The day Big Jack Charlton talked absolute Cobblers

Prehistoric’ was one of the kinder words used by critics of Jack Charlton’s brand of football when he was manager of Ireland but in the foreword he has penned for a newly published biography by Colin Young, the man himself makes the claim that, au contraire – or, more likely, ‘bugger that’ – his Ireland team actually laid the foundations for the game as we know it today.

“We invented a game that was totally different to everything world football had ever seen before,” he writes, “and we turned the game on its head. Nowadays, every team in Europe does what we did back then. But they have a different name for it now because it sounds better. When you go to FIFA meetings and conferences now they call it ‘pressing’. They’ve given it a fancy name because they don’t want to tell us that we started it and we brought it into international football. Ireland. But we did. They might call it ‘pressing’. We called it ‘putting people under pressure’. And it worked...”

Of course, it was what Jack’s teams did with the ball rather than what they did without it which has long been a bone of contention and a matter which continues to divide opinion even now, as witness the recent keen resurgence in the debate about what supposedly constitutes Irish football’s DNA.