Interview/John Toshack: Emmet Malone meets the former star player and well-travelled manager who returned to his native Wales to take the reins of a national team in trouble

It's almost 30 years since John Toshack left Anfield to begin his career in management with Swansea City but as he walks through the doors of a Dublin hotel he is still instantly recognisable as the big and burly striker who partnered Kevin Keegan to such terrifying effect in Liverpool's attack of the 1970s.

Under Bill Shankly and then Bob Paisley the club won three championships, an FA Cup and two Uefa Cups during Toshack's time there and his playing days are still a major point of interest during his many dealings with the media.

Having turned 57 earlier this week, however, he sounds weary when the subject arises, almost managing to sound dismissive as he described his playing days as the best of his life before returning to some aspect of his work in management.

Only towards the end of the conversation does he come close, perhaps, to addressing the root cause of the problem - a lingering disappointment over the way in which, he believes, a club he loved so dearly let him down badly within a few short years of his departure.

"When I left Liverpool to go to Swansea all I wanted to do was to go back to Liverpool and the way things turned out I could have done," he recalls. "We broke all records," he says of a spell during which he took the Welsh club from the fourth division to the top of the old first, "we were winning the league and it looked as though I was going (back) but then Bob (Paisley) turned the other way and said he was staying.

"It was all agreed but maybe in the end they thought I was a little bit too young to do the job. Either way, I suffered at Swansea after that, ended up getting into what was a low spell for me, and somewhere deep down I lost a little something of what I had for Liverpool."

He will, he concedes, never shake the tag: John Toshack of Liverpool and Wales, and his experiences at Anfield, he insists, have always shaped his approach to management.

"They told us there that the important things in football today were important 50 years ago and will be important 50 years from now and I believe that," he says. "What I learned there has shaped everything I have done (even his decision not to carry a mobile phone, highlighted recently by an exasperated Robbie Savage, is a nod to Shanklyesque simplicity) and I feel deeply privileged to have been there when I was."

Still, it is not the Merseyside outfit with whom he now identifies. It is Real Sociedad, whose badge he wears on his jacket when we meet, and whose people, he feels, were always there for him in his moment of professional need.

Toshack stayed a little too long at Swansea where his ample powers of organisation and inspiration simply weren't enough to sustain the whirlwind progress made during his first four seasons. There were opportunities to run other English clubs but all seemed like accepting second best and so, when the chance came of a move to Sporting Lisbon he took it, resolving to throw himself into both the job and the life.

What he got in return was a lesson in how cruel the game can be. He learned the language and adapted well to the pace of Portuguese life only to be sacked at the end of a season during which the club lost one league game but ultimately finished second in the championship behind Porto.

The experience almost prompted him to return home but Sociedad came in and he was persuaded that this was different kind of club, one at which he and the team could develop. "It was a great place to learn," he recalls. "I could sign almost nobody because all the players had to be Basque so it was all about getting the best out of what you had."

It went well, though, with Real winning the cup for the first time and achieving their best ever finish in the league (second).

Bigger clubs took note and Real Madrid lured him away. Working with a particularly talented group of players during his one full season there, he oversaw the club's fifth successive title-winning campaign before falling out with the club's hierarchy and returning to the Basque country.

His career since has been both eventful and varied. A first spell in charge of Wales ended after one game and 41 days when, he says now, he realised the task was too great for a man working at it on a part-time basis from a base in northern Spain.

He had spells in France, Turkey and Italy, at Deportivo La Coruna, a third at the Estadio de Anoeta and a second with Madrid where success this time eluded him.

"It was in 1999 and I was at Besiktas when they came along and paid up my contract so that I could come back," he recalls. "It was like going into Baghdad going back there the second time. Same thing that they've got now, the same problem . . . players like Christian Panucci, Predrag Mijatovic and Roberto Carlos were there and they were running the place.

"They'd won the European Cup, the Ferrari Boys they were called . . . Lorenzo Sanz, the president signed me to help sort it out. They'd created a monster and maybe had I been a little more diplomatic I would have stayed a little bit longer but we are the way we are . . . there's a Spanish phrase (he rattles it off before translating), 'I would rather die standing up than live crawling'. If I'd crawled around a bit more I might have stayed but once people start making decisions you know you should be making yourself then you know you have to leave."

He retains strong links with northern Spain, owning a house near San Sebastian and writing a weekly column for a local newspaper. Having taken and then left management jobs at two minor clubs, though, the time seemed right for a different challenge and so, when Mark Hughes moved on, he returned to his native Wales to take on a national team in trouble.

A veteran of the media circuit, it becomes apparent more than once as he talks that certain lines come automatically to him.

Quite a few are repeated almost verbatim from a few weeks earlier in Montreux where he was reacting to the draw for the qualifying stages of the next European Championship (which included Wales and the Republic of Ireland in the same group). Others, like his well-worn sounding explanation of just how bad things had become prior to Hughes' departure have clearly been prompted by repeatedly similar lines in questioning, based in this case on the common misconception he had inherited a vibrant team and set-up from the now Blackburn coach in November 2004.

In fact, things had taken a turn for the worst almost two years earlier when, after winning their first four European qualifiers - they beat Italy and scored 10 goals while conceding just one - the team crumbled and ended up missing out on a place in Portugal when they lost 1-0 over two legs to Russia in the play-offs.

"Obviously when you take 12 points from your first four games like that, you expect the team will have enough to get itself over the finishing line but it didn't happen and we went two years without winning a competitive game," he says.

"The players became dispirited and so did the supporters and there were some particular disappointments. Then, when Mark decided to walk away several of the players decided to go too. In one way I can understand it because it's hard, the results are going badly and you find yourself driving down the motorway at two o'clock in the morning. The reality is, though, we have to pick ourselves up, work hard at bringing through some of the younger lads and get on with it."

He has some decent players to work with although, he concedes, not nearly enough of them and with most of his Premiership regulars (except, famously, Savage) automatic choices he spends most of his time watching games in the lower leagues where the real battle for places is being fought out. "Put it this way," he smiles, "I don't meet Sven much on my travels."

At a time when just about everybody here is lamenting the Republic's lack of depth he admits to being somewhat envious of the talent pool at Steve Staunton's disposal. He remains, however, surprised by the Louthman's appointment.

"Clearly the people who have appointed him see something in him that they feel will make him a great manager and I would have to say that anyone who has played more than 100 times for his country has to have something to offer. My own view, though, is you go into international management to teach, not to learn. I did my apprenticeship at Swansea and learned something at every club I was at on the continent. That's what I'm looking to bring to the Wales job now."

Whether it will be enough to get his side to Austria and Switzerland is another thing altogether, though, and he clearly sees his five year contract with the FAW as reflecting the scale of the task facing him.

"The fact is Wales have never qualified for a major championship (their one appearance was handed to them due to political difficulties involving Israel) so how can we expect to now when we had better players so many times before?" he asks. "And yet I've got to believe because if you don't then you can be sure nothing good will happen . . . that's what I learned at Liverpool and it's what my own career has taught me."

In a European Championship group where, due to the presence of the Czechs, Germans and Slovaks, Ireland's chances of qualification merely look less remote, he will surely need every ounce of that faith during the 18 months ahead.