There’s just one problem with director Sean Casey’s gorgeous documentary, Liam Brady: The Irishman Abroad, which will be shown tonight on RTÉ1 (Monday, 9.30). You find yourself having to rewind quite a bit to hear the chat you missed because you’re so busy being mesmerised by the old clips of Brady playing football.
It’s 33 years since he retired from the game, so the only version of the Dubliner known to the more youthful among us is the at-times gruff and grumpy pundit. But even to those of a more, well, seasoned vintage, it’s easy to forget just how glorious a footballer he was.
Ahead of his time, too.
Browse through the current Juventus squad and you’ll spot 15 non-Italian players. When Brady moved to the club from Arsenal in 1980, he was their only foreign player. And he was surrounded by Italian warriors such as Dino Zoff, Gaetano Scirea, Antonio Cabrini, Claudio Gentile and Marco Tardelli, all of whom would go on to win the World Cup two years later and who were sceptical about what this scrawny Irishman could bring to their team.
But the affection and respect with which Tardelli and Gentile greet Brady on his return to Italy for the making of the documentary, Brady speaking fluent Italian to them both, gives us a fair notion of the impact he made at the club during his two seasons in Turin, as well as the friendships he built that endure to this day.
Not that the Italian leg of his journey started well. He recalls his league debut when he couldn’t cope with the heat. He played poorly, got back on the team coach and heard a club director say, “we got the wrong foreigner”, their first choice having been Kevin Keegan.
He proved to be a decent enough foreigner in the end, though, helping Juventus win the title in both of his seasons with the club, famously scoring the penalty that secured the second of them despite already knowing that he was being let go, Michel Platini taking his place.
“I’m just so pleased I came and lived here, it was a wonderful life experience as well as a great football experience,” he says of his time in Italy, where he went on to play for Sampdoria, Inter Milan and Ascoli, the experience evidently an enriching one.
Before then, we’re taken through his early footballing days, when Arsenal scout Bill Darby knocked on his parents’ door in Dublin and invited him to London for a trial.
“That was what I was waiting for,” he says, the myth about the chippy qualities of his left foot resulting in his nickname forever debunked by an old interview with his Mam. “There’s no point in him looking at the menu,” she told the club when he first arrived in London, “all he eats are chips.”
True, he had some bad hair days, conceding that he sported “a perm that went wrong” when he made his Irish debut against the USSR as an 18-year-old, but in time, we forgave him, mainly because of the pure joy he brought us. And the pride: this cultured, majestic footballer was one of our own.
They were, though, dark times for the Irish in England, Brady recalling being beaten up on the tube after some Birmingham natives heard his accent, while Frank Stapleton talked about how he, Brady and David O’Leary were stopped and questioned by police every time they returned from Dublin to London. Only when they stated their professions were they waved through.
Still, the Arsenal faithful adored him. When there was first talk of him leaving the club, a reporter did a vox pop with fans outside Highbury. “Do you think he’ll stay at Arsenal,” they asked. “I hope so,” replied one fan, “let’s buy him a house – Buckingham Palace.”
But the true loveliness of the documentary is that we see a Brady most of us probably never knew, the Bob Dylan diehard, the fella so devoted to music he never read a newspaper, only the NME (New Musical Express), and whose greatest joy in life comes from discovering vinyl in random shops that had been absent from his already bulky collection.
We’ve known for a while now that Eamon Dunphy and John Giles are crooners, but Brady? A revelation, the documentary opening with him singing along to John Lennon’s Starting Over while he drives by Lake Como. “It makes me cry, this song,” he says, recalling his emotions when he heard Lennon had been killed.
A deeply emotional man, as we see in the most poignant and beautiful of closing scenes when he reads out the letter that Jack Charlton sent him after his retirement.
You’ll want to replay that clip forever.
“I think I was born to be a footballer,” Brady concludes.
That he was. A special one, too.
