The greening of Gillespie Road: When Arsenal’s Irish held football in the palm of their hands

Liam Brady, Pat Rice, Sammy Nelson, David O’Leary, John Devine and Frank Stapleton had their directions down and their heads up. Tony Donnelly tended the club kit and Paddy Galligan took care of the stadium, but they minded their Irish fledglings best of all.

As a well-tailored Niall Quinn emerges from the underground, there’s an estate agent showcasing to a young couple the upside of living across the street from a modern-day Premier League stadium. ‘Legends have walked up and down this street, with their gear bag and their dreams slung over their shoulder.’ 

Quinn smiles.

“Walking up from the Tube station started me thinking,” Quinn says. “I first did that 41 years ago. Did it happen for me here? I dunno. But you get the goosepimples, taking it all in, remembering a time when I had to do the kit and get it all ready for (Arsenal’s training ground at) London Colney.

“For the first while I lived with my uncle and aunt in Twickenham, and I had to get the 281 bus to Hounslow station at quarter past six every morning to get the Tube across the city on the Piccadilly line to make sure I was here for 8.15am. It was really difficult for the first year. The kit was done on the top floor of Highbury at the time and there were no lifts. Look, it was easy enough in the morning, you could slide the skips down those beautiful marble steps, steel hopping off them. No-one was there to give out to you.

“But after training, when we got back with skips full of sodden jerseys and gear, towels, getting them back up, a step at a time, to the laundry was no fun. I was on a three-year deal, they saw something they might develop, cos I had a guaranteed clause, but just because I had a pro contract, you couldn’t just walk away and dump your mates. It was only when I really got in the team that I could just turn up as a footballer.” 

He made his debut against Liverpool in December 1985. “It came from nowhere. I scored. I was meant to be going to Port Vale on loan and I didn’t even know where that was at the time. The goal resulted in a sack of fan mail. I rang my mother and she said ‘write to everyone one of them now!’” 

It was the first of 20 Gunners goals and 81 starts with another 13 as substitute. Quinn’s finest years were ahead of him, with Manchester City , Sunderland and Ireland. Liam Brady once said the Arsenal way is to develop footballers for a successful career. 

Implicit in that is the career may be elsewhere.

On May 14, 1980, eight years before Ireland would compete in a major tournament finals, Terry Neill’s Arsenal arrived in Brussels to play their European Cup Winners Cup final against Mario Kempes and Valencia. The starting XI featured six Irish players, three from the Republic and three from the north, each fundamentally important to Arsenal’s chances of rescuing a trophy from a marathon 67-game season that featured four FA Cup semi-final games against Liverpool. Inexplicably, they’d lost the final at Wembley to second division West Ham, and couldn’t rely on their faltering league position to secure European football again.

“It was an unbelievable time to be a player here with so many Irish accents, plus an Irish manager,” Liam Brady says now. “Tony Donnelly, the kit man too. Sammy and Pat were already here when I signed pro forms in 1973, quickly followed here by Frank and David. John Devine came after. It was a unique situation. It will hardly be seen every again.” 

Never.

On Arsenal’s official website, it says of Brady: “It's hard to stem the flow of superlatives when describing the talent of Liam. Arsenal fans of a certain age will testify that the Irish man was the cleverest playmaker of his generation and, rather like Diego Maradona at the 1986 World Cup, he could make a mediocre team a potent one.” 

Before lunch at the Emirates last Saturday, Brady points elsewhere around the room. “Frank was a top, top striker. He scored over 100 goals at Arsenal by the time he was 24. Think about that. He put so much work into his game, diligently so. All the time he was coming back after training and working at it. Dave? O’Leary was just a natural. I was playing golf with him yesterday and he looked ready to tog out. He could run like the wind, was a good footballer, bringing it out from the back. He was in the team at 17 and never left it after.” 

O’Leary played 722 times for Arsenal. No-one ever played more for the club and never will. If it’s true that they linger over losses more than the wins, O’Leary will never forget those May days in 1980. But it wasn’t all down. They became the first English team to beat Juventus in Turin (Paul Vaessen immortalised with an 88th minute winner) in a stunning Cup Winners Cup semi-final second leg upset. Arsenal’s Irish sextet were matched by a cohort of Italian internationals who would rule the world two years later: Zoff, Gentile, Scirea, Cabrini, Tardelli, Bettega.

In the Brussels final, Arsenal wore yellow and the great Argentina striker Mario Kempes awaited in his gleaming Valencia kit. He was at the peak of his powers, a couple of years after the World Cup of 1978, Menotti, Passarella, Ardilles, Bertoni, Leopoldo Luque, the avalanche of Buenos Aires ticker-tape et al.

“Don Howe never really gave a lot of compliments, he was a hard taskmaster,” says Dave O’Leary now. “The sort that if he said nothing to you, you felt you were doing ok. That dressing room in Brussels, on the back of losing the Cup final, a few days earlier to West Ham, was not a good place. We’d lost on penalties. He fixed me with a stare. ‘You know what, tonight you’ve become the best centre half in the world’.

“Good God, I thought. I was probably playing as good as I could then. Kempes gave me his jersey after, with a few words that might be translated best as ‘hope I don’t see you too often again, mate’.

“We had two games left domestically to try and scramble into Europe. We somehow beat Wolves 2-1, but we collapsed 5-0 at Boro. We got messed up by playing those four FA Cup semi-finals against Liverpool. We should have beaten Valencia.” 

TROUBLES

“These were different times with different values,” Niall Quinn says. “I was reading lately something that David Rocastle, God rest him, said about Arsenal, about the values he learned. He was born a brilliant person anyway, but he said he never forgot the things the older folk used to say to us.

“We had Alfie Fields, an ex-player, who used to drive the bus out to London Colney. Liam would remember him too, he used to come in for the Youth team games, and he would give the Saturday morning team talk with the fag still hanging in the mouth. He wouldn’t even take it out. ‘Always remember who you are, where you are, and what you represent’ he would say. If you shouted at someone on the pitch he would look at you and explain that there’s an Arsenal Way. One of the lads, came in with a bit of a beard one day, he had to shave it off before training. It’s funny I thought of that today when I came around the back of the stadium, taking everything in, and the pictures there of the players with their big tattoos. That would not have happened in my time!” 

There were other issues too for the Irish lads, though not of Arsenal’s making. Anti-Irish sentiment was running high in the wake of the Birmingham and Guildford bombings. The bombing of two central Birmingham pubs in 1974 resulted in the death of 21 people and the injury of 182 more. The IRA bombing in Guildford, Surrey later that year killed four soldiers, a civilian and injured a further 65.

“Frank reminds me of all the times we were stopped and searched at Heathrow when we flew in after a trip home. Two or three detectives would be waiting on the Aer Lingus flight. And we probably looked likely lads. Young, long hair, denim jeans. When we told them we were footballers, they would still check it out before letting us on our way.

But I had a much more serious encounter with that anti-Irish feeling during that 1978–79 season, an experience that shook me up. It was January on the London Underground. Some guys from Birmingham started to make lewd remarks to the girl I was with. I don’t think they recognised me as an Arsenal player because there was no mention of football. I told them to leave it out and they copped my accent. Immediately, they set upon me, shouting about the bombings in Birmingham. I have never seen a packed carriage empty so quickly. It got pretty brutal. They gave me a good kicking and tried to smash my head off the windows of the carriage. My friend did her best to pull them off me and when the Tube reached its next stop they jumped off, leaving me battered and bruised.”

- Liam Brady: Born to be a Footballer.

At London Colney ecumenism and better sense reigned. With a sharp edge. ‘Is there gelignite in the gear bag, lads?’ They teased the Republic international Gerry Daly over his name and wondered if he worked for a German newspaper on the side. Sammy Nelson, whom Brady remains close to, introduced himself early doors. ‘Liam? From Dublin? You’ll be a Fenian bastard then.’ “It broke any ice immediately. We never gave a second thought to our different backgrounds again. There was just a genuine Irish vibe about that team. The accents, the music played. You had to be sensible, of course. The Dubliners could be played on the team bus, but not the Wolfe Tones,” Brady says.

‘Fuck off back to the bog’ became something to rise above. Most of the time. Before the first of three successive FA Cup finals in 1978, a magazine photographer brought shovels along with him to hand to the Irish lads. Stapleton told him where he could start digging.

Alongside Brady and David O'Leary, the Highbury legacy of Pat Rice is outsized. From double-winner to Wenger lieutenant, it felt Rice was virtually a greeter at the gate. Any time I inveigled my way through the marbled Highbury foyer down the narrow passage way to the home dressing room, courtesy of Paddy Galligan, Rice spotted me and turned a blind eye. Or at least long enough for him to quarry into his jacket and lob a club pin or some such in my direction with a wink. He wasn't around last Saturday but the mentions were as warm as they were frequent.

For O’Leary, home-sickness was the primary concern in the early days.

“At the time I came over in 1973 I hadn’t realised that leaving home was going to be so traumatic. I was bad,” he recalls. “When you are caught up in the delight of signing for Arsenal, you don’t immediately think of the fact that you have to leave home. When the day arrived, it was a bit of a shock. Arsenal were fantastic, they made sure you were well looked after, stayed in good digs. But I missed home a great deal. It probably took me the better part of a year to get over it, and that initial season was very tough. I found the training, the competitiveness of the South-East Counties League very difficult. I didn’t think I was much good by comparison, but suddenly about six weeks to go in the season, I got stronger, got on top of the training and started to show what they signed me for.

“Of course, I went back to Ireland for six weeks, got used to the ways of home, and the homesickness things resurfaced again. But I got in the reserves and stayed in it all year. Then in my third season, the first game of the season was away at Burnley. I was in. Another Irish international, Terry Mancini was a fantastic help, Sammy and Pat Rice alongside, Liam was in the side. I was supposed in for a game or two, played 14 league games that season. From then on I never looked back.” 

The goals and the glory were marvellous. Stapleton scored the second in the 1979 Cup final 3-2 win over Man Utd, the Wembley stroll that turned into the five-minute final. United scored in the 85th and 88th minutes, before Brady, in his magnificent Stylo boots with the dashing white tongue, rewrote history from the left side. Where else?

Niall Quinn still retains the small thngs, the minor detail of Arsenal. “Even though I became a regular player at Man City afterwards, there was no way I would leave my area of the dressing room after a game unless it was immaculate. To this day, if I have a meeting in a café, I pick my stuff up and bring it back up the counter. I am sure in some of those places, they are looking at me. They talk about the All Blacks cleaning the dressing sheds. We were doing that 20 years before them. When there was no cameras or mobile phones in them, that was an Arsenal dressing room non-negotiable.” 

Quinn was still around the place a decade later. 1989. The 35th anniversary of Anfield approaches May 26th. By then Brady had taken Italy by storm, Stapleton had decamped to Old Trafford, neither with regrets. But David O’Leary was steadfastly Arsenal.

THE FIRST TIME I walked up Avenell Road was on April 2, 1977 as a 12-year-old with my father and Uncle Der, who lived in Boston Manor. Graham Rix was making his debut for the club, and at Aintree on the day, Red Rum was winning a third Grand National for Ginger McCain.

The opposition was Leicester City, and for the only time in his Arsenal career David O’Leary scored twice. “I was deadly from six inches,” he says. “Should have had a hat-trick that day.” 

Twelve campaigns and many hundreds of games later, George Graham turned to his poise and assuredness at Anfield for the impossible mission. Defeat Kenny Dalglish’s Liverpool by two goals to snatch the League title on the final day. In the final game. Between the top two teams. What Sky Sports would pay for it now, as they pump-prime Sunday’s season-defining Premier League meeting between champions Man City and Arsenal.

“George didn’t want us to go up the night before, so we bused it up the motorway that Friday morning. We got a bit of lunch, we went to bed in the afternoon. I was with Alan Smith. Sleep didn’t take us. We thought tonight could be something special or it could be just desserts for kind of messing up in the games before it against Derby and Wimbledon, which let Liverpool back into it.

“He had went to the back five a bit before, then went back to a four, now we were a five again with Bouldie back. In the last knockings, I am looking lengthways down the pitch at Mickey Thomas and the thought grows quite quickly. This might happen here. It was trickling in past Grobbelaar from my vantage point. You couldn’t make it up. That night and the weekend went into local folklore, the pub, the parade. They made a movie out of it, two in fact. But Ireland were playing Hungary on the Sunday, and I missed it all.” 

*** 

Ticket sales at £250 and £100 shifted smartly for the event at the Emirates, organised by the London Irish Centre’s Gary Dunne, Anna Brennan with help from the likes of Brendan Wallace, and the Arsenal Foundation’s Mairead King. Actors and activists milled with supporters of a certain generation, men with teenage kids and generous midriffs. In the '70s, these were early teenagers in Finsbury Park and Highbury, Holloway, Islington, areas with a heaving Irish contingent. 

“A lot of the Arsenal support now come from those people. And it’s passed on,” says Brady, who went on to nurture today’s glittering stars as director of the club’s academy under Arsene Wenger. “They gravitated to the club because of its Irishness.” 

Neither Brady or Quinn are happy with the development structures of Irish football these days, but acknowledge it’s a different world.

“I had to be better than the best centre forward in Scotland in my year, or Wales, or Northern Ireland, England. That was my challenge,” Quinn says.

“I remember Jonathan Woods, John Purdy, they were miles better than me when I started. Then Paul Merson came in, Kevin Campbell came through. You had that coming at you constantly, but at least they weren’t coming from Argentina, Spain, Brazil or Italy or France. It’s so much tougher now and the way structures are, we have gone quantitative in terms of a player nowadays. How fast are they? Metrics are everything. When you were Irish back then, your talent was fostered and developed. Arsenal gave me three years because I was tall and skinny. Now they’d be saying he’s gone past it, he’s not the right build. Then it was qualitative, they saw something in me, saw I had a good touch, could hold the ball up, bring others into play, and obviously I could head the ball which was more prevalent in those days.” 

At Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium on Sunday, the prototype modern-day centre forward will be in City blue. A freak called Erling Haaland, who holds the ball up better than Quinn or even Stapleton, who is faster than Brady though hardly as skilful. He might struggle against O’Leary?

“Goals stop every conversation these days,” says Quinn, who’s worn both shirts. “I look at Gabriel Jesus. He has many of Haaland’s abilities, and any time he gets a goal it blunts the ‘I am not sure about him’ chatter. Goals do that. I played 90-something games and someone tells me I got 20-odd goals. It wasn’t a bad strike rate. But Alan Smith was getting 21 goals in 25-30 games after me. We are slaves to metrics but the most important one is goals. It’s quite ridiculous. The debate is overweighted. 

"Look at Evan Ferguson. He has more pace than me, he’s certainly stronger physically than I was at his age. But he’ll be judged on goals, won’t he?”

After lunch and an amiable chat with the presenter Dermot O’Leary – greatest passions, Ireland and Arsenal – Quinn and Brady are still signing shirts. Stapleton retains his game-playing shape in a well-cut black jacket and pants with open-neck shirt. He queues for food with David O’Leary because...why wouldn't he? Sammy Nelson does likewise with Steve Morrow. There’s a retained reverence from green Gunners who queue a step or three in arrears. Stapleton appreciates the yard of space, O’Leary not so much, though his pace would probably rescue him anyway. Sammy’s smiling and Brady cribs that he needs to lose a few pounds as they point down to animated conversations near the corner of Gillespie Road and Drayton Park.

There’s an estate agent showing a three-bed terraced. He'll make his sale. Irish legends have walked up this street with their dreams and the kit bags.