‘I’d walk a hundred miles to talk about Jimmy Murphy’

Peter Jackson on the son of an Irish emigrant who guided Wales to the World Cup finals and was Matt Busby’s right-hand man at Manchester United.

Even now, almost 30 years after his death, James Patrick Murphy still stands alone among Wales’ football managers.

Of all those charged with steering their country to the finals of the World Cup since the early 1950s, only the son of an Irishman from the supreme hurling heartland of Kilkenny has succeeded in getting them there. Aided and abetted by political interference on a global scale, he found a way that had never been found before nor since.