I’LL BACK MYSELF EVERY TIME
Former Man City prodigy Jack Byrne says he has the talent to rebuild his career
JACK BYRNE is never going to pretend to be something he isn’t just to appease his detractors. In Ballybough, bashfulness gets you nowhere.
‘Too many footballers now just say what people want to hear and are just robots, to be honest,’ he begins. ‘That’s not me, it will never be me. I’ll say what I feel at the time and if it comes back to bite me on the a**e, then fair enough.’
Byrne left Dublin’s north inner city for Manchester City at the tender age of 14 and has carried an unapologetic confidence ever since. He keeps a photograph of the first day he walked through the door at City’s old Platt Lane training ground.
In it, he’s five foot nothing and the training gear is swimming on him; even the Adidas runners look a couple of sizes too big. He’s only a kid, another baby who has left Ireland in search of the Promised Land and there is the faint hint of a mischievous grin.
The innocence remains, but any naivety has long been chipped away. Byrne is 21 years old now and the gifted creative midfielder – about whom people in Irish football have been talking since City fought off Arsenal for his signature before he sat his Junior Cert – finds himself rebuilding a career, and reputation, with Oldham Athletic in League One.
If he was just breaking into the third tier of English football and producing a glut of man-of-thematch displays – five at the last count – as well as some spectacular goals, this would be the story of an up-and-coming starlet with the world at his feet and potential to be cherished.
But his route has been different and this current loan spell in the lower leagues could be viewed as just another stop in a career that is experiencing a slow descent rather than a rapid rise. The youngest of four, he signed a five-year contract at City just three years after losing his father to cancer and did so in search of a better life.
He seems brash, bold and seemingly cocky from the outside and the less sympathetic will view the past year as a healthy dose of medicine for an overly confident young footballer.
‘Sometimes people get it wrong between having a personality and being stupid. But Jack Byrne has personality,’ Patrick Vieira, his former City youth coach, explained in 2015. ‘I love him more than anything else.’
Byrne has had a rotten time since leaving SC Cambuur, following a season in the Dutch Eredivise, and returning to the north west of England last summer.
Another loan from City, this time to Blackburn Rovers, was a disaster, while one month into a permanent three-and-a-half-year move to Wigan Athletic, the manager who had signed him, Warren Joyce, was sacked. It’s all a far cry from when Martin O’Neill invited the then teenager to train with the Republic of Ireland in March last year to get a closer look at the diminutive playmaker earning rave reviews in Holland. Byrne wasn’t actually part of the squad for the friendlies against Switzerland and Slovakia building up to Euro 2016, but that didn’t stop the FAI putting him forward to speak to the media. He wasn’t shy about pressing his case.
‘I don’t think I’m ahead of schedule just because I’m 19. I believe in my own ability and that I’m as good as anybody in the squad,’ he said. O’Neill dealt with his comments using typically caustic wit.
‘If he backs it up with ability, then great. If he turns out to be crap that’s his problem. If he’s cocky, then great, well done. He might have a bit of that knocked out of him by the senior boys.’
The belief remains and so does the single-minded determination.
‘People were asking me questions and I said what I felt at the time, I wasn’t going to lie,’ Byrne recalls of his remarks last year.
‘You have to back yourself. If you don’t back yourself, no one is going to do it for you.
‘I was just saying what I felt,’ he continues. It wasn’t as if I was coming out and saying, “Oh, I’m better than James McCarthy and David Meyler and all these top pros”. I wasn’t saying that.
‘At the time, I was playing every week
I’ll say what I feel and if it bites me on the a**e then fair enough
in Holland. Playing against Ajax, Feyenoord, PSV. I was doing well, so why wouldn’t I back myself? I still would now because you have to believe in yourself.
‘You’re standing on your own. It’s a team game but it really is all down to yourself. Hopefully one day I’ll get back in and around it with Ireland.
‘Nothing fazes me. Sometimes you have to take 10 steps forward and 20 back to get where you want to be.
‘Some people probably think I can’t play in England. Course I can. I see this move as a positive. You have ups and downs in football and learning how to cope with them is the hardest thing you can do.’
Whenever he comes back to Dublin, he’ll head for Dollymount Strand to think about his late father, John.
‘It’s where his ashes were spread,’ he explains. ‘It helps clear my head.’
Byrne’s focus was sharpened even before he was a teenager, when he was impressing for St Kevin’s Boys in the age group below Robbie Brady and Jeff Hendrick, and football became his sole purpose thanks to his mother Jackie’s guiding hand.
‘After my Dad died, she was struggling for two years, there was no one working in our house.
‘It was just my ma. I had holes in my boots going to football but my ma was unbelievable.
‘She never missed a training session and St Kevin’s were great, they didn’t take subs off me. It was a tenner a week, but that was a lot of money to us. That’s a big factor in why I went away so young.
‘I had friends getting involved in stuff and there was nothing there for me any more. It would have been easy to stay at home and do whatever, but I had to look after her in a different way.
‘How can you turn down a fiveyear deal at 14, considering the situation we were win? I’m proud of what I’ve achieved so far and I hope my ma is too. She is the strongest woman I know.
‘There are days when I’d love to come back to the gaf and have her there with a big bowl of stew but that wouldn’t be fair on her, she has her own life to live. Sure she wouldn’t want to move away. No chance. All her family are in Dublin.’
Byrne did recently buy a house of his own in north Manchester, though, as he puts down roots at a crucial point in his career.
‘You don’t want to waste your money. I was lucky to get two decent contracts at City and a good one with Wigan. It’s a short career but I’d rather set myself and my ma up than spend £1,000 on a pair of runners.
‘You don’t need to have a million quid in your bank account and spend it for the sake of it. You don’t need to spend more than the average person just because you earn more.
‘I’m from the inner city, I’m not going to come home speaking in a fake English accent. I don’t want to waste anything. I’m only young and this career goes quick.
‘This contact could be my last contract. You never know in football.’
Out of sight and out of mind, but Jack Byrne hasn’t gone away.