The lives of Brian

Brian Carey arrived for the interview at a Cork hotel with a ready-made intro: by sheer coincidence, the Tuesday on which we were meeting turned out to be 24 years ago to the very day since he’d left his hometown, Cork, for England to begin a career in professional football which would take him to Manchester United, Leicester City, Wrexham, Doncaster Rovers and Wolves and see him experience almost all aspects of the game – from the glorious to the grim – as, variously, player, skipper, coach, scout, assistant manager and manager.

That someone so steeped in the sport should have found time for a trip home as the new season got under way was down to the sobering fact that, for the very first time in those 24 years, he found himself without gainful employment in the English game, his brief tenure as assistant manager to Dean Saunders at Wolves coming to a juddering halt in May when, having failed to keep the club in the Championship, the pair were ushered through the exit at Molineux.

Noting this had been the first time in all his years in English football that he hadn’t been involved in the frantic preparation of a pre-season, he suggested that the novelty of having so much free time away from the all-consuming pressures of the professional game hadn’t worn off just yet. “I haven’t missed the day to day so far,” he said.