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THEO GIVE US A BALL
Official Millwall Athletic Match Day Programme (v. Aston Villa - 6 October 2018)
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THEO FOLEY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LOVE STORY OF MODEST FOOTBALL MAN
By Larry Ryan
Theo Foley smiled from the pages of other people’s books, had cameos in other people’s stories.
In Eamon Dunphy’s autobiography The Rocky Road, Foley is the Charlton manager about to give Eamon an escape from his soured Millwall career.
“I liked Theo. He was a Dubliner: brash, extrovert, optimistic, intense, thin as a whippet, hard as nails when he played, full of sardonic humour around the dressing room. ‘What’s the story, Dunphy? Do you still want to play … or are you looking for a rest home?’ was his opening gambit.”
In Alan Smith’s recent book Heads Up, Foley is the good cop you could take a few liberties with on the Arsenal training ground, on the rare occasions George Graham didn’t take the session.
“One morning, Niall Quinn launched himself at Theo, rugby tackling his countryman during the warm-up, with both ending up at the bottom of a grassy ditch. Thankfully, Theo wasn’t the sort to get on his high horse. Both had a good laugh.”
And in A Football Man, by John Giles, Foley is the player wrongly, in Gilesy’s view, chosen in central midfield for Ireland in the World Cup playoff with Spain in 1965, an indictment of selection by committee.
Foley is another of our most enduring football men, who wove himself into the fabric of the English game over 60 years, without ever really making the story about him.
Now, after much persuasion by the ghostwriter of Theo Give us a Ball, Foley has joined some of those dots and painted a rich portrait of a life in football.
He was sacked at Charlton within a season of signing Dunphy, but not before he had smartened up the Valley touchline, sporting a three-quarter length brown leather coat he bought out of Bobby Moore’s car boot for £100.
He left Arsenal in 1991 because Graham felt his good cop had grown too close to the players. And he was as bemused as Gilesy about ‘65, even if Theo was Ireland’s best player doing a man-marking job on the great Luis Suarez. Spain got their winner only when Foley was off the field patching a cheek opened by a Spanish elbow.
Theo grew up in Inchicore, St Patrick’s Athletic’s Richmond Park visible from his back garden. “This was like Wembley. Growing up with a football stadium as a backdrop, football seeped into my blood and stayed there.”
He captained Northampton Town in the English First Division, while running a pie shop in the town, its grand opening performed by the singer Ruby Murray, before she became rhyming slang for an alternative evening meal.
He won nine Ireland caps, mostly at full-back, hastening his own demise by chancing a knee injury to play against Franz Beckenbauer’s Germany in Dublin.
He’d linger around the edges of Irish football, a footnote in the narrative. He was shortlisted for the manager’s job in 1975, when two FAI reps called to his house to interview him at quarter to midnight. George Burley wanted to bring him on board as assistant in 2005, but Brian Kerr got the hotseat.
He notes it’s less than 50 years since the Republic first appointed a manager with autonomy to pick his own team, in Mick Meagan.
“We were miles too late and you can’t help feeling we’ve been catching up ever since.”
While at Charlton, he had a regular Saturday slot on London radio station LBC, predicting the First Division scores with a young Jeff Stelling.
He even made it into a Private Eye Colemanballs collection for the immortal post-match line: “If there was one person to blame it would have to be the team.”
Later, at Arsenal, George Graham didn’t win any more championships after the pair parted. Who knows what else Graham lost? A conscience, perhaps. Foley turned down a bung for the first time in 1972. “I’d never have been able to look Mammy and Daddy in the eye had I taken it.” Theo Give us a Ball is full of appreciation for the life football gave him, but also reminders of how disposable even great football men once were.
Years after he bought the leather coat, Theo met Bobby Moore again.
“A couple of years before he sadly passed away, I saw him at the old Wembley trying to get into the private bar after an England game and some arsehole on the door wouldn’t let him in without a pass. ‘Can you get me in here, Theo?’ he said, as I walked past. The captain of the England World Cup winning side at the home of English football. What a joke.
“I pulled the doorman aside and gave him one hell of a bollocking as Bobby was just too modest to have a go. Ironically, there is now a bar at the New Wembley named after him as well as a restaurant and a statue outside. All correct and only right but all too late, unfortunately.”
At 81, Theo still works as a matchday host at Charlton, would still “watch a kickabout in the back garden with as much enthusiasm as the World Cup”. But it fits pretty well too that he may not even be the true hero of his own story. When his son Paul, who wrote the book, agreed to a chat, he warned he might struggle “to have enough puff for the phone”.
When Paul had the idea for this book, six years ago, he was a fit man in his early 40s, who’d played non-league football, who went to the gym three times a week.
One day, in 2012, he noticed his leg catch on the treadmill and from there unravelled a nightmare. The tumour on his brain stem is inoperable. Six months of radiotherapy here, nine months chemotherapy there. A second course of chemo now.
He began the book five years ago a touch typist, he finished it sweating through the night, prodding out his father’s words, one finger at a time.
“For the last 18 months, I’ve been in a wheelchair. The hands don’t work too well. I’ve changed quite a bit. It’s been a bit of a struggle. They are trying to zap it and control it, but it just slowly gets worse.”
Would there have been any book without his illness? Paul doubts it.
“Dad is quite a modest man. Who’d want to read my story, he always said. But the book helped me in a way, even though it was a slog. It gave me a focus. That’s how I sold it to him.”
For Paul this is a love story. The boy’s fondest memories of an “idyllic childhood” are of spending six weeks of school holidays with his dad on QPR’s training ground, chasing footballs. With maybe an ice cream on the way home.
These past years he has battled on, teasing out his dad’s memories, pride his comfort.
“Mum says I’ve captured his voice,” Paul laughs. “I bloody should have.”
Their love story had its fairytale. “The pinnacle,” Theo calls it.
There has been much 20-20 hindsight about Anfield ‘89. George Graham will tell you he planned it to a tee. In his new book, Bruce Grobbelaar says he feared the worst after Kenny Dalglish’s downbeat teamtalk. Alan Smith smelled something in the Mersey air when he and David O’Leary enjoyed a relaxed pre-match nap.
But Theo won’t bluff. “If I’m completely honest, I didn’t give us much chance.”
He admits he roared at John Lukic to kick it long, with time running out, rather than bowl it to Lee Dixon, before Michael Thomas made sure Theo is more than a footnote in Arsenal history.
“I have been fortunate enough to have been invited over to The Emirates for the odd game to see Ricey or Bouldy and was blown away when Arsene Wenger came over to our table and knew exactly who I was.”
Nor was Foley a footnote in the lives of the players he became too close to.
Among Paul’s fondest memories is regularly coming downstairs as a teenager to find the late David Rocastle in his front room, shooting the breeze, waiting for a lift to training. Rocastle, known as ‘son of Theo’ in the Arsenal dressing room, was lost to cancer by the age of 33.
Nowadays two international shirts have pride of place in Theo’s home. The Spanish shirt Luis Suarez wore in Paris and an England one signed by Rocastle after Foley left Highbury to become the boss back in the East Midlands.
The message on it reads: “To Theo, you will always be my no. 1 coach, wishing you every success as manager of Northampton Town, from your stepson Dave ‘Rocky’ Rocastle.”
* Theo Give us a Ball: A Life in Football is published by Apex Publishing and is out now.
Irish Examiner
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THEO GIVE US A BALL
Official Charlton Athletic Match Day Programme (v. Fleetwood Town - 25 August 2018)
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THEO GIVE US A BALL
Sports Trader Magazine
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THEO GIVE US A BALL
Irish Daily Star
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FOLEY PROVED TO BE MOST ABLE ASSISTANT
George Graham’s No 2 at Arsenal could teach Roy Keane a thing or two
By Paul Rowan
“Be tight with the players but tighter with the manager,” would be Theo Foley’s advice when it comes to the art of being an assistant manager, a role he carried out for George Graham at Arsenal, but the Dubliner doesn’t believe that Roy Keane for one will take much notice.
“I would imagine Roy finds it difficult for anybody to tell him what to do, I wouldn’t know what to say to him to help him because he goes way over the top,” says Foley. “I don’t think he trusts many people, I don’t think he allows other people to have an opinion, as he has proven in management. His management skills are not great. He was a great player. End of story, that’s it.”
Keane fell out with Harry Arter and Jon Walters over the vexed question of their fitness or otherwise during lengthy spells on the treatment table at the end of season international friendlies in June. It’s a difficult area where Foley has some sympathy for the Ireland assistiant manager, but, as he puts it, “To accuse somebody of faking injury is probably the worst thing you can say to a professional”.
When Foley was manager at Charlton in the early 1970s, he recalls levelling the same accusation against a player called Dave Shipperley — with good reason, Foley felt, as the big defender was overindulging in the Christmas party season. The bad blood between the two of them eventually spilled over into a fight on the training pitch where Foley had to be pulled off the player.
It wasn’t the only time Foley squared up to men much bigger than himself along the way — the likes of John Fashanu at Millwall and Niall Quinn at Arsenal will testify to that — but Foley also had no problem empathising with players, probably because he was a good one himself but not in the elite bracket.
At Arsenal, after they famously won the league title in 1989 at Anfield, Foley thinks he probably got too close to the players. In particular, the goalkeeper John Lukic, who he wanted to stay at Arsenal and fight for his place rather than go to QPR on a swap with David Seaman, for whom Arsenal also willing to pay £1m. The deal fell through much to Graham’s annoyance, though Lukic wouldn’t remain at Arsenal for much longer. Foley was also instrumental in Michael Thomas — Arsenal’s goalscoring hero at Anfield — extending his stay after falling out with the Graham shortly after. When Graham decided to demote Foley to look after the reserves and promoted Stewart Houston as his deputy, Foley left the club in 1990, a decision he would go on to regret.
“I was hurt and disappointed as I loved my job. I loved the club and I loved the players. It was, and still is, the pinnacle of my career.”
His pride was wounded, but Foley never fell out with Graham and worked for him later at Leeds United and Tottenham.
Foley has now told his life story in his fascinating autobiography, Theo Give us the Ball, which has been ghost written by his son Paul, who played the game at non-league level and is a fighter as well. Paul was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour six years ago and has been confined to a wheelchair for the last 18 months, but has produced his father’s life story, in between bouts of chemotherapy and spending time with his young family. Paul remembers a young David Rocastle waiting in the family living room in southeast London every morning for a lift to training with Theo, who had become like a father to him and was left “heart-broken” when the former Arsenal midfielder died of cancer in 2001.
At 81, Foley is still incredibly fit and hasn’t lost that combative streak. He earned nine caps for Ireland in the 1960s but it could have been even more were it not for some bad injuries. Beside the Rocastle shirt which Foley has hanging at his home near Greenwich is one presented to him by one Luis Suarez, the renowned Spain striker who Foley marked in the infamous World Cup playoff of 1965 in Paris.
Foley knows that part of management is eliminating any reasons — or excuses — which the players may have for failure. Back then the players had a major one. Foley says the players were incensed by newspaper reports that the playoff tie against Spain had been moved from Wembley to Paris on the back of a financial payment said to have boosted the coffers of Irish football by about £25,000. He also remembers castigating teammate Eamon Dunphy for smoking a cigarette on the pitch shortly before the game. Late in the game, Foley himself got an elbow to the face which required treatment on the side of the pitch and Spain scored the only goal of the game as he was about to return.
“I don’t think they would’ve scored if I had been on the pitch,” says Foley. “I went to hospital afterwards to get my cheek stitched. Nobody bothered too much about me. They left me there and that was it. They were having a party at the hotel.”
Foley at the time was captain of Northampton Town who were enjoying a rare visit to the top flight of English football and he had become friendly with Bobby Moore, who would go on to lift the World Cup for England shortly afterwards.
A few years later, Moore would sell him a brown leather coat which Foley wore on the touchline when he was managing Charlton after leaving Arsenal. However, he was always more comfortable in a tracksuit and might even have been part of the Ireland management team answering to George Burley, had the FAI not chosen Brian Kerr instead in 2003. Still there has been enough incident in his colourful life, even though he was never one to go looking for trouble.
* Theo Give us a Ball is available on Amazon as an ebook; Paperback, Apex £9.99. Due out in October
The Sunday Times
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