The long and winding road

Falling in love with the game. Falling out of love with the game. And now, after years of thinking his chance had passed him by, the opportunity to represent his country at the European Championship finals. West Brom and Ireland midfielder Keith Andrews tells his story

Keith Andrews has been involved in some pretty significant qualifying games for Ireland. Think Paris, for a start, and when you can’t stand the pain anymore, think Tallinn.

And then there was the one where, if anything, the stakes were even higher. Admittedly, Andrews didn’t actually play in this particular crunch match but then he did have the excellent excuse of only being 13 at the time.

Sitting in a Birmingham city centre hotel, where the West Brom man is lodging for a couple of nights ahead of today’s midlands derby against Aston Villa, Andrews looks back in wonder to that night in November in 1993 when the two Irelands met at Windsor Park with qualification for US ’94 hanging in the balance for Jack Charlton’s team.

As a football-mad kid, Keith was already in a state of nervous tension as he sat down to watch the match on television at the family home in Beaumont on Dublin’s northside.

“And then,” he recalls, “my uncle Des called to the house and said to me, ‘listen, if we qualify I’ll take you to the World Cup’. So you can imagine what I was like watching the game. When Jimmy Quinn scored that goal, I was actually contemplating killing Jimmy Quinn. And then when Alan McLoughlin scored the equaliser…oh my God. I actually played against him years later in a reserve game and I had to go up to him on the pitch and just say, ‘I owe you so much’.”

That 1-1 draw was enough to send Ireland to the World Cup finals and the young Keith Andrews off on the trip of a lifetime, flying first to Toronto to stay with relatives who had a house with a swimming pool. “So it was in the pool every day and then it was, ‘let’s go down to New Jersey to watch Ireland playing Italy’.” The journey south was another adventure: as Keith remembers it, there seemed to be about 25 people crammed into a big Winnebago for the drive from Toronto to New York, stopping in motels along the way.

And then came the big pay-off: by the luck of the ticket draw, Keith ended up behind the goal in Giants Stadium in the perfect position to see Ray Houghton put the ball in the Italian net and secure Ireland a famous 1-0 victory. “Ah, fabulous times,” he says with a smile.

But although Keith had been a precocious football talent from the age of five, and by 12 had come to the attention of clubs like Nottingham Forest, Newcastle, Wolves and Man City, not for one moment in Giants Stadium did he look down on the celebrating Irish players and think: one day that could be me.

“No, nothing like that at all. That would have been pure fantasy. Even though by that stage I was going on trials, I wouldn’t even have been thinking I was good enough to make a career in football. As for playing for your country? That would have been crazy dreams material. That was never going to happen.

“Even at that age, as much as I loved football, I was quite realistic and always put things into perspective. I actually wanted to be a chef. I just didn’t think of football as a career. So few players make it and it can be such a ruthless business.”

He would learn some early lessons about that side of the game at his first club in England. Aged 16, he signed as a trainee at Wolves at the same time as Robbie Keane, and though he would later earn the distinction of becoming the club’s youngest captain in more than a 100 years – in a game against QPR – he would also experience some of football’s more dispiriting aspects at Molineux. There were injuries, spells out on loan, changes of management and the arrival of new, more experienced players whose presence made it harder for him to claim a place. Coupled with a period of emotional upheaval in his personal life, it all left him for a time feeling wholly disenchanted with the game.

“I went through a stage where I wouldn’t react well to being left out,” he admits. “My lifestyle then certainly wasn’t as good as it it’s been in the last five or six years. It became a bit of vicious circle. I’d get injuries and then, out of sheer boredom, I’d go out and have a couple of jars which you shouldn’t be doing when you’re injured ’cos, let’s be honest, it’s not going to do the injury any good. Then I split up with Claire, the girl I’m with now. I’d been with her since I was 16 and now I was around 19/20. We were apart for couple of years which coincided with the time I was playing League 2 football. So I think it’s fair to say she’s good for me!”

Back at Wolves, his sense of disillusion deepened as he realised his options were limited.

“I just felt I didn’t like the industry. All fans ever hear about and read about is the good stuff. They don’t realise how ruthless football can be. So the club would consider letting you go to Walsall for free. But if Sheffield United wanted you it’d cost them a million pounds, ’cos they were rivals for promotion. So a club basically has your future in your hands if they want to play hardball – which they did. And I just became very disillusioned.”

It actually got to the stage where he was contemplating packing it in and heading to America where he thought he might combine university and football. A “total change of scenery” is what he had in mind.

“Claire still brings that up,” he remarks. “It was a conversation on the phone. We weren’t together at the time but I rang her up and said ‘I’m not interested anymore, I don’t enjoy training, I’m falling out of love with the game, I think I need a change’.

“They were very, very tough times. But Claire was a big part of talking me out of it. Even though we were apart at the time, we were always in touch and I always trusted her judgement. In hindsight, if I’d walked away then it would have been a disaster.”

So he decided to give it a “good go” with a fresh start at Hull City, then newly promoted to the Championship. But just a few games in, he snapped his ankle ligaments – “ironically, at Wolves” – and he was out for three months. “I’m thinking, here we go again. I’m not enjoying this. I’m stuck in a one-bedroom apartment in Hull.” But there was at least one major upswing in his fortunes: “That also coincided with me and Claire getting back together.”

He resumed playing after Christmas but, by the summer, with a new manager and new players, it was clear he’d be on the move again. Then his agent rang him to say that MK Dons were interested.

“I actually had no interest in signing for them,” he admits. “I was going down the M1 thinking they were in League 1 – and of course they were in League 2. I only went down out of courtesy. But I met the manager Martin Allen, a real character, and I met the chairman and I just had a good feeling. Their new stadium was only three-quarters built but there was something right about it all. I’d had offers to go on loan to Championship teams but it’s not all about the financial aspect. I just wanted to be happy on and off the pitch. They made me feel welcome, they made a good impression. I saw it as a platform to go and enjoy myself and be part of something. And I also felt I could go down in order to go back up.”

But it was rugged enough stuff to begin with. Second game in and a Hartlepool player clattered him with a wild tackle.

“Jesus Christ, he should have been locked up for it – he split the skin on the top of my knee in half. If they’d stitched it I wouldn’t have been able to play so they glued it together so I could play the following Tuesday. And I could hardly bend my knee. I was literally hobbling around the pitch, it was ridiculous. I still have a big scar right across my knee but I quite like it ’cos it reminds me that was my welcome to League 2.”

What Keith calls the “big turning point” at this stage of his career came the following season with the appointment as manager of his former Wolves team mate Paul Ince. Under Ince, 2008 was a year of what he calls “rapid acceleration.” MK Dons won promotion, and Keith was named League Two player of the year. Then Ince was poached by Blackburn Rovers and subsequently kept a promise made earlier to Andrews that wherever he’d go, he’d take him. And that was how Keith Andrews suddenly found himself in the Premier League. “Paul Ince had to battle very hard to get me to Blackburn,” he says. “And to this day I’ll always be indebted to him.”

By the time an unforgettable year was over, Andrews had been called up by Giovanni Trapattoni for a ‘B’ game against Notts Forest and then marked his senior debut for his country with a goal in against Poland.

“A good year,” he laughs. “I was absolutely delighted. I still have the fax at home. It couldn’t have worked out better: a new manager in for Ireland, my move to the Premiership, then the B international and my debut. It was beautiful.”

And all the more so because the journey to that point had been on such a long and winding road.

“It’s a cliché that, as people say, you appreciate it more when it comes late,” he reflects. “But you do. I was watching Ireland games up until I was 27 so to become part of it then was incredible.”

Andrews has gone on to establish himself as a mainstay in the Irish midfield and, over two qualifying campaigns under Trapattoni, has experienced emotional extremes that few international footballers will ever know. Yes, we’re talking play-off agony and ecstasy again.

Andrews was pictured crying on the pitch after the final whistle in Paris in 2009. He wasn’t the only one but it was definitely the only time, he says, football reduced him to tears.

“I was in an awful state,” he concedes. “Looking back now, I wasn’t even thinking at that moment about how we’d lost – as in the handball – it was more a case of we’d played so well and given such an unbelievable performance on the night and we’d been so close to the World Cup finals – that’s where the emotion came from. I was actually back in Paris a month ago with Claire. And on the way into the city we drove past the Stade de France. And I didn’t even recognise it because a lot of that night is a blur. I’ve no interest in looking at a DVD of it. It did affect me a hell of a lot. But it certainly made me as a person, and the group as a whole, stronger mentally, and even more determined to get to next finals.”

Which, happily they have done, and this time on the back of a play-off experience in Tallinn which could not have further removed from the heartbreak of Paris.

“Before the game, we had said among ourselves: ‘you know what we’re like, we always do things the hard way, let’s not try to draw tonight.’ Because imagine going back to Dublin 0-0 – the nerves would have been all over the gaff. You would have felt it from the crowd because we were the favourites and, if we hadn’t beaten them, the first leg would have been seen as a failure. But by no means could we have envisaged that we’d win 4-0. It was fantasy stuff walking off the pitch and looking up at the scoreboard – you know you’re there, but you can’t say you’re there.”

People still hold up Paris, and to a lesser extent Tallinn, as examples of what this Irish team can do with the managerial handbrake off. But Keith Andrews thinks there were exceptional circumstances in both games which encouraged the players to go for it – almost a sense of desperation in Paris and a feeling of opportunity in Tallinn. If Ireland were always to try to play like that, he reckons that, over a span of games, they’d crash more often than they’d hit the heights.

“Listen, we know we’re not the greatest football team on the planet,” he says. “Realistically, we probably shouldn’t even be qualifying, and given the limited amount of players we can choose from relative to bigger countries, we do over-achieve. There’s a lot of criticism of our style of play, people saying how negative the manager is, especially because we’re in the era now of Barcelona or even, over here, the way Swansea play. And people love that. I’m not just saying this to defend the manager but I do genuinely believe that if we were to set up like that, and try to play that kind of free-flowing football, we’d lose more than we’d win.

“Looking ahead to the Euros, if we go and open up and try to play expansive football against Spain, I guarantee you now they’ll beat us comfortably. Everyone loves the way Spain play and rightly so because they’re a fantastic team. But we have to go there, use our own gameplan and play to our strengths. And whether people watching in America or Japan or wherever don’t like us because of it, I can assure you that won’t be high in my thoughts.”

Andrews is going to these finals in what he believes is the best shape of his career, and with his current club situation a rewarding one. In January, he departed Ewood Park with no little relief, having become a fans’ scapegoat for the club’s travail under three different managers.

“To this day, I don’t know whether it was because Paul Ince brought me from League Two or what but, for me, it was never really an issue,” he says of the abuse he received from the terraces. “But one thing I didn’t like was my parents or my partner going to games and hearing that. And that was unfortunate because they liked going to the games and supporting me. When Sam Allardyce was there, he never even mentioned it to me. He couldn’t give two hoots, played me all the time. And it never really bothered me up until Steve Kean called me into his office on the morning of a home game and said he was leaving me out because of the fans. I don’t even know what I said because I was in shock. Whether that was the genuine reason he was dropping me I don’t know but that’s what he said. And from my point of view, that’s when it became a major issue. And from then, the writing was on the wall. You just know your time there is done and it’s best to move on.”

Now Andrews is thriving under Roy Hodgson at West Brom, a manager he says he can learn something new from every day. And between Hodgson and Trapattoni, the player, at the age of 31, feels lucky to be drawing on such a wealth of coaching experience at a point in his career when he still feels he can improve even more as a player.

Starting with today’s game against Villa, Andrews has three more club games with West Brom before his thoughts can turn exclusively to the biggest weeks of his football career to date.

“It’s tough not to be thinking about the Euros every day because it’s going to be massive but also you need to keep your eyes on the prize,” he says. “To be ready for the finals your club form needs to be good. I’ve been at clubs where the season kind of tapers off at the end if you’ve nothing to play for. At West Brom now, we’re safe, so you could say that it’s mainly pride we’re playing for, but I’m playing for a manager now who’s not letting us rest on our laurels. He wants, wants, wants. He sets such high demands on us, and that’s perfect for the likes of myself, Shane Long and Simon Cox because we won’t be able to switch off. So we’ll be at it right to the end of the season – and then we’ll be ready for the Euros.”

ANDREWS AND DUFF: THE CHESS MATES

The card school is the time-honoured way of killing time for professional footballers, but Keith Andrews prefers something a little more cerebrally challenging – chess. And, within the Ireland squad, Damien Duff is his most regular opponent.

“We had a good school going,” says Andrews. “Myself, Paul McShane, Glenn Whelan played a few – but mainly it’s myself and Duffer. I’ve played chess since I was at school and Damien is still learning so I’d have a few years on him.”

And what do most of their teammates think of the chess men? “Ah, they’d think we were a pair of geeks,” he says with a laugh.

Away from football (and chess), Andrews says he wishes he could devote more time to improving his golf game. For reading matter he prefers fact over fiction, especially autobiographies, but has recently been immersed in Matthew Syed’s ‘Bounce’, a book of sports psychology.

And, on the business front, there is his involvement in the men’s clothing label Chess London, the company which is supplying the Irish squad’s suits for Euro 2012. While other high-profile footballers and celebrities are set to raise the brand’s profile, the core business will be about getting the classic design clothes to the high street. “The idea is best quality clothes at a more affordable price,” he says. “I’m not behind the desk sketching designs but because I’ve got a little profile I’m able to create a bit of awareness.”

Adds Keith: “I’ve always planned for the future so that, touch wood, if it all ended tomorrow, I’d be ok.”

And he tells a cautionary tale about a former teammate who, after an enforced absence from the game, tried in vain to pick up his career again.

“It’ll always stay with me,” he says. “His little girl was maybe 5 or 6 at the time, and in school the teacher was asking the class what does your mammy do and what does your daddy do. And all her friends were saying, a doctor or a carpenter or whatever. But when it came to her she said: my daddy just watches telly all day.

“That hit him hard but it hit me hard too, even though it had nothing to do with me. I’ve always been one, going through life, who likes to have things prepared, to have things in order. And, regardless of money, I enjoy working. People might say, well, he hasn’t got a clue what a hard day’s work is but I can assure them I do. I think I’ve got a very good work ethic. And I’ll always want to be doing something, even when the football is over.”