Mercs in Saudi, death threats in Durban … the adventures of Ireland’s former soccer managers

After Ireland. An anthology of short stories.
In the middle of 1987 Eoin Hand landed in Saudi Arabia. The sports shop he part-owned in Dublin had folded and he had not worked in football since he finished as Ireland manager, 18 months earlier. Every trail in England had gone cold. Wolverhampton Wanderers had interviewed him but plumped for Graham Turner instead. They had just fallen into Division Four. He needed to earn a crust.
Al-Taawoun were searching for a European coach. Tommy Docherty, a vivacious character, had turned them down but, for Hand, being out of work had broadened his horizon. An agent made the match. The Saudis liked the idea that he had been an international manager. They were importers of prestige.
“I said, ‘Look it, I’ll go and try it for a month,’” Hand says now. “I basically organised them – they had never been organised before. They were very keen to keep me and consequently they gave me a very good contract. Financially, it put me on my feet – there was no doubt about that.”
At that time, very few people were enriched by football. As a player, Hand’s biggest wage had been £120 a week at Portsmouth. When he took the Ireland job in 1980 his annual salary was £9,500, climbing to £17,500 by the time he finished, five years later. Just like now, the Saudis had no truck with the going rate.
Hand lived in a compound for foreigners in the city of Buraidah, dicing with local customs and sharia law. He was arrested once for wearing shorts in a shopping centre and stewed for hours in a police cell until his sponsor at the club used his leverage to get him out.
The team was amateurish. The players had a poor grasp of rudimentary principles and Hand was trying to educate them through an interpreter. One of his central midfielders refused to head the ball. One of his strikers walked off the field one day after scoring such a beautiful goal that he could see no purpose in continuing. As a further complication he discovered that two of his players were in a relationship. They used to disappear into the woods together on Friday evenings, taking their lives into their hands.
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Under his leadership, though, the team did well. They offered him a contract extension and included a Mercedes to sweeten the deal. But after a year Hand had second thoughts and decided to leave. He was making arrangements to have the car shipped home until the club chairman intervened. The car was staying. Call it an exit tax.
Malcom McDonald was the manager of Huddersfield Town, and asked Hand to be his assistant. Within months, McDonald was sacked for an act of gross professional misconduct. Hand was promoted. Huddersfield were relegated to Division Three. The new manager was absolved of blame. He survived.
That’s not even half the story.
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Since John Giles’ first competitive match as Ireland manager, 50 years ago this month, there have been 10 permanent appointments to the role. It left a different mark on each of them. Nobody was unscathed. Even Jack Charlton, the most successful and celebrated of them all, was slightly scarred by his final qualifying campaign.
For Charlton and Giovanni Trapattoni, it was their last jobs in football; Charlton was 60 when he finished; Trapattoni was 71. For all the others, though, football’s carousel continued to spin.
It would be reckless to describe this as a pattern, in case that might suggest coherent thinking, but four of those Ireland managers were only in their 30s when they were appointed: Giles was 32, Hand was 34, Mick McCarthy and Steve Staunton were both 37. Giles and Hand were still playing club football. Glenn Hoddle is the only England manager appointed to that role in his 30s.
What it also seemed to mean was that their lives in football were still ahead of them after they finished with Ireland. Turn the page. Next chapter. Simple game?
At this remove, the brevity of Giles’ career in management is striking. For such a brilliant player, blessed with a such an acute football mind, he seemed destined for a long life in the dugout. Just six years after he finished with Ireland, though, he fled that world. By then, he had managed the Vancouver Whitecaps, Shamrock Rovers and West Bromwich Albion, each time confirming his aptitude for the gig. It didn’t matter.
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“I never really enjoyed it,” says Giles now. “There were very, very harsh decisions to be made about leaving players out, and you don’t have the freedom that you’re supposed to have. That’s what I found out. I had a short spell at it. I wasn’t sorry to get out.”
The trajectory of Staunton’s career in management, in contrast, was no surprise. When Ireland plucked him from Walsall’s coaching staff he had no front-of-house experience, and after he was sacked by the FAI, he waited two years for his next opportunity.
Darlington appointed him when they were bottom of League Two in October 2009 and sacked him five months later, when they were 19 points adrift of safety. In his last game in charge, a home defeat to Barnet, Darlington recorded their lowest ever attendance: 1,463. This wasn’t his calling in life.
For McCarthy, though, it has been a vocation. His stamina and resilience have been extraordinary. In just over 30 years he has managed in more than 950 matches in Britain, with six different clubs, either side of his two stints with Ireland. He has won the Championship twice; during his time with Wolves he kept them in the top division in successive seasons for the first time in 30 years; with Ipswich, he led them to the Championship play-offs for the first time in 10 years.
His teams were pragmatic and unpretentious and, on losing runs, that would be held against him. But in football’s slavish devotion to outcomes McCarthy couldn’t have survived for so long without a firm grasp of the bottom line.
To prosper in the jungle, he needed the skin of a rhinoceros. McCarthy spent longer at Ipswich Town than at any other club, but as is often the case, it ended sourly. At the conclusion of his last full season, he joined the players in the customary lap of appreciation to the fans and was booed at every turn. Ipswich had the fifth smallest budget in the Championship. He was operating on a shoestring.
His second last match was a 1-0 defeat, away to Brentford. After the game he was approached by a policewoman who asked him not to leave the ground by the main exit. “There are fans outside waiting to throw bottles at you,” she said.
Brian Kerr succeeded McCarthy as Ireland manager, first time around. In his only full qualifying campaign Ireland lost just once. In October 2005 his contact wasn’t renewed. Unlike Stephen Kenny, though, he didn’t return to the League of Ireland, where he had first made his name. The Ireland job had given him a taste for international football.
“I knew I wasn’t going to get the Brazil or Spain jobs,” he says now. “Realistically, it was going to be somewhere else, far away, taking a chance on me. I went to India. They were keen, but I wasn’t after being there for a week.
“I spoke to Singapore too, but I wasn’t sure I would stick being so far away from everyone here. The offers from Africa were too risky from lots of angles.”
Instead, he landed in the Faroe Islands and guided them to their first competitive win in eight years. Before he left, they added another. Kerr made them better. For every manager, that is the binding metric.
In Martin O’Neill’s case, most of his winning was in the past, first at Leicester City, then at Celtic and to a degree at Aston Villa. With Ireland, some limitations were exposed. Criticism rained on him, like it had on every other Irish manager. His reaction was prickly.
He finished with Ireland in November 2018 and accepted an offer from Nottingham Forest two months later. He lasted 19 matches. Roy Keane joined O’Neill as his assistant, just as he had done with Ireland, but Keane resigned during preseason, in the summer of 2019, and O’Neill was sacked a week later in the face of what The Guardian described as “growing dressing-room disillusionment”.
The widely reported suggestion that the players had done for him was hotly rejected by O’Neill. “There was this idea that it was player power at Nottingham Forest,” O’Neill said in an interview on Talksport. “Do me a favour. Player power at Forest? There was not a player strong enough or with the personality to usurp me. The players did not get me out in the end. I believe there were a few nondescript players who sent their agents to the CEO. More fool him for listening.”
Three years later O’Neill published his autobiography. In a tome that runs to more than 350 pages, there is no mention of his last job at Forest.
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In 1994 Eoin Hand moved to South Africa. The job of national team manager was available and after a few inquires he was granted an “interview”. By Hand’s account, it lasted five minutes.
Hand stayed around, and a few months later he was appointed manager of AmaZulu, a club outside Durban. He had no idea what he had walked into.
“After a few months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “it was clear that the fans and the wider community didn’t want a white man in charge of the team. I became the unwitting subject of what was, effectively, reverse apartheid.”
He began to receive death threats. Rocks were thrown at him by supporters. For one match he wore a motorcycle helmet in the dugout. Then, at training one evening, everything came to a head. A group of about thirty Zulus walked on to the pitch. He tried to reason with them.
“Then the crowd suddenly parted,” he writes, “and the tribal chief walked right up to me. ‘You are not listening. If you do not leave, we will kill you.’ I looked around only to find that my players, to a man, had vanished.’ It was only me, the tribal chief and an angry mob behind him.
[Two days later] I was sitting alone by the pool on the hotel rooftop when a man came out of the nearby lift. Without looking at me he pulled out a gun and began to slowly pace around the pool. I got up immediately and said, out loud, ‘I’m leaving Durban now. I’m leaving.’”
For Hand, being Ireland manager had been tough. But at least the assassins weren’t armed.
Fifty years after John Giles’ first competitive game as Ireland manager, Heimir Hallgrímsson is the 10th different manager to hold the post on a permanent basis. What did the others do when they finished with Ireland? Was the job a help or a hindrance in their later careers?
Most of them finished in management within half a dozen years of leaving the Ireland job. For Jack Charlton and Giovanni Trapattoni it was their swansong in the management game.
Martin O’Neill took one more gig, returning to Nottingham Forest, where he enjoyed his greatest successes as a player. He lasted 19 games. Steve Staunton’s only job in management after he finished with Ireland was a five-month spell with Darlington in League Two.
John Giles, Eoin Hand and Brian Kerr all went abroad. Giles spent three years with the Vancouver Whitecaps, before returning to West Bromwich Albion for a final season. Hand went to Saudi Arabia and South Africa either side of a four-year spell with Huddersfield Town, while Kerr managed the Faroe Islands.
Of all of them, Mick McCarthy was by far the most active in his post-Ireland career. After his first stint with Ireland, he managed Sunderland, Wolves and Ipswich Town, twice winning the Championship and keeping Wolves in the top division in successive seasons for the first time in 30 years.
After his second stint with Ireland he managed Cardiff City and Blackpool, and had a very short spell in Cyprus, but without any success.