Authors: Trevor Keane
One of the most memorable experiences of Italia ’90 was a meeting that Jack Charlton and his squad had with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. Gerry Peyton says, ‘This for me was definitely one of the highlights of my time with Ireland. Italia ’90 was an amazing experience. The results themselves were fantastic, but the whole trip was organised to a tee. On a personal note, the audience with the pope will forever rank high in my life. I remember I was standing next to Packie, and we saw the pope talking to a number of players at the top of the group. He then made a beeline down to me and Packie. He shook Packie’s hand, and then he reached over to me and told me about how responsible the position of goalkeeper was and that he himself had been a keeper in his day.’
Monsignor Boyle was a supporter who got closer to the team than he could ever have imagined when he made his way to Italy to support Ireland in pursuit of their World Cup dream. As it turned out he had a massive role to play in the team’s audience with the pope: ‘I was initially in Italy as a supporter watching the Ireland team. I just happened to be staying in the same hotel as the FAI officials on Sardinia. I was saying Mass in the hotel, and the FAI approached me and asked me if I would say Mass for the team, who were staying at another hotel, the following night, which was a Saturday. I agreed, but they couldn’t make the Mass in the end. Instead, we did the Mass on the Sunday, which was the day before the England game.
‘I went up to the team hotel. There was a lot of security around the hotel. People were nervous because of the England and Ireland meeting, but there was no need to be. There was no trouble. I said the Mass, and it was just me and the team for it.
‘Jack Charlton then invited me to have lunch, and he asked
me, as long as I was around, would I mind saying Mass for the team for the rest of tournament. Naturally, I agreed. Once we had made it out of the group stages we were paired with Romania, with the match to be played in Genoa. Before the game Jack said to me, “If we win, we will go to Rome, and if that happens, a couple of members of the panel want to have an audience with the pope. Will you be able to arrange that for them?”
‘I contacted the director of the Irish college in Rome, Monsignor Brady, who is now Cardinal Brady. I explained the situation to him; however, we had to keep it hushed, as the game had not been played yet.’
Ireland won the game and then had to make their way down to Rome, where they were to face Italy. Monsignor Boyle continues, ‘Audiences with the pope are held on a Wednesday, and the players only arrived down on the Tuesday, so there was not a lot of time to make arrangements. However, they had their audience with the pope, and the Vatican was very pleased. Ireland were the only team that arranged for an audience with the pope during the tournament.’
Craig Johnston had retired from football when he met up with Jack again, at Italia ’90: ‘Ireland had just beaten Romania on penalties. I was in the crowd that day, and Jack saw me amidst the mayhem and chaos. He had the presence of mind to come over to me and to ask me how I was and what I was doing with a big film camera on my shoulder. I told him I was filming a documentary for UNICEF, and I really needed a lift back to the team hotel. Much to my surprise, he pulled me up out of the crowd and put me on the team bus. It was amazing, really.
‘After Ireland lost to Italy in Rome the players were with their wives, having a singsong like only the Irish can have. The
lads were all in good spirits, as they had dramatically over-delivered on their World Cup promise. They were all very proud of their achievements. It was going to be a long night at the end of a long but successful campaign.
‘It dawned on me as I was sitting there watching and listening to the singsong what Jack had just achieved with his players. Sometimes it takes an outsider to tell a ragbag army of blokes how good they can all be. Sometimes it can’t come from within the ranks. I thought it was a bit like Bill Shankly with Liverpool and how a Scot had somehow made the Scousers believe they were the best in the world and then they became the best club in the world. This was the same. Here was Jack Charlton, the big proud Englishman, and he had just helped Ireland to their best World Cup position ever. In their presence he was like the messiah.
‘It was a fantastic evening. Everybody was having a good time. I remember Chris de Burgh took it upon himself to sing a song in tribute to the gaffer to the tune of “Hey Jude”. He sang a whole parody, starting off with the words “Hey Jack”. One by one all the players sang a song. Liam Brady was there, and he sang “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town”, while Andy Townsend chipped in with “I’m Leaving on a Jet Plane” and Ronnie Whelan sang a traditional Irish song. It was a privilege to be there, and I escaped largely unnoticed until Ronnie Whelan made me get up and sing a rendition of ‘I Still Call Australia Home’. Mick McCarthy, another big gruff Englishman, then picked me up and threw me into a fountain, camera and all. At the end of the night, or the start of the morning or whatever, it must have been about 5.30 a.m., all the lads were still singing, although their throats were now red raw. When Big Jack got up to move all the players in
unison called for one last song from the gaffer. Without missing a beat the big man launched into a stirring rendition of “The Blaydon Races”. It brought the house down.
‘Jack then grabbed his wife’s hand and led her off to bed. The lads weren’t going to let him have the last word, though, and they turned into a schoolboy choir and started singing “We know where you’re going, we know what you’re doing!” If everybody thought that was the end of it, it wasn’t. Just as the laughter had died down, the shutters of the master suite on the third floor balcony were flung open. Big Jack appeared before us all, semi-naked, with a towel covering his bits and pieces. He made a series of very lavish and generous hand gestures, which received a rapturous round of applause from his congregation. The night had finally ended, and it was now time to put a very funny and memorable night in Irish football history to bed.
‘I had met Jack’s son John Charlton years ago up in Newcastle. He was a very good footballer himself and a great lad. The Irish lads loved him, and he was helping his dad out as an extra pair of hands and eyes in the Ireland squad. One night John invited me to the team hotel. They were having a few beers and a bit of team bonding. There were a few silly games that footballers often play and one that I hadn’t seen before. It involved someone sitting in the middle of the floor and a penny being pushed into his forehead. The natural suction of the slightly moistened penny keeps it on the forehead until the person whacks the back of his own head hard enough that it falls off.
‘Jack, who had sunk a few pints of the old Guinness himself, was watching a few players do this and saw that it took them about three whacks before the penny fell off their foreheads. As
a competitive man, he just had to have a go himself. After all, how hard could it be?
‘Big Jack sat on the stool in the middle of the room. As the lads gathered round him you could hear a pin drop. Ronnie Whelan approached him, licked the coin and stuck it onto Jack’s forehead. Jack then began to whack the back of his own head. Once, twice, three times. He looked down to see if the penny had fallen. No, it hadn’t. He whacked again harder and harder. Six, seven, eight whacks. Nothing. Nine, ten. Even more feverish whacking followed. Eleven, twelve. He was whacking away as the crowd begged him to hit harder and harder.
‘The Big Englishman man got up to fifteen very hard whacks of his own head when he finally twigged that the coin was not there. The look on his face was priceless. He had been done like a kipper. Ronnie had pressed the coin very hard, so it felt like it was actually stuck there, but it wasn’t.
‘That little prank shows just how much the lads respected him. Jack was one of the boys, and the fact that he actually got involved says something about his management style. It is very hard to think of another manager who would do that. Jack’s personality was big enough that he was willing to put himself into the firing line and be laughed at, in the process endearing himself to the squad even more.’
PUT ’EM UNDER PRESSURE
The well-known Irish song ‘Put ’Em Under Pressure’ produced by Larry Mullen of U2 that topped the Irish charts during 1990 was based on the catchphrase that Jack had adopted during his
reign with Ireland. As Jack himself puts it, ‘I suppose people talk about the long-ball football we played, but when you look at the players we had in the team it was long ball with quality. We pressurised teams in their own half, and they were not used to it. They were used to having time on the ball.’
Jack understood perfectly what he wanted to achieve from day one in the Ireland job: ‘It was around 1981, I think, and I was doing some TV work. Denmark were playing Italy, and they managed to beat them 3–1. They did it playing one man up front and hitting the ball up to him. The forward would then knock it back to the midfielder, and because Denmark had an extra man in midfield the Italians did not know whether to come, stay or drop back. This meant that Denmark were winning all the ball. The result surprised a lot of people, but I was not surprised.
‘Before the Euro ’88 qualifying campaign I went to Mexico to see the teams that Ireland had been drawn against, Belgium and Bulgaria, and I saw that they had real tidy passing games. Straight away I knew we had to adapt and change our game plan, as I felt we were not good enough to play at that level. So we set about introducing a new system.
‘I remember Belgium had a fella called Ceulemans. He was an attacking player and about six feet two inches in height, and their full-backs would try and get the ball up to him at every chance. He would more often than not win the ball, so I knew we had to look into that. The key was to cut out the supply to their full-backs. I said to the players, “Once the ball gets to their full-backs charge them down.” That meant they then had to move the ball, and it stopped them playing the way they wanted to.
‘I was a defender as a player, and I understood the relationship between defender and goalkeeper. When I first came in I moved
Mark Lawrenson, who played as a defender for Liverpool, into centre midfield. I felt that by having a defender in there the link between centre-half and midfield would be enhanced. It worked, too, and then when Mark retired through injury I moved Paul McGrath in there. The reason for having a centre-back in midfield was because your centre-backs need to be the fittest men on the field. There is a lot of concentration involved in defending. For example, when a right-back or a left-back is caught out of position the centre-back has to cover them. When that happened we had Mark and Paul who knew how to defend and would be able to drop back into the centre of defence to cover them. All the players had a responsibility to cover positions when other players were caught out. If they could not do it and play the system, they were not in the team. They had to fit into the system.’
Although Ireland failed to reach Euro ’92, despite going through qualification unbeaten, they qualified again for the 1994 World Cup in America. By that time Tommy Coyne had joined the squad and, due to an unfortunate injury suffered by Niall Quinn, he boarded the plane to America: ‘The opportunity to play for Ireland came about through Packie Bonner and Chris Morris. They were at Celtic with me, and they asked me if I had any relations of Irish descent. My grandmother from my mother’s side was from Ballina, County Mayo, and as she had died at a young age it was a wonderful honour for me to represent Ireland in her memory.
‘The decision to play for Ireland was very easy to make, and I had no hesitation in accepting the offer. The fact that a manager of a national side was interested in me was a massive boost to me and my career, and I think that I played the best football of my career during those years.
‘Despite being a latecomer to the squad [Coyne was twenty-nine when he made his Ireland debut], and being on the periphery of the team, I managed to play three out of the four games at USA ’94. It was a wonderful experience – one of the best of my career. I was very fortunate to be there, as Quinny had withdrawn due to a cruciate-ligament injury. Playing in the Giants’ Stadium was amazing and very emotional.
‘The spirit in the squad was fantastic. Everybody got on so well. Being in the Ireland squad, surrounded by players such as John Aldridge, Ronnie Whelan and Paul McGrath, really helped raise my game and take it to another level.
‘I found Jack Charlton to be very down to earth and likeable, but I was in awe of him. He was a World Cup winner and had played at a very high level. He was unlike any manager I had played under. One time, we were in Dundalk before a game, and Jack showed me how to fly fish during a break in training. He had such a good manner, but it did not detract from his skills as a manager. In the years he was in charge he transformed Irish football.’
The first match in the Giants’ Stadium saw one of the biggest upsets in World Cup history when Ireland beat Italy 1–0. Jack says, ‘That was the highlight for me, that match against Italy in USA in 1994. You see, the rules had changed after Italia ’90. Keepers could no longer pick up the ball from a pass-back, so we had to adapt our game. Our game was built on a pressing game, and our full-backs would play the ball over the head of their full-backs, which meant that they had to turn. This allowed us to get into good positions and attack. If the opposing full-back got to the ball before we did, he could play it back to his goalkeeper. That three, four or five seconds meant that we could
regroup the players and get into shape again. However, with the introduction of the new rule, the keeper had to kick the ball, so there was less time to get our shape back and we had to adapt our plan. The players, as always, were very responsive, and we got the result that day.’