talkSPORT reporter and Hammer Ian ‘Moose’ Abrahams catches up with former Arsenal and West Ham United favourite Liam Brady...
Anyone who saw Liam Brady play for Arsenal, where he won the FA Cup in 1979, and in Italy with Juventus, where he won two Serie A titles, Sampdoria and Inter Milan, will know that he was a generational talent.
In March 1987, Liam left his fourth Italian club, Ascoli, and returned to London to join West Ham United for a £100,000 fee. The mercurial Irishman would play over 100 games for the Hammers across three seasons, and is still well regarded with West Ham fans for both his talent and for sticking with the Club after relegation in 1989.
I spoke to Liam ahead of Sunday’s game between his two English clubs and started by asking how his move to Upton Park came about?
“I was at Ascoli at the time and I wasn’t getting on very well with President and I’d been let down on a number of things and I was really wanting to get away from there and get back [to England] and in many ways John Lyall rescued me from a situation I wasn’t very happy in,” Liam told me.
“I think John came to see me play for the Republic of Ireland against Scotland in a European Championship qualifier in February of ’87. We beat Scotland 1-0 at Hampden and through a mutual friend of ours he got in touch with me told me he was interested in bringing me back and asked if I was interested, and I jumped at it to be honest.”
A real football man
John followed Ron Greenwood into the managerial seat at West Ham in the 1970s, of course. I’ve spoken to many players who played under John, and they’ve told me pretty much the same thing: John Lyall was a manager who didn’t go looking for confrontation with his players. Many West Ham fans reading this will know he played the ‘West Ham Way’ and that’s backed up by Liam Brady’s experience.
“He was a real football man who wanted football to be played in an entertaining fashion, pass out from the back, through midfield, in a time when England was probably changing to where a lot of teams were playing a lot of long ball stuff,” Liam told me. “John stuck to his principles, he was a great believer in entertaining football, and he never wanted confrontation, he just wanted to persuade people, and he was probably a bit ahead of his time in that respect, as many managers were screaming and shouting.”
Entertainers
As I’ve already mentioned, Liam Brady was a fantastic player. I began watching West Ham in 1977 and was brought up watching the exquisite skills of Trevor Brooking and Alan Devonshire. It seemed, around that time, that quite a few teams had players who could get you off your seat: Glenn Hoddle at Spurs, Gordon Cowans at Aston Villa, and of course the likes of George Best, Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles we all great entertainers, and Liam Brady most certainly was worthy of mentioning alongside those names. As Liam admitted to me, coming to West Ham suited his style of play down to the ground.
“I wanted to enjoy my football, without any doubt, and I wanted to play in a very attacking way, and in many ways that was John Lyall had created at West Ham and probably Ron Greenwood before him,” he continued. “It was that kind of place where they wanted football played in a certain style, so I fitted in pretty seamlessly.
“I join the team that had done well the previous season (West Ham had finished third in the old First Division in 1985/86) but I don’t know what was going wrong when I joined. It seems that a lot of the players had been approached by bigger clubs, and they were having their heads turned. Things weren’t going that great that season, but we turned things around and we got some very good results towards the end of the season and we went on a good run and I was really looking forward to the following season.”
One particular memory I have of Liam Brady in a West Ham shirt, which I was lucky enough to witness live, was a memorable goal he scored away from home at the Baseball Ground against Derby in January 1989. It was a curling effort from just outside the box into the top corner of the net.
“That was when I’d come back from injury,” Liam recalled. “I had a very bad injury and it actually happened at Derby more than a year before I scored that goal and I was out for nearly ten months. In the three years and three months I was at West Ham, I missed ten months which is a shame, really.”
A hat-trick of finals
As everyone knows, Liam’s career began with Sunday’s opponents Arsenal. Liam joined the Gunners as a teenager from St Kevin’s Boys in his home city of Dublin in Ireland.
He played in three FA Cup finals, losing in 1978, winning in 1979 and finally losing in 1980 when Trevor Brooking’s header scored a famous victory for Second Division West Ham at Wembley.
“Arsenal really looked after me,” Liam told me. “I came there when I first of all I was 13, I left school at 15, and I joined Arsenal, and they really did look after me, as they did with a lot of the youngsters who grew up together like Frank Stapleton, Graham Rix and David O’Leary, and we all went on and had great careers in football and have got Arsenal to thank for our upbringing and our development.
“We had a difficult first few years when we were really not doing that well, but we were learning our trade, and once we had two or three seasons under our belt, we became a very good side and we got to three successive cup finals, and actually won in ‘79.”
In that final Arsenal led Manchester United 2-0, United then scored two goals late on before Liam played a big part in the winning goal, scored by Alan Sunderland
“It was a great last 10 to 15 minutes of a final, rather than a great final!” Liam told me, as he laughed. “It was probably the best six or seven minutes of a cup final ever.”
Foreign fields
From becoming an Arsenal legend, Brady left for one of Europe’s stellar clubs, Juventus, in 1980, having impressed the Italians in a European Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final win that season. I wondered why Liam had decided to try his luck abroad. His answer was pretty simple.
“Kevin Keegan had gone to [Hamburg in] Germany a couple of years previous to me leaving Arsenal and I wanted to try my luck abroad as quite a few players did,” he revealed. “It started a trend when Keegan went to Europe and a number of us followed him; some went to Germany, some to Italy, some to France, Laurie Cunningham went to Real Madrid, those things were happening at the time.”
As I just said, Liam Brady is most certainly an Arsenal legend, but he’s also very highly thought of at West Ham and the feeling is mutual.
“I do some work with Tony Gale and Tony Cottee and with West Ham supporters and I have a lot of good friends there,” he confirmed. “Billy Bonds was an absolute pleasure to play with, I still see Trevor and I’ve forgiven him for that goal in 1980! I see him on the golf circuit, so I have a lot of connections with the Club and I just hope they get out of trouble.”
Liam Brady, a man with connections to both clubs, who provided some great moments for both clubs and more importantly a man who is highly thought of as a player and the thoroughly decent man he is at both Arsenal and West Ham United.
