Cool, calm, connected

THROUGHOT a glorious career, Ronnie Whelan earned a reputation as one of the most cultured footballers in Europe.

RONNIE WHELAN remembers Roy Keane’s debut for Forest well, he just didn’t know him as Roy Keane, that’s all, only that “there was a young lad playing in midfield” for them.

It was 21 years ago last month, when Keane went down to Anfield and began helping the kitman lay out the gear only to be told by Brian Clough to put on the number seven jersey himself. Keane would acquit himself quite well, though it was something of an education for him.

“I discovered the limits of patriotism,” Keane would say in his own autobiography, recounting that Whelan welcomed him to the big time with a “bruising over-the-top tackle”.

In truth, patriotism never came into it; the first Whelan knew it had been an Irishman he’d roughed up was when I “heard this Cork accent, ranting and cursing”. That was about all he remembers about Keane that night, he was just some young lad that he’d kicked, but Keane would make a more lasting impression upon him when the two teams would meet in the City Ground a few months later.

“A ball came over, I knocked it down and next thing he just splattered me. I wasn’t hurt but I sort of let on that I was hurt because I knew he had tried to do me and I knew he was going to get booked. I knew then I had half a chance to do him back again because he’d be on a booking and wouldn’t be able to go in full whack for the next ball between us; this is the way the mind works, you see.

“Anyway, he was booked but he finished the game and afterwards Dean Saunders would say to me, ‘What’s going on there with you and him?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. Why?’ And Deano said, ‘Because when you were down, he was shouting as he was walking away, “That’s for fucking kicking me at Anfield!’” See, Roy didn’t forget.”

Whelan smiles as he says that. In many ways they were different players, him and Roy, but in even more they were so alike. They both lifted the FA Cup at the top of those Wembley steps, both of them the best central midfielders in British football, playing for the premier team in Britain. Each won multiple leagues and a European Cup. And sadly, each fell out with their Irish managers at a World Cup that should have been the crowning moment of their respective careers.

Now the list of similarities extends to the two of them each having written revealing autobiographies, with Whelan’s candour about the hard side of football and his own ugly streak making particularly interesting reading. There was a hugely competitive and combative streak to Whelan, even if it was more understated and underestimated than Keane’s. Like Keane, he didn’t forget.

In a fascinating chapter entitled ‘Assassins’, Whelan takes us into the hidden game of 1980s British football and just how brutally physical it could be, especially in his own habitat of midfield. Although Whelan was primarily a ballplayer, he was also, as Roy Evans observed, ‘a bit of an assassin’, one of the quiet ones.

He confesses to deliberately taking out the likes of Coventry’s Lloyd McGrath — “it was well worth the booking I got” — and purposely ripping his studs down the shin of Kevin O’Callaghan, leaving the Millwall player requiring six stitches after he was stretchered off. Again, there were limits to Whelan’s patriotism; O’Callaghan might have been a good friend but he’d made the cardinal sin of kicking Whelan — albeit harmlessly — earlier in the game.

“I regret it to this day,” writes Whelan in Walk On: My Life in Red.

“There were people I didn’t regret doing and others I’d loved to have done but never got the chance. But I was sorry I did Cally because he was a friend and a real nice bloke as well. What can I say? It was the typical footballers’ mentality: he kicked me, I’m gonna kick him.

“I’m well aware that these stories don’t reflect particularly well on me. Looking back from this perspective, I can see I was guilty of some nasty stuff. But I didn’t see the bigger picture then; I didn’t care about the bigger picture. Professional football was dog-eat-dog.”

The soccer autobiography might be the most maligned genre of sports book yet no category has been responsible for so many quality Irish sports books either. Whelan’s book is hardly as groundbreaking or as explosive as those of some of his former teammates, probably because he never quite had to contend with the sort of inner demons that tormented Paul McGrath and Tony Cascarino and Keane, while the narrative isn’t driven by the sort of tension that characterised Niall Quinn’s riveting account of Saipan and his own career.

What’s so welcoming about Whelan’s book though is that as well as sealing and reminding us of his lofty place in the pantheon of great Irish footballers and indeed great Irish sportsmen, it has, now that its author turned 50 last week, the maturity and perspective to give a real insight into what made him so good and what made those Liverpool teams so great.

To survive and thrive in that dog-eat-dog midfield arena against the likes of Reid and Bracewell and Robson and Whiteside, it helped Whelan to know his midfield colleagues had his back just as he had theirs. Steve McMahon and himself had an understanding that if ever one of them was already booked, the other would dish out any required retribution for them. Graeme Souness had taught him the value of that, but that wasn’t the only reason they did it either.

“I knew that when I was in a battle that Steve McMahon would help me out because we were great mates,” says Whelan over a coffee in the Shelbourne Hotel, where his book is later launched.

“Every week we’d have pints together, have a laugh together. I often think all those nights out together, while they didn’t make us better individual footballers, they helped us become a much better, tighter team. We knew our priorities — it was about getting points on the table before getting pints on the table — but we definitely had a bond there that you wonder do players and teams have now.”

Yet for all their camaraderie and friendship, Whelan is honest enough to admit it was compromised by a certain selfishness too. He was particularly fond of Jan Molby and his dry wit (Molby had the greatest of retorts to the rather lippy and uppity Crystal Palace strikeforce of Ian Wright and Mark Bright: “Whoa, hang on a second. You have a bit of a head start on me here. Youse know my name, I haven’t a fucking clue who you two are!”) but whenever a Molby or a Sammy Lee was in the team ahead of him, Whelan wasn’t always wishing them the best.

“You never wanted them to play bad and you didn’t want them picking up some injury that would finish their career, but you’d be there thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if they just tweaked a hamstring and gave me a chance to get in and swing the game some way? Couldn’t they just miss one game?’ Because at Liverpool at the time, when you got dropped, how were you going to get back, in with the team winning?”

There was only one way he knew: “to give everything you could in training and show you were raring to get back into the team.” But sometimes it wasn’t enough, like when he didn’t even make the bench for Ireland’s 1990 World Cup game against Egypt.

There are a couple of generations of Irish fan now who have no idea how big a story it was at the time, and, in the shadow of Saipan, a few more who have simply forgotten. Whelan had probably been Ireland’s best player in the qualification campaign before he broke his foot against Arsenal two months out from the tournament. He wasn’t fit in time for the opening tournament game against England but he felt he’d trained and played well in the lead-up to the Egypt game only for Jack Charlton to announce he’d be going with the same team and same subs, prompting Whelan to thump a ball furiously into the stands. Within a couple of hours Charlton would tell the press Whelan still hadn’t been fit enough, only for the press to run into Whelan who declared he was fit enough.

At this remove Whelan says it was Charlton’s insensitivity rather than his decision which irked him so much. While he can understand why Charlton didn’t want to break up the McGrath-Townsend tandem, he couldn’t accept he wasn’t worth a place on the bench or even a private chat about the matter.

“That night, all the lads were in bed but I couldn’t sleep so I went downstairs to look to have a chat with Jack. I seen him in the restaurant and he was sitting at a table with Maurice Setters and a few others and I asked him if I could speak one-to-one with him, you know, let’s get it out in the air, we may scream at each other but at least we can say it’s over and done with and move on. But no, Jack said if I wanted to say something, to say it in front of all the others.

“And I said, ‘What’s it got to do with the kitmen and all these other people? I want to talk to you about what’s going on, about why you wouldn’t put me down as a sub’. But he wouldn’t do it. Now, Jack was usually a bigger fella than that. He was actually quite a good man-manager and normally he’d be prepared to stand up and have an argument with you and everyone would still respect each other but I don’t know why, he just didn’t do it on that occasion.”

To this day he ranks it as the most disappointing moment of his entire career — “it still hurts me, thinking about it” he says — but he knows it was hardly the most tragic. Here was a man who played the night of Heysel, who captained Liverpool at Hillsborough. One of the 96 who died that day was a 19-year-old called Ian Whelan. His nickname and idol was Ronnie.

“That was when I broke down, when I heard about him. I broke down other nights but that was the worst. And that’s when you start to think, he only went to watch you. You feel all kinds of emotions still about that day but at the time one of the strongest ones was guilt. If we weren’t playing that day, they wouldn’t be dead.”

He has so many good memories though. Hillsborough and Heysel might have been nightmares but for the most part his career was a dream. His father Ronnie played and won in the League of Ireland but, as Ronnie Junior puts it, “my aspiration wasn’t to play League of Ireland”. It was to play for a top club in England, and thanks to the guidance he got from Ronnie Senior, it’s where he’d end up.

“Jason McAteer had a book on the bus recently going to an exhibition game. It was called Bounce and I was reading parts of it and it was about what makes the best in anything, whether it’s music or sport or whatever, is the amount of practice people put into it on their own. And I’d do that. Da would tell me to keep it up 20 times on my left. And people can’t believe it when I tell them that when I’d get to 19 and the ball would hit the ground, I’d start all over again. They say, ‘Surely you went in and said you did 20 even though you didn’t?’ But I would never do that. I would have to be able to go back in and honestly say ‘Da, I got to 20.’ I loved doing nothing more than kicking a ball against the path or the curb or whatever. It was never a chore.”

Technically, he was superb. Alex Ferguson once said of him that he did the simple things better than anyone else in the English game at the time. He had a wonderful attitude and temperament too, but he admits, anxiety plagued him throughout his career. He couldn’t stay in the house the Friday before a game; he’d have to rent a hotel room and hang out there with his best friend Ian Rush. In the dressing room he’d always feel like vomiting and often he would do just that. As much as he loved his time at Liverpool, “15 years,” he says, “is a long time to be going around with a knot in your stomach”.

A lot of it came down to a fear of losing.

“Ever since I was a kid I wanted to win. When I was seven I cried on my dad’s shoulder because we lost a final. I don’t go along with all this psychology about kids and that we’re all winners and there’s no losers. Bollocks to that. There’s winners and there’s losers and I wanted to be a winner. And I still felt the same way at 33.”

That was one thing he noticed about his final few years at Liverpool. Losing didn’t hurt teammates enough. The club and the sport was changing, and though Whelan played in the first Premier League game that Sky televised live, he wasn’t of the Super Sunday generation with all its bling.

For all his competitiveness, there was a compassion about Whelan — when Liverpool were in the process of whipping Crystal Palace 9-0 one night he urged Ian Wright to “carry on, try and keep playing” — and he was abhorred when he’d hear a young team-mate mocking an opponent with the line: “I pay more tax than you get wages.”

For Whelan, medals were the currency he went by and not enough of the latter-day ‘Spice Boys’ were rich by that definition.

“I don’t think losing hurt them enough. Yeah, it’s great winning and we all love winning, but how does losing hurt you? Are you going to do something that it won’t hurt as bad again next time? I just felt the bus wasn’t as quite as it used to be after a loss, they seemed to get over it a bit too easy.”

Like Keane, he would depart his club in poignant if not quite so acrimonious circumstances, and like Keane, he’d recognise that maybe this club or this time was no longer for him. Whelan accepts he wasn’t of the new man generation. In his day if a player’s wife or partner was pregnant, the club saw to it that the baby was induced, so it could arrive after or well before a game. His first daughter was born as planned a few hours after he’d got back from a game in Coventry. That’s the control the club, the game, had over them.

“That’s just the way it was, and to be honest, I don’t see why it should be any different now. You’re a professional footballer, you’re getting paid handsomely for it. So why shouldn’t your missus go a few days early so you can be ready for the game on Saturday? But they miss games now, don’t they, to be there at the bedside? I think if Elaine went into labour on a Saturday morning she’d have said, ‘I’ll be fine, see you after the game’.”

After a colourful if mixed time managing in Greece and Cyprus, Whelan has spent the last decade or so mostly engaged in punditry and playing golf (“Alan Hansen says I’m the worst eight-handicapper in the world”).

He’s in good health and good form, helped by the notion that Liverpool are on the right track under Kenny Dalglish. He’s not so sure whether Ireland will qualify, only that they need to. The game needs them to. The country needs them to.

“If you look at Euro ‘88 and Italia ‘90, a lot of our best players that came along after that, your Robbies and Duffers, grew up watching that, they went out onto the street with their mates, kicking a ball.

“The place could do with a boost like that again.”

But in order to do that, how it could do with another Ronnie Whelan.