Paul McGrath - loved by all except himself

[wws]

A saint PATS LEGEND

[EalingGreen]

Ireland's greatest ever player (North or South) and comes across as a really nice, down to earth guy as well. The man the word legend was invented for.

I've seen McGrath, Keane and Brady all play live for ROI, plus their various clubs, and I remember Giles from TV. I'd have to say that McGrath was the pick of the bunch, which (imo) makes him a strong contender for greatest-ever ROI player.

But "Ireland's greatest ever player (North or South)"?
Sorry guys. If you look at the record of Pat Jennings, Danny Blanchflower or "Peter The Great" (Doherty), there's a strong case to be made that each of these was his equal, even superior.
And, of course, he doesn't come close to you-know-who as a player (not to mention the drinking, womanising or general hell-raising).

Remember:
Maradona = Good
Pele = Better
George = Best

[Schumi]

Remember:
Maradona = Good
Pele = Better
George = Best

Paul=God

[tetsujin1979]

Met him once, when the Ireland team were training in Limerick before the home game against Austria in 95, I was doing my Junior Cert at the time and the hotel where the team were staying was about 20 minutes from my house. So a bunch of us went out one morning to try and get some autographs, and just after we arrived the team came out to get on the bus, I ran up and asked him to sign a notepad for me, and all I could think was "chr!st, I'm taller than Paul McGrath!". Still have the notepad at home with all the signatures too.

[joe_barry80]

Not really directly to do with the man himself but a friend of mine told me that when the crowd were waiting for the team to return in Dublin Airport after Italia 90, Nelson Mandela happens to pass through before the team, so the fans all start singing "Ooh aah; Paul McGrath's Da; I said ooh aah Paul McGrath's Da ... etc".

The best players I have seen play for Ireland were Ray Houghton, John Giles,
Liam Brady, Paul McGrath and Roy Keane. As to who was the best, each was immense in his own right when playing but for sheer strength, determination and ability to read a game without ever having to resort to the nastier side of the game, none would surpass Paul.

Mandella was still in jail till 92 or 93

[$Leon$]

Mandella was released from prison on 11th Feb 1990

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandella

[Fergie's Son]

What a player. Really gave his all for Ireland. Do remember, he played a number of games in the middle of the pitch for us!

Easily one of the greatest Irish players of all time. Was he the greatest? I think you have to consider his position. He wasn't a gamebreaker the way Keane was. That is, McGrath's role was to destroy rather than create. He was a Bobby Moore or a Claude Makalele rather than an attacking midfielder. Keane had more opportunity to positivel affect the game (from an Irish point of view).

McGrath, however, is up there with the best though. That said, the greatest Irish player of all time (based purely ok skill) is George Best by a country mile. Arguably the greatest who ever played the game much less the greatest Irish player. Just my $.02

[dr_peepee]

Legend and a realy nice man.

I was lucky enough to get invited to the Function in the mansion house when Jack Charlton got the key to the city just before USA '94. Got to meet Jack and all the Squad (Bar Babb, McAteer and Gary Kelly). The two most friendly and approachable from all the players were, ironically, Paul McGrath and Roy Keane.

I chatted with McGrath for a bit and I got a secuirity guard to take a photo of us. During which he raised his pint of Club lemon to the Secuirity guad and said "Make sure you get this in the photo". They both laughed. I didn't get the joke at the time.

[The Swordsman]

What a player. Really gave his all for Ireland. Do remember, he played a number of games in the middle of the pitch for us!

Easily one of the greatest Irish players of all time. Was he the greatest? I think you have to consider his position. He wasn't a gamebreaker the way Keane was. That is, McGrath's role was to destroy rather than create. He was a Bobby Moore or a Claude Makalele rather than an attacking midfielder. Keane had more opportunity to positivel affect the game (from an Irish point of view).

RTE showed Eng V Irl from Wembley 1991 yesterday evening. McGrath played midfield and was immense.

If you watched that game, you'd see Paul could create too.

When you talk about the great Irish midfielders, there is not much to choose between Keane, Brady, Giles and McGrath. But Paul was a centre half who played only played midfield for Ireland (please correct me if I'm wrong here) and there has been no other Irish CH, IMHO, who could lace his boots. Thats why I believe Paul is the greatest ever.

I met him once. He seemed to me to be a really sound down to earth guy. I hope he can battle through his alcoholism.

[OwlsFan]

Saw that game last night as well. An immense performance but I awaited with dread the Houghton 1 on 1 with the keeper late on when he shot wide. That miss still hurts but it was the 2 draws against Poland that really screwed us.

The team was at its peak then with McGrath protecting the back four. Different era then. Moran gives Robson a forearm smash in the face and doesn't get booked (straight red these days). McGrath takes a shot full in the face - shakes his head and moves on to the next tackle. Imagine Drogba in similar circumstances - would be rolling round in agony for ages.

Irish team that day: Bonner, Stan, O'Leary, Moran, Irwin, Sheedy, Townsend, McGrath, Houghton, Aldo and Quinn.

[beautifulrock]

A fantastic team, strength and skill throughout team. If only we had to qualify....

[Closed Account 2]

Does anyone have that game on DVD / video ?

[cheifo]

I was at that game and the atmosphere was fantastic..always remember how it built up and up during that period of sustained pressure when they could not get out of their half.

[bennocelt]

Mandella was still in jail till 92 or 93

its a true story, it was the 1994 return

[Stuttgart88]

Similar article in today's The Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...417093,00.html

McGrath is tackling his demons
By Rick Broadbent

The dark days are now fewer for troubled former international


THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY AND Graham Taylor had just rung to deliver the latest edition of the Riot Act. Feelings of shame and self-loathing merged. The inner voice told him he was a worthless bum. “I vividly remember the Stanley knife and the blood pouring on to the floor,” Paul McGrath recalled. “Come to think of it, I remember the au pair’s scream, too.”
Re-reading his biography left McGrath shaking his head. “I thought, ‘What sort of human being are you?’ ” It was the best of tomes, it was the worst of tomes, a tale of two players — the sober star playing in midfield and defence, and the suicidal drunk on the brink.



On Saturday, McGrath went back to Aston Villa and was fêted as a much-loved son. Everyone knew of his problems, but few outside of an inner circle have appreciated the depth of the depressions or the trauma of the mental breakdown that left him grinding bacon and egg into his hair and with his knees stuck together from months lying in a zombified state.

The nadir was slashing his wrists while his baby son, Christopher, lay in the same room. There were other suicide attempts, too, some more determined than others. He drank a bottle of Domestos and thought, ‘This one’s going to do it’, and he drove his car into a church wall after downing a bottle of brandy. The latter coincided with what he says was the best period of his career at Villa, but he does not remember the hospital or ambulance, just the policemen turning up at his home and asking for a breath test.

McGrath is too honest to suggest he wants others to be inspired by his resilience, but he does believe his history may provide some empathy for co-sufferers. It is voyeuristic and gruesome, but sheds some light on one of sport’s last great taboos: mental illness.

“The most selfish thing I did was cutting my wrists,” he said. “I just didn’t want to be involved any more. A lot of it was drink. If I’d been sober I wouldn’t have had the nerve, the wherewithal or the stupidity, but I started off using drink and then drink started using me. And I don’t know where the line got crossed.”

It is interesting that McGrath says he drank initially because of chronic shyness. That, in itself, was rooted somewhere in a past that involved being given away by his mother, abandoned by his father and beaten in an orphanage, but he believes shyness was a flaw bonding him to another Irish icon and alcoholic, George Best. “Because of the transplant people say George should have behaved, but I’m sure he didn’t want to curl up and die ,” McGrath said.

“You don’t do it because you want to destroy yourself, you do it because you’re in the grip of something else. Drinking’s like a parallel world. George was shy and lovely but he just could not get to grips with his demons.”

The miracle is that Best and McGrath could play to such a high standard. Best will always be a bittersweet legend, while McGrath was a force of unnatural will. He accepts that Sir Alex Ferguson should have got rid of him earlier, but his renaissance at Villa defied medical science. Occasionally he would play while drunk, like the time he got the man-of-the-match award against Everton. “I went for balls I wouldn’t normally dream of going for,” he said. “I felt impregnable and that was dangerous.”

The survivor mentality was to the fore in the 3-1 victory against Manchester United in the 1994 League Cup final. McGrath had woke the night before with a searing pain in his shoulder. “I could not lie down because of the agony,” he said. “It was the scariest thing that has ever happened to my body, like someone had stuck a red-hot poker in me. I was in bits and should never have played, but I was pumped full of injections.”

A League Cup, an FA Cup and 83 Ireland caps are career statistics that paper over the binges and the bleakness. Little was bleaker than the breakdown he suffered as a teenager. He is not sure whether it was brought on by his childhood, a kick in the head or having a drink spiked with LSD, but in Back From The Brink (Century, £18.99), he wrote of his time in a psychiatric unit: “My voice had left me. I was lying in one position for so long my knees actually stuck together. They had to be prised apart. My legs are still scarred to this day.”

Friends recalled that his glazed eyes and sore-marked face rendered him a character from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Yet McGrath came through it to move to United, where Ron Atkinson’s “flexible” methods suited him. “He was a comedian,” McGrath said. “He’d want to play in the five-a-sides and looked like Brian Glover in Kes. Then Fergie came in and he had a different set of rules.”


It was, perhaps, the onset of a stricter, more scientific era that was defined by the likes of Arsène Wenger. “I couldn’t have got away with it now,” McGrath said. “It was a lovely era because of the bonds, but we overdid it and paid the price. I was blessed that I had people who cared enough about me to not want me to be falling down and making an a*** of myself. But the things you do in the middle of a binge are beyond belief.”

Things like drinking amid the winos and syringes in a Dublin alley and waking in a caravan on a beach with no recollection of how he got there. McGrath has tried to get help before, including via Tony Adams’s Sporting Chance charity, but now he thinks that he is on the right road. “You have to ask for help,” he said. “You have to do it for yourself, not your kids, your wife or your mother. I think it’s my turn to be well because I’ve been through the wringer a few times.”

He hopes football fans remember him “as a half-decent player who had a bit of a problem”. He worries about the things his children have seen and knows this is a long haul. “There’s a half-decent person in there somewhere,” he said. “It’s just a matter of getting him out.”

[OwlsFan]

its a true story, it was the 1994 return

I don't think it was 1994. Mandela's first visit to Ireland was July 1990 which would co-incide with the team coming home from Italia 90.

[The Swordsman]

Does anyone have that game on DVD / video ?

I recorded it on Saturday on my new DVD recorder, which I don't really know how to fully use yet.

If I can figure out how to get it from there to the web, I will do that providing it won't mean an appearance before the local wig.

Alternatively, I could copy it to DVD and send it on to you.

[Tenderloins]

Finished the book last week. Harrowing stuff some of it, yet a very hard book to put down.
Whats incredible is that even through his alcoholism, suicide attempts , addiction to pain killers and other pills etc he was so fantastic on the field. The fact he didn't rate himself highly which was always put down to modesty when it was self confidence.

The son Chris was playing for Chorley and working in Security according to the book.

[wws]

just reading some posts above saying mcgrath didnt have opportuniteies to change games like keane etc - it should be noted that mcgrath literally pulled the team through a rake of qualifiers when we had a strike force that couldnt score for love nor money

scored some classic headed goals and volleys from distance in a green shirt

[as_i_say]

Saw that game last night as well. An immense performance but I awaited with dread the Houghton 1 on 1 with the keeper late on when he shot wide. That miss still hurts but it was the 2 draws against Poland that really screwed us.

Irish team that day: Bonner, Stan, O'Leary, Moran, Irwin, Sheedy, Townsend, McGrath, Houghton, Aldo and Quinn.

watched that the other night as well-hurts like hell. its a shame we were still the country of wee little poor little ireland at the time cos charlton should have been sacked after that campaign. we were one of THE best teams in europe in 1991 without a doubt. Player for player we were so much better than england yet were forced to play that disgusting style of football against them in wembley with a team like that on the pitch.

whatever you say about dunphy-he had it right about that!!