Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
FREEWHEELIN’ BRADY ABROAD
new doc a fascinating insightthe into Irish great’s career
IT WAS a phrase Liam Brady got used to hearing.
One that would be uttered, day after day, in training grounds in Turin, Genoa and Milan.
“Il buongiorno si vede dal mattino.” A good day starts in the morning.
Italians take that to heart. Consider the care and precision they put in to their first coffee of the day.
Brady has taken the lesson to heart in a new documentary about his football life — The
Irishman Abroad — which will air on RTE on February 13.
You will struggle to find a sports doc with a stronger start.
Darragh Bambrick’s film begins with a caption — Lake Como in Italy, and then we are with Brady at the wheel, talking to Bambrick out of shot.
He is playing music — John Lennon’s final album ‘Double Fantasy’ to be exact. ‘Starting Over’ comes on and Brady starts to sing along.
Then the memories come tumbling out of him.
On December 8, 1980, Lennon was murdered in New York. Brady was still finding his feet in Italy and was being driven to training by Juventus teammate Antonio Cabrini.
He had the radio news on and turned to Brady — ‘Lennon è morto’.
In the doc, Brady gets visibly emotional. “I had been in Italy just five months and was still a bit homesick,’’ he said.
“John Lennon was just 40 years old. He was just getting going again.
Music
“I cry whenever I hear this song.”
He goes silent for a moment, losing himself in the music. Then he comes alive, jigging and swaying to the beat while at the wheel.
It’s Liam Brady like we’ve never seen him before.
Bambrick’s documentary is divided into three parts: growing up in Dublin and the years at Arsenal, the Italian adventure, and days in green with Ireland.
What draws everything together is music. The soundtrack takes in everything from Italian Arias to The Beatles to David Bowie to Thin Lizzy to The Dubliners.
And Brady picked all the music for the soundtrack himself.
There is a famous photograph from his Arsenal days, relaxing in his London home with a pile of records — LPs from Horslips, Rory Gallagher, Bob Dylan.
That was no posed pic, something that quickly becomes clear in this film.
“I had money to buy records, which was the great love of my life. I could afford a new LP every week,’’ he said. “I saw Bob Dylan, went to The Who, saw all these legendary groups.
Vinyl
“It was a great time, there were so many bands to go and see. I didn’t read the newspaper, I read the NME (New Musical Express).
“It’s a funny thing, rock stars often want to be footballers, and footballers often want to be rock stars.”
We see Brady’s delight when coming across a rare Dylan LP — he’s still a vinyl man, of course — on a trip to a Turin record shop recently.
There are stories about rebel songs being played on the Arsenal team bus — they had seven players from Ireland, north and south, at the time and a manager from Belfast in Terry Neill.
For the parade through north London after winning the 1979 FA Cup, a tricolour flew at the front of the bus. Pat Jennings was friendly with Luke Kelly and that led to plenty of nights out that ended in sing-songs with legendary singer. But it wasn’t always easy to be Irish in England in the 1970s.
In the doc, Frank Stapleton recalls coming back to London after being on international duty and how they’d always be stopped and questioned by CID. Brady remembers one experience, in particular, vividly.
“It was a bad time, so much happening in Northern Ireland. The thing that struck me was that the English people didn’t really understand what was happening in Northern Ireland, didn’t understand the politics their government had put in place. They didn’t understand it, either,’’ he said.
“I was on the Tube one night
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, 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
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.