Hughton: I would never say never with Ireland
After a distinguished playing career Hughton is now a top coach, so is he...
CHRIS HUGHTON would be ready to take on the Republic of Ireland manager’s job should it become available at some stage in the future. The highlyregarded Brighton boss hasn’t discounted a shot at coaching his country but for now is not looking beyond his role with the Premier League club, where he is under contract until 2020. ‘It [managing Ireland] is definitely something that I would never say never to,’ said the former Ireland fullback. ‘If you’re going to coach, you want to coach at the highest level, and being able to do that at international level is the highest level. ‘My real desire is dayto-day football, being out there on the training ground,’ added the 59-year-old. Under Hughton, Brighton have won promotion to the Premier League and can today advance to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup for the first time since 1986, should they beat Coventry City. But the former Spurs player is well aware of the fickle nature of management. It is more precarious than at any other time. We’ve got to the stage where you come in in the morning, Sky Sports is on and someone’s gone. ‘Anyone that decides they want to come into management will have to understand it’s a different type of life. The average expectancy is 13 TURN TO PAGE 76, COL 2
THE morning after his second FA Cup win with Spurs in 1982, Chris Hughton arrived at Heathrow Airport for a long-haul trek to Port of Spain.
He wasn’t heading there on holidays, but rather for a low-key Republic of Ireland international against Trinidad & Tobago.
The Cup final replay against QPR meant he missed the glamour game of Ireland’s end of term tour, against Brazil — Falcao, Socrates and Zico all scored in a 7-0 win — but he was prepared to make a 9,000-mile round trip because he’d given his word to Eoin Hand, the Irish manager, he’d be there.
Only there was no airline ticket in his name at the desk; someone in the FAI had cancelled it. A little nonplussed, he turned around and went home, while Hand waited in vain for his full-back to arrive.
At Brighton and Hove Albion’s shiny training centre in Lancing, where everything bar the pitches are blue and white, Hughton allowed himself a smile on Thursday as he recalled a story which said as much about the FAI’s then parsimonious ways, as it did about his sense of duty to Ireland.
‘Irish team players in my experience were always committed. I can’t remember too many friendlies where players were pulling out,’ he recalled.
‘That’s always been the case. Part of it is wanting to play at the highest level but also the fact the Irish team was like a club unit and you always wanted to be there.’
‘That time in 1982, I got to the airport after the celebrations to find there wasn’t a ticket left in my name, so I didn’t go (to Trinidad).’
Hughton was 10 stone 12 pounds when he retired as a footballer, and weighs in today two pounds less which he reckons is, in part, to metabolism passed on by his parents, Ghanaian- born Willie Hughton, who settled in London, and Christine Bourke from Limerick.
At 59, he has a sprinkle of grey in his crinkly curls and sports a bandido-style ‘tache and beard, but he looks like he could still over-lap at pace, as he did in his prime for Spurs and Ireland.
As a player, the FA Cup was good to him. He played in three finals, and enjoyed two triumphs in a slick Spurs side that could turn on the style in the Cup, if not always over a 42-game season.
‘We ended up winning it in 81 and ’82 and also winning the UEFA Cup in ’84. We were very much a Cup team with the type of players we had. We had a lot of flair in the team with Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles.’
His last Cup final in 1987 was painful as Spurs lost in extra-time to Coventry City, by coincidence the club which today stands between Brighton and their first quarter-final in over 30 years.
Even with plenty of changes, Brighton should have enough quality to see off the League Two outfit and while he would cherish a run to Wembley, he knows Premier League survival is his priority. He is three years and a bit into his work at Brighton – already the 13th longest serving manager in the 92 League clubs — and the graph has risen steadily. From survival in the Championship in season one, to reaching the play-offs in season two, and promotion in season three. If Brighton stay up in the Premier League, it will represent further progress and he isn’t finished yet. ‘The objective is to make sure we stay in the division and develop, to become a mainstay in the Premier League. The way the big spending is going, it’s very difficult. ‘Can we become like Stoke, Southampton, West Brom, a team regularly in the division? That is what the aim and objectives are.’
And what if Ireland calls? As they did when he was just out of his teens, and again when Brian Kerr became manager, what then? Hughton smiles, for he knows the question is coming.
UNLIKE some others, Hughton didn’t grow up in Stratford, London, with a wall plastered with posters of Irish footballers. It was the late 1960 and early 70s, and the Irish team, Johnny Giles apart, weren’t all that good at the time.
He was aware of his Irish connections as he had uncles and aunts doted about London but trips to Ballinacurra Weston in Limerick were infrequent.
‘My grandmother, on my mother’s side, preferred to come to London instead. As a kid, I wasn’t in Ireland often, that I recall.’
He wanted to play football for Spurs and was with them from 13 to 16 but wasn’t offered an apprenticeship although ‘they must have seen something in me’ as he was asked to continue training twice a week with the youths as an amateur.
‘I did a four-year lift engineering apprenticeship and after that, I signed full-time and got straight in the team. I wasn’t thinking about international football, I wasn’t thinking “I wonder if Ireland will come in?” I just wanted to establish myself at Spurs.’
The call from Giles came quickly and the late Krish Naidoo, the South African-born entrepreneur who ran the Miss Ireland competition through the 80s and early 90s, was chiefly responsible. ‘Krish was a fanatical Spurs supporter and in his conversations with Bill Nicholson, and with Keith Burkenshaw, he ascertained my Irish background.
‘The FAI interest came through that avenue. Johnny Giles was manager and once I had the approach, I didn’t hesitate,’ said Hughton.
His debut in 1979 was a friendly against the USA at Dalymount Park and his final game was a Euro qualifier in 1991, against Turkey in a febrile Istanbul.
In that time, he chalked up 53 appearances, scored one goal – a cracker against Cyprus – and was selected by Jack Charlton for the finals of Euro ’88 and Italia ’90.
‘Playing for Ireland became a huge part of my footballing life,’ he recalled.
For Hughton, the opening game in Euro ’88, where Ireland stunned England 1-0 in Stuttgart, remains the ultimate high.
‘If you talk to anyone of an age who supported the national team at that time and spoke about their highest moment, it would be that first game,’ he said.
‘Not only to be in the championship, but to start with a win, no
If you’re going to coach, you want to do it at the highest level
matter how we got it, couldn’t have been any better. ‘Ironically, the next game (against USSR) was our best performance. We should have won and that would have put us through (to the semi-finals).’ But there were disappointments too, notably when Hand’s team were robbed by officialdom of a place in the 1982 World Cup finals — ‘Eoin was a good manager and he came so close’ — and in Italy in 1990, where he didn’t get on the field of play. ‘I remember having a conversation with Jack [Charlton] the day before we played England. He said depending on how we wanted to play would decide who was going to start. ‘By the end of the walk, I was starting to feel I wasn’t going to play. I knew it was either Steve [Staunton] or me, and Steve was a very good player. That I didn’t start in the first game wasn’t difficult, that I didn’t get any minutes at all was very frustrating. ‘If you haven’t played at all, if you haven’t contributed, that feeling that you haven’t been able to give anything on the pitch is difficult.’
Hughton returned for Ireland as assistant manager to Brian Kerr from January 2003 until October 2005, during which time Ireland lost just four games out of 33.
‘I knew Brian, not that well, but I knew of him. As soon as I met him, and he spoke about what he was going to do, I jumped at the opportunity. It was, in another way, a way of representing the country,’ he says.
‘Brian’s record stands up to most managers and I thought he deserved another go.’
As for himself, he would be the first name, along with Mick McCarthy, on many people’s lips when Martin O’Neill’s time as Ireland manager runs its course.
So would he consider it? His reply is, as expected, a diplomatic one. ‘It’s definitely something that I would never say never to,’ he said.
‘If you’re going to coach, you want to coach at the highest level, and being able to do that at international level is the highest level.
‘My real desire is day-to-day football, being out there on the training ground. I’m still youngish enough and fit enough.’