John Giles: 'Football was my living, not my sport'
A very revealing article on the career of the legendary John Giles, courtesy of The Herald
IT begins, as all football stories should, on the street. The young John Giles played alone on Ormond Square. He looked after 'the bouncer', the small ball they played with on the street, so when his friends disappeared for tea or bed, he was not alone. He still had the ball and the hours would pass quickly. He lived in 7A Ormond Square and he spent his solitary hours trying to hit the '7A' on the door. The foundations were laid.
"My upbringing was the perfect grounding for becoming a footballer," he says nearly 60 years later, sitting in the Gresham. His parents and two of his grandparents lived in the house along with five children - the incentive to spend as much time as he could on the street was overwhelming - but John Giles needed no encouragement.
As he played on the street, Giles realised he could do things no other boy could, but, crucially he believes, this "gift" was not neglected; he also had the intelligence to realise he must not squander this bequest. In a lifetime of football he never did. And when he retired, his analysis of the game was beyond compare. John Giles has a first-rate mind which he chose to apply to football. It has been his life's calling, the world which he understands better than any other. "I never, ever considered myself good at anything apart from football."
But he was good at that from the beginning and the dreams formed quickly. "From the time I was young I wanted to be a professional footballer, I wanted to be a great footballer, I wanted to emulate Raich Carter, Peter Doherty, Jimmy Hagan. I had a vision of the game in England and what I wanted to do. It was nothing to do with money, it was really pure ambition.
"I had a gift to play football which was no personal reflection on me. That's no false modesty, anybody can be gifted. I didn't see it as clearly as I did when I was older but as a kid I knew it was there. I could kick a ball in the classical way, nobody can teach you that." His father saw it too. Dicky Giles was a legendary Dublin football man and as a boy, his son followed him everywhere.
He learned the game, in part, by osmosis on bus rides down the country with the Drumcondra team his father managed, listening to men like Kit Lawlor and Benny Henderson and watching them play.
But his father provided the knowledge to go with the technique sculpted on Ormond Square. When people would say to Giles later in his career that he appeared to carry a ten square yard of grass with him onto the pitch, it was wisdom imparted by his father and appreciated by the intelligence of his son. "Football," he says, "is 20 people in a restricted area competing for space."
Some saw it differently. Once, when he was out in his home town during a time when his gifts were not appreciated in his own country, a drunk confronted him. "Giles, you bollix, I could do what you do." John Giles took it as a compliment.
He always had, he said, a belief, a core understanding that he was good at what he did but when he doubted, his father provided it for him. He remembers a trip to Manchester when he was 14. He would be going to Old Trafford when he was 15, but until then the club kept them involved by inviting young players over during the holidays. That Easter, he went to watch United's reserves play Chesterfield. Bobby Charlton was playing for United. "Bobby was brilliant," Giles says, "Bobby was always brilliant."
That night, Charlton scored five as United won 8-0. In the stand, Giles was worried. 'I don't think I'll ever be good enough for this,' he said to his father who had accompanied him on the trip. His father reared up. 'You'll be better than any of them, you're only 14 now, in three years' time you'll be better than any of them'.
His father's gift, he says, was an obsession with football combined with a refusal to be impressed by anybody. He remembers as a child finding a picture in the house of his father with Stanley Matthews. Dicky Giles' son was impressed, Stanley Matthews at the time was The King of Football. "I asked my father what he was like and he said 'He's a lovely man but he knows f**k all about football'."
Decades later, Giles met Matthews when they were in Dublin for Liam Brady's testimonial. A number of the Leeds players were in town and they spent the night in the hotel bar where Matthews joined them.
"Stan was brilliant, loved chatting with the lads, he was a really unassuming fella but Stan started talking about football and Stan was talking the biggest load of crap you've ever heard. And I remember thinking, 'f**k me, my father was bang-on'." His relationship with his father propelled him into the world he wanted to enter but the son's "pure ambition", his desire simply to be the finest professional in the game altered their relationship.
"I've got to be honest, apart from football, I didn't get on very well with my father. He wasn't my ideal man, he was outgoing, a bit brash, plenty of confidence in himself but apart from football we weren't close. I was like my mother, introverted and shy but I did have a belief and that's different from self-confidence." But his father's education helped him on the way. At Manchester United, he ignored the bad advice and prospered when he came into contact with Matt Busby's assistant, Jimmy Murphy. Murphy was a hard man, but Giles immediately understood that he knew the game as he expected it to be known. One night, playing for the reserves, Giles missed a penalty. Murphy's criticism left him in tears. He was hard, getting harder.
UNITED, he says, was the "survival of the F***est" and he still speaks reverentially of the players who he competed with in his early days.
Manchester United took the best and football was witnessing a golden generation. Giles made his debut in 1959 against one of the greatest, Dave Mackay. "He was a sensational player. If you held onto the ball long enough, wherever you were on the pitch, you'd be tackled by Dave Mackay."
Giles became part of the new wave of English football but he made his own way, famously leaving Manchester United and going to Leeds. Revie and Busby were great managers, he says, but their differences highlighted the complexities of management. "Revie was the finer technician but deeply insecure. Don didn't see the big picture. If we were winning 1-0 after five minutes, Don would want us to win 1-0. I was brought up with Busby. Matt wouldn't even think of winning 1-0 or 2-0. If we were winning 1-0 or 2-0 and you tried something with five minutes to go, Matt would say fair enough, Don would say, what were you doing?"
Unlike Old Trafford, Elland Road wasn't provided with an assembly line of talent. Instead, Revie worked with the players on the training ground, making great players out of some who may have not been noticed. Giles' own football philosophy was rooted in his education in Dublin and in Manchester, but at Leeds, he found a team who would appreciate it.
"When I played it was always a selfish thing, this is what I want to do. I was never involved with the crowd, I was never a crowd favourite. I played 12 years at Leeds and I was never in the top three for Player of the Year. It never bothered me. The one thing I wanted was the respect of the players, they know you better than anybody else."
He tells a story that illustrates his values. Leeds were playing an early-season European Cup tie and winning comfortably. They were 3-0 up when Giles dropped back to pick the ball off Norman Hunter. But Hunter had other ideas. "Norman knocks it out to Paul Reaney and I said, 'Norman, for f**k's sake.' He says, 'I'm f**king bored here, I haven't had a kick in ten minutes, f**k off. It wasn't a bad ball.' It wasn't a bad ball but I said to him later, 'Do you remember that game in Derby last April when we were going for the title?' He said, 'Yes'. I said, 'Do you remember how I showed for you all match on that bumpy pitch?' 'Yeah,' he says. 'You were delighted to see me?' 'I was delighted to see you,' he says. 'That's the point, Norman, I'll be there on the good days and I'll be there on the bad days'."
It has become his refrain as a television analyst but he lived his football life by moral courage; the difference, he says, is a step in either direction. He relished the occasions when it was tested. The Leeds team may be remembered by many for the game against Southampton when they won 7-0 and spent the game teasing Southampton with flicks and party tricks, but Giles hated it. "I asked Revie to take me off."
Those games don't give him a glow. Instead, he remembers a sixth round Cup match against Spurs in 1972 when Leeds came from a goal down to win 2-1 or when they beat Liverpool at Anfield in the semi-final of the UEFA Cup. "Those were the things I went to sleep on," he says, "that was the turn-on. We played some of the best football I've ever seen in the world. Ever. But it was never mentioned. Give a dog a bad name. It bothers me in a certain way but not an awful lot because if I'm with the Leeds lads we know what we did.
"We'd go behind the Iron Curtain on a winter's night and they'd be kicking lumps out of you and we would respond in the right way as a group. Anybody who quits, you know about it."
His game was the product of a supremely rational mind and a purist's instinct. He saw no need for the concessions to the crowd or to any notion of PR. If it was a failing, it pursued him through his career, colouring the impression of him at Leeds and later at Ireland. But, as he reminds you, the perception was always from the outside.
Now he is the philosopher, then he was a warrior with different rules governing his actions
The crowd, he felt, never noticed the real thing. They saw the 3-0 victories in Europe when, as he says, "everybody wanted to eat the ball" and formed their opinions. He didn't care. "My feeling was that I was a professional footballer and the crowd pays to see me play. I'm an artist in the footballing sense. I ain't going to pander to the crowd. The real turn-on is when you're a goal down at home and there's fifteen minutes to go, then the battle was on. From a crowd point of view it was a different thing because if you take the responsibility you get stick - but I didn't give a f**k about them."
He was the same with the press. As a child, he saw Jackie Carey win Footballer of the Year and he logged it down as an ambition. In 1967, Jack Charlton won it after one of the worst seasons of his career and Giles gave up. "We used to joke at Leeds, 'You're playing so badly, if you don't watch out you'll get Footballer of the Year'. Jack used to joke about it too."
He looks back now and thinks differently but now he is the philosopher, then he was a warrior with different rules governing his actions.
"I did things which I would look back on and say, 'How did I do that?' But when you're younger you don't want to be wise, you can't afford to be. It's a physical battle. You have to go through the battle."
He became notorious but few noticed. The press looked elsewhere for hard men, increasing his contempt. He spoke quietly and carried a very big stick.
"It was my living, not my sport and if I didn't respond in the way I should respond I was going to be out of this game so I then became as big an assassin as there was and as dangerous in my own way. You keep your head, you do it coldly, you do it clinically but you let everybody know in the game, that there are no liberties taken here. But I always had a good reputation outside the game until I made my own confession.
"I was given the choice of becoming a lion or a lamb and I was determined not to become a lamb."
He thinks wisdom can only come with time and, possibly, retirement. Football demands innocence, otherwise the whole thing seems futile. "People might say it's childish but football is a childish game. You don't want to be worldly because then you'd say 'I can't kick him' whereas the attitude we'd have had was 'I'll kill him'. And you would and think nothing of it."
But it was a strange kind of innocence, hardly innocent at all. In the late 1970s as he began to think of getting out, he realised he'd outgrown his father who still believed there were medals to play for, honours to be won. "I'd get a bit impatient with him and he sensed that, but it didn't bother him," he laughs at the memory.
His father kept striving. One day they were sitting in a car as Giles, who had just turned to journalism, confessed he was struggling with his column. 'Imagine what you could have done if you'd worked hard in school,' his father told him. "He wanted me to be a scientist as well as a professional footballer but he knew what he said because he stopped and said, 'Not that you've done too bad'." By that stage, things had changed. "I outgrew my father."
He knows he could have given more to football but he was weary when it came to management. He won promotion with West Brom but became disillusioned, not just with the club but with the realities of the game. He belonged to the club and they knew no other way but obstruction and complaint. He had expected praise and enthusiasm after an inspirational season but it dawned on him that it was not football's way.
Instead football is a business which feeds on ingratitude. "If Alex Ferguson had done what he did for Manchester United in industry, he would be managing director, secure for the rest of his life. In football, he's under pressure because of the success he's had."
He stuck around for a few more years in the eighties, but he wanted out. "In my time, the financial rewards weren't as good, at least Alex Ferguson would be a very wealthy man if he was sacked tomorrow.
"In Revie's time, Shankly's time, Bill Nicholson's time, these guys were the great managers of the day, none of them was ever financially secure when they finished. That was the environment I came into in management and I remember going to a management meeting where I saw these guys and they all looked sad cases to me. It was only my first year in management and I thought if I could do what these guys could do it would be brilliant, but they're not happy people. So in many ways it was a great thing to realise that, on a personal level, but in football terms it's a bad thing because I would have done a lot more in the game as I was aware of what it was about. But I wasn't prepared to do it." He sits in the Gresham for three hours talking about the game. He is interrupted twice, noticed several times. A man tells him that his son has had trials with Forest, a woman says he was a hero to her father. Giles is the conscience and intellect of Irish football while Eamon Dunphy is the erratic brilliance.
ON television, they have educated a generation of Irish football fans and reached beyond the hard-core to enthuse many who know nothing about the game.
On English television, those who know nothing often find themselves talking to Gary Lineker on a Saturday night. They are in the entertainment business but unfortunately they're not entertaining. "I watched Match of the Day a few weeks ago and Gary Lineker - who I have a great respect for, he was a terrific player - actually irritated me. He's become like a professional presenter, looking at the camera, winking at the camera, a little quip, anything rather than talk about the game. I think people are hungry for knowledge of the game. They want to know what's going on and they want an honest opinion of it. People say, football's a simple game but it's not. It's complicated but reducing it to simplicity is the secret. People know when they're being kidded."
He laughed when he read of the battle for Jamie Redknapp as a pundit. "He seems to be a lovely lad but I wouldn't listen to Jamie Redknapp for an accurate analysis of the game in a million years. He's a pleasant, nice-looking lad who won't actually say anything."
His relationship with Dunphy, he says, is fine. Their friendship was one of the casualties of the crazy summer of 2002. He regrets that they fell out over Roy Keane but, he says, "we're ok, we do our business together and there will always be a relationship there. I've known Eamon since he was ten."
His opinion on the Ireland manager's job is, he says, a calculated guess. "I've seen managers and players from my time and I thought he'll do well and I was proven totally wrong in my judgement and I'm an ex-pro. When you consider the people picking the Ireland manager, it's less than a calculated guess."
His choice would be Guus Hiddink on the basis that it removes as much of the guesswork as possible. Staunton or Keane, he says, are great professionals, but the game of chance increases if you appoint a novice manager. "They could be great but who knows. I played against Brian Clough and his attitude as a player was crap but he went on to be a genius."
He has heard so much bullshit talked about football, he says, that he is reluctant to offer an opinion on another subject in case it, too, is bullshit. But he knows about life because he knows about football. "Football is human behaviour. I love football but I don't get a kick out of it anymore. If it's done well, I expect it to be done well and if it isn't, it irritates me."
He lives in Birmingham, but, he says, he could move to Dublin tomorrow and it would make no difference. He has stripped away most of life's trivialities while believing that the game he understands more than others may be childish, but reveals something about life.
"The one great thing about football is that whatever happens it will manifest itself on the pitch. If it's right, you'll see it on the pitch, if it's wrong, it will be on the pitch. In business you can get fellas who are doing crooked deals and nobody knows anything about it. There is an ultimate honesty about football. Politics is part of the lying game, I wouldn't trust any of them. In football, you can hide for a while but ultimately the truth comes out. I always loved that."
ireland-mad.co.uk
