Life in the green isle

It may have been his brother Steve who was World Middleweight Champion, but there’s more than a hint of the boxer about Roddy Collins. Broad of shoulder and flat of nose, you imagine he’s the sort of person who’d give anyone who crosses him a clip round the ear. Which he has done frequently during his career in football management. Famed at Bohemians for meting out instant justice to a coin-throwing home fan, the 43-year-old has now taken his uniquely hands-on skills to Carlisle in the English Third Division. They’re used to hard men in the Northern border town but, even so, eyebrows were raised when stories of Collins dragging players out of nightclubs started to circulate. The locals were even more perplexed when after a particularly woeful first-half display against Lincoln, the team were told they weren’t getting their half-time cuppa and, snowing or not, they could stay on the bleedin’ pitch and do some extra training.

While this approach has generally gone down well with fans who were tired of their team’s underachieving – the Blues finished third from bottom last season – Roddy Collins hasn’t been without his critics. Or hate mail. But then that may be the unhappy price paid by the kind of man who expresses his views – on everything from drugs to Roy Keane – with an always uncompromising directness.

STUART CLARK: I’m not saying they’re as overtly racist as Milwall or Oldham, but I know from following England that there’s a Combat 18 element to the Carlisle support who can’t like the manager being Irish.

RODDY COLLINS: I don’t know if any of ’em are Combat 18 but, yeah, I’ve had verbal abuse – “You Paddy this, you Paddy that” – and a written death threat when we played in Plymouth last season. If someone walks in and puts a gun to my head I might start shaking, but fellas telling you what they’re going to do in a letter? I don’t give a fuck what they say to me, but if it turned physical and endangered my wife and five kids who are over in Carlisle too…I’d murder them! I’m no tough guy but I’m not a coward either. My kids took abuse from other kids last year ’cause we weren’t doing too well. That hurt me.

SC: Do you sometimes wish that the Collins offspring were back out of harm’s way in Dublin?

RC: You joking me? With all the drugs? I tell you, if anyone tried dealing that stuff to my kids, I’d break their fucking neck and not show any remorse. I wouldn’t have it. I’ve a 21-year-old daughter and, touch wood, she’s just got her Science Degree and is past all that. I’ve another daughter – a good kid who’s 15 – who’s always going, “Dad, they’re taking hash” and “Dad, they’re taking cocaine.” She’s not into it herself but it’s part of her world, which is sad.

SC: As a Cabra boy, can you understand working-class communities turning to Sinn Fein and vigilante groups for help?

RC: You have to do it. If the Gardai are as under-manned and under-financed as they keep saying they are, somebody else has to take care of things. Otherwise it’ll end up in anarchy with all the junkies robbing and taking. Even now, there are murders and people being shot every day. And because it’s happening in working-class areas, other sections of society don’t care. I was just telling my players, it’s the scourge of Dublin.

SC: How does it compare to the carry-on when you were a kid?

RC: There were a few bottles of cider, but no drugs. If you had a straightener with someone it was with your fists, not a gun. I love Dublin but when I’m over in Carlisle, I don’t have to worry about my kids being dealt heroin on the street. The main street, come to that. I just drove our kitman along O’Connell Street and said, “That’s the most dangerous strip in Ireland after closing-time.”

SC: Football and boxing have traditionally been seen as escape routes for working-class kids. Did having a dad who introduced you to the discipline of boxing at an early age save you from getting into bother?

RC: Stephen was very steady and got his Leaving Certificate, but for a while I was a bit of a tearaway. I was never caught for anything by the police – I was a good runner! – but there was a group of my friends who went down the wrong road. One of them, Paddy Corman, was murdered and a couple more ended up in prison. Fortunately for me, my father was an absolute gentleman who never cursed in the house and was very strict with us. If he hadn’t been, my nicking a few apples might’ve developed into something more serious.

SC: I don’t know if it’s local myth, but I’ve heard it said that for a while there you packed a heftier punch than Steve.

RC: Yeah, I remember hitting him once and knocking him straight out… I was eight and he was four! No, I’d have been as keen a boxer as him until I was 16 and then Fulham took me away to England. There was eleven of us living in our Corporation house in Cabra, we were in desperate need of extra rooms but my father thought it more beneficial to build a boxing gym! I sparred with Steve three weeks ago – we weren’t waging war or anything but we built up a healthy sweat.

SC: If you’d opted for gumshields rather than shinpads, do you think you’d have been as successful in the ring as Steve?

RC: No one in this country’s as good as Steve and he’s proved it. The best memory for me was being in his corner at Millstreet when he beat Chris Eubank. My treat as a kid was being woken up at 2am in the morning to hear Cassius Clay fight on the radiogram. I used to dream of being at a World title fight and, well, it came true, didn’t it?

SC: What was your role within Steve’s entourage?

RC: Helping with his gumshield and winding the opposition up! I’d walk past Chris Eubank’s corner beforehand and say, “You’re going to fucking get it tonight!” and Steve’d have a fit ‘cause he was the one who had to fight him. I was so high after Millstreet, I didn’t sleep for two days. I never knew what the word “pride” meant until watching my brother in the ring that night. The only thing that’d better it is Carlisle winning the Champions’ League!

SC: Three successive promotions and a top four Premiership finish and it could be, “Goodbye Scunthorpe, hello Real Madrid!”

RC: (Laughs) We’ve started the Spanish lessons already! The Third Division is a completely different world to the Premiership where nobody, player or manager, is earning less than £10,000 a week. Our lads are doing okay on about a grand, but the average wage at Darlington is five hundred quid. You’d have thought with their Chairman being an ex-safe cracker they’d have more money, but no! For my first season in charge at Carlisle I got paid £20,000, which wouldn’t even keep Alex Ferguson in chewing gum.

Unless a Russian knocks on our door, I’m not going to become a Premiership manager with Carlisle. We can get to the First Division, though, and then there’s a chance of a Bolton or a Leicester City coming in for you. I’m definitely not limited in my ambition.

SC: Does that mean in 10 or 15 years angling for the Ireland job?

RC: 10 or 15? I want it after Brian Kerr! No, what I’ve always strived for in life is to be the best at what I’m doing. I mightn’t necessarily get there but it won’t be for lack of trying.

SC: Or cuffing your star players round the head. Tell us about the infamous nightclub incident involving Jamie Burt, Brian Shelley and Des Byrne.

RC: Having lost 5-1 at home to Hull City, I told the players there’d be no drinking that night. Not so much as a punishment but out of respect for the people of the Carlisle who’d paid through the turnstiles. I’ve spies in every club in town, so when one of them rang at two in the morning and said they had a pair of ‘em in I tore round and caught them red-handed. Then I drove to another pub where the third fella had a vodka and cigarette on the go and gave him a right-hander to the ear.

There was an even worse occasion when, after a Tuesday night game, I told the lads I wanted them in bed and asleep by two o’clock. Hearing at ten to- that they were still at it, I steamed into this club and found the whole squad sat round a table that was covered in booze – there wasn’t room for a box of matches. A load of them legged it into the Gents so I followed and gave a trialist such a boot up the arse he couldn’t sit down for a week. Next to get it was the table with the drinks on which cost me £80 in breakages. I don’t mind a bit of unwinding after a game, but they were being blatantly unprofessional. Ultimately, it’s the players who suffer more than the club. I signed a very good Irish lad last year who would’ve earned good money for a few seasons but he preferred the pub to the training ground and I had to send him home.

SC: I know you’re not really hurting them, but are right-handers and boots up the arse the best to way to motivate professional football players?

RC: It’s not like the old days where you were left to your own devices. If a Carlisle player has a problem with drink or gambling or their domestic situation, we’ll arrange for them to get expert help. They’re not in the national spotlight like Wayne Rooney would be, but our 18 and 19-year-olds still have the pressures of local celebrity. If they’re having problems coping with that, I’ll lend a sympathetic ear. What I won’t tolerate under any circumstances is a lack of effort. That’s why I kept the players on the pitch at half-time against Lincoln. I didn’t give a monkey’s that it was freezing out there. 5,000 spectators had bought tickets and they weren’t getting value for money.

SC: There’s another great story dating back to when you arrived at Carlisle in July 2001.

RC: When I took over there were six or seven players who were just picking up a wage. They didn’t care if we were relegated or not, so to show them that wasn’t on I brought ‘em into the city centre at 8 o’clock in the morning and let them have a few runs up and down the main street. I wanted them to see normal people going off to work with their lunchboxes and realise there are no free rides in this life.

SC: Non-football fans probably aren’t aware that you were sacked by then owner Michael Knighton for criticising his running of the club, and reinstated when he was bought out by your Dublin pal John Courtenay.

RC: Michael Knighton wanted an excuse to wind the club up so he brought in Paddy Irishman thinking he didn’t know his trade and would get the team relegated. In my opinion, if that had happened there’d be a Tesco’s where Carlisle United is now. When it turned out that Paddy Irishman did know his trade, the rug was pulled from under my feet. People are always asking me, “How did Michael Knighton get to juggle the ball and almost take-over at Manchester United?” and I say, “Charm.” He’s a lovely guy to meet at first but then you realise he’s got his own agenda. He’s a lovely guy to meet at first but then you realise he’s got his own agenda.

SC: He’s a few quid shy of the £3.8 billion that the new Chelsea owner’s worth, but John Courtenay is a pretty rich guy, isn’t he?

RC: If in excess of a hundred million is what you call “pretty rich”, yeah, he is. He’s not running a charity, though. What’s going out now on transfers will have to come back in or Roddy Collins, for one, is history.

SC: Gordon Strachan says that the worst thing he’s done, viz a viz disrupting a team, is let a journalist have unlimited access to them. Did you have any qualms about RTE spending the entire 2002/03 season with Carlisle?

RC: If it’d been on local TV and going out during the season, I may have had concerns but it’s an Irish thing and several months after the fact. I laid down ground-rules which the film company kept to, so the disruption was minimal. It’s obviously an issue for Bobby Robson who’s just pulled out of a £150,000 deal to have Newcastle’s season documented. I imagine there’d be greater complications for him with players’ agents and sponsors.

SC: As somebody who’s admitted they want the Ireland manager’s job, how would you have handled the Roy Keane affair?

RC: This’ll guarantee that I never get the job but I can’t be two-faced. At that particular time, the FAI – or the knife ‘n’ fork brigade as I call them – were amateurish and unprofessional. Whilst I sympathise with Mick McCarthy over the way he was sacrificed afterwards, if he’d have stood up to the FAI it wouldn’t have happened. It’s like Stephen Collins going to train for a world title fight in Las Vegas and finding there’s no ring or punch-bag in the gym. Would he hang around? Not on your life!

SC: The question I imagine everyone in Carlisle is asking at the moment is: “Are you going to win promotion next season?”

I’d better or I’ll be re-discovering the joys of plastering for a living!