guys were getting a bit forward with the girl I was with.
“I told them to stop and they recognised my Irish accent. They turned out to be from Birmingham and I became the subject of their temper over what had happened in Birmingham.
Beating
“Nobody helped me, but I managed to play on the Saturday. It wasn’t too bad a beating.”
His time in Italy — with Juventus and Sampdoria, especially — changed Brady’s life immeasurably.
You can see it in the affectionate way he interacts with the likes of Italian giants Claudio Gentile and Marco Tardelli.
Family is a cornerstone of Italian life,
ICONS: Bob Dylan and John Lennon
(right)
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and Sampdoria marked the birth of the Bradys’ daughter, Ella, by bringing out posters and flags bearing her name.
On a visit to Turin, Brady meets up with Juventus goalkeeper, Wojciech Szczesny — who the Dubliner brought to Arsenal during his time as head of youth development.
The exchange between the two is worth recording.
“Liam was cold. You were strict, you weren’t one of these people who put their arms around you. You were cold,’’ said Szczesny. “People were scared of you. The coaches were Steve (below)
Bould and Neil Banfield, both tough, but people were scared of you, not of them.
“I always felt that Liam liked me, I could tell. Remember you’d give me 20 pounds a month for my phone?”
Brady’s response is: “Shhhh, I wasn’t meant to do that.”
Family
Schenzy laughs. “Ah, you’re not working anymore. That 20 pounds made a difference to me. That was me talking to my family. Thanks for that.”
And the two men clasp hands. Brady was the main man on the Ireland team for 15 years, before Jack Charlton effectively ended his international career by substituting him in the first half of a friendly against Germany.
In Paul Rowan’s book The Team That Jack Built, Charlton made it clear that he’d gone out deliberately to humiliate Brady — he wanted to show to Irish fans that the player was ‘’finished’’, in the manager’s words.
“With Ireland, they don’t give up on their fucking heroes easily, so you’ve really got to show ’em,’’ Charlton told Rowan.
Brady, though, is at pains to make it clear that their relationship wasn’t quite like many think.
“This film is an opportunity to tell people I didn’t have a problem with Jack,’’ he said.
“I had an idea of the way football Jack should be played, he had his way. It’s a shame the way it ended up.”
Then he pulls out a letter from the late great Geordie and reads it aloud.
We won’t spoil it by detailing the words here. But it is the perfect finish to a documentary with a perfect start.
FOR just the third time ever tomorrow, the Dublin team bus will be pointed for Limerick.
The first was in Askeaton in March 1993, when Dublin scored a six-point win, and the next was on February 10, 2007, when they escaped from the Gaelic Grounds with a 0-14 to 1-10 victory.
The previous weekend, Dublin and Tyrone had played out a League opener in front of 81,678, a record attendance for a game in the competition.
But just 1,227 paid through the turnstiles at the Gaelic Grounds seven days later.
Former Limerick midfielder John Galvin reflects: “I suppose the only time we had a big support was, I wouldn’t even say it was massive like, but when we got to Munster finals you had somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 people there.
“But besides that, we just wouldn’t have a massive football following.
Decent
“Look, we’re in a hurling county and I think alright, back in 2003, 2004, we had built up a decent following and then we got relegated and it all went away again and it never got back up.”
Limerick had come unbearably close to a first provincial title since 1896 under Liam Kearns on more than one occasion and after he left in 2005 a rebuilding job was passed over to Mickey Ned O’Sullivan.
Still, they were at a decent level, competing in a 16-team Division One (divided into two eights) in 2007 having won promotion.
“When Liam Kearns left, a couple of the older players left with him and Mickey Ned had to start blooding new younger players that time,” explains Galvin.
“I suppose we had done well to get to Division One but we just… we probably weren’t ready for it at the time.
“Even though we had a lot of close games that year, we weren’t ready for it I suppose.”
Year
And yet had they beaten Dublin they’d have earned a spot in the revamped Division Two the following year, while Caffrey’s Dubs would have been landed in Division Three instead.
“One thing I do remember is Pa Ranahan, who played for a long time afterwards,” adds Galvin.
“He got through on goal at one stage there and Cluxton saved it and the only thing I do remember about the game that if Pa Ranahan had stuck that goal we probably would have won it.”
As it was, Tomas Quinn kicked a 45 in injurytime to give Dublin a one-point win.
Limerick matured under O’Sullivan’s guidance and, again, came so close to that elusive Munster title in 2009 and ‘10, losing finals narrowly to Cork and Kerry respectively.
But a power shift in Gaelic football was kicking in at that stage and Galvin largely puts it down to the GAA scrapping the League structure that pertained up until 2007.
“The biggest blow to the League ever,” he says. “You basically made sure that the stronger teams were playing the stronger teams week in, week out and the weaker teams were playing weaker teams week in, week out.
“The levels did change pretty quickly in the space of a couple of years then.
“There definitely wasn’t as big a gap between the top teams and the lower tier teams back then.”