OH BROTHER!
When one turns up, the other follows — Manchester United, England, the TV commentary box... and now Valencia
The fairy dust has passed from Phil to Gary
As Gary and Phil Neville join forces again at Valencia, it seems more apt than ever that their powerful brotherly bond was forged on a barracks playing field in Bury.
The endless games of football and cricket they played together as boys unfolded next to the Greater Manchester home of the second Battalion, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. And Gary was a drill sergeant from the start. He still is. Apparently, if Phil suggests they meet up at 6pm, Gary will say, ‘Let’s make it 6.15’, for no reason other than to assert his authority.
social media was abuzz yesterday not just with news of the older Neville’s appointment as Valencia’s head coach, but with snide observations about his capacity to upstage his younger brother, who is now his second-in-command.
But ever since those early days on the barracks playing field, Gary has always taken charge and Phil, two years younger, has always been happy for him to do so. Theirs is not, and has never been, a relationship fuelled by powerful sibling rivalry, which in a way is surprising, given how intense Gary is about everything he tackles.
The key to understanding how they tick lies with their parents. Phil takes after their calm, easygoing mother, Jill. Gary is much more like their late father, Neville Neville. Phil’s twin Tracey, now coach of the England netball team, is temperamentally somewhere between the two, not as feisty and opinionated as Gary, nor as placid as Phil.
When they were growing up, sharing a bedroom until Gary was 19 and Phil 17, their dad brooked no nonsense from them, or from Tracey. Yet he carried out his fatherly responsibilities with almost religious zeal, and one of his main duties, as he saw it, was to nurture their innate sporting talent.
The boys’ football and cricket commitments did not sit easily with his job as a lorry driver, but for his regular journeys to Northamptonshire he would routinely leave the house at 4am, in order to be back in time to take them to training, or to watch them play. As Gary records in his 2012 autobiography, Red, his father’s determination to wring every ounce out of every day has rubbed off on him.
Their parents inculcated in them the overriding belief that family comes first. The two brothers would never drop the L-word, ‘love’, on one another, yet in Red, Gary also writes that when they were both making their way at Manchester United, if he had to give up his place in the team to anybody, ‘I’d always prefer it to go to Phil more than anyone in the world’.
He seems as honest a man as he is intense, so there is no reason to doubt him when he downplays any talk of sibling rivalry.
On the other hand, Phil once told me a revealing story. When they first played against one another in the Premier League, in a 1-1 draw at Old Trafford after Phil had joined Everton, the ball whizzed just past his head during a break in play.
‘When I looked round he was walking away pretending it wasn’t him. I said, “Gaz, what did you kick the ball at me for?” He said, “You’ve been there, Phil. You come to Old Trafford, you go over to your manager, you’re drinking your drink, swanning around. I thought, I’m not having that”. so he smacked the ball at me.’
It’s hard to imagine that a man so easily riled did not, as a teenager, take a fair bit of umbrage at the manifest superiority of his younger brother both academically (unsurprisingly, Gary was a rebel at school, while Phil unerringly toed the line), and on the sports field.
In his book, Gary is generous about the way sporting excellence came easier to Phil than it did to him. But is there, in the following passage, just a hint of enduring bitterness? ‘I struggled to make the county team; he played for England schoolboys at every level, going down to Wembley in his smart blazer, the cream of the crop.’
In cricket, the difference was even more marked. Gary was decentt enough to play for North off England schoolboys, batting at three with a lad called Michael Vaughan at four. But for Lancashire Under 14s, Phil was the stand-out player in a team that included Andrew Flintoff. Revealingly, he refers to Flintoff even now not as Freddie, but Flinty, the nickname that dates back to their teens.
For quite a while, cricket looked like the younger sibling’s destiny. At 15, Phil was playing for Lancashire seconds, and in Gary’s unwavering opinion: ‘Iff it hadn’t been for football he could uld have gone on to play cricket dozens of times for England at every level, there’s no doubt about that.’
But Phil’s abundant promise as a teenager is clearly a sight easier for Gary to deal with now than it was then. ‘He was a class act with gifts that set him apart from me,’ he writes. ‘Like millions of young boys, I dreamt of being a footballer. In my imagination I was the next Bryan Robson. But I wasn’t even the best sportsman in my own family.’
In adulthood, to a very large extent, those childhood discrepancies have been exactly reversed. Phil is a high achiever by almost any standards except those of his big brother. He played 59 times for England, but Gary played 85, becoming England’s most capped right back and leaving a hole that for years has been difficult to fill. Phil, by contrast, while a terrific servant for his country, is unfairly remembered for the mistimed tackle which gave away the penalty against Romania that sent England home from Euro 2000.
At Manchester United, when Gary was a certain starter under sir Alex Ferguson, Phil wasn’t always sure where he stood. That’s why he joined Everton, who did well enough during his time there, but back down the East Lancs Road, Gary was still collecting silverware.
And then they became television pundits, and it seemed somehow typical that Gary should become almost everyone’s favourite analyst while Phil at times floundered, being widely lampooned for his one-note co- commentary during the England v Italy match in last year’s World Cup.
It was as if all the fairy dust with which Phil had been anointed in boyhood had somewhere along the line transferred to Gary.
But none of that matters to Phil. And folk can say what they like about Gary upstaging him yet again; he’s clearly delighted to have his brother alongside him in La Liga, where they can talk about salford City, the team they co-own with Ryan Giggs, Paul scholes and Nicky Butt, and maybe occasionally reminisce about the old days at the barracks playing field in Bury.
But mostly they will knuckle down and try to make a success of the Valencia job. They might not pull it off. But they are Nevilles, so it will not be for the want of trying.