ASIF KAPADIA’S DIEGO Maradona biopic has up to now laid claim to the greatest opening scene of a football documentary, but another great from Italian football in the 1980s has weighed in with some competition.
Kapadia’s first shot is point-of-view footage of a car scurrying around the chaotic streets of Naples, scored to the pulsing, claustrophobic synth of Todd Terje.
Liam Brady: The Irishman Abroad also opens in a car on Italian roads but with an abrupt ping! as Brady plays John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over over the speakers.
“Makes me cry, this song. Christmas 1980, I’ve been here five months, we are driving along and the news comes on. And [Antonio] Cabrini says, ‘John Lennon è morto.’”
If you can’t picture Liam Brady as the kind of man to cry at memories of John Lennon’s death, then you don’t understand the depth of his love of music. In the documentary, he explains that the greatest benefit of breaking into Arsenal’s first team was that he could now afford to buy a new LP every week, and unlike his future TV colleague Eamon Dunphy, Brady didn’t read the newspapers during his time in England. Instead, he read the NME.
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Music is one of the documentary’s richest threads, and Brady picked the entire soundtrack himself. Lennon and the Beatles are there, along with the Luke Kelly, Rod Stewart, Puccini, and a healthy dose of Bob Dylan.
But it all begins with John Lennon’s words.
“We are both falling in love again/Just starting over.”
There’s no real thing as starting over in football, but the warm reminiscence of documentaries like these are the next best thing. We sit with Brady in his home as he idles through a rich trove of photographs and memorabilia, and join him as he revisits the spartan fields of his youth and the ornate cities of his fame.
Arsenal, Juventus, Sampdoria, Inter Milan…Brady’s career seems almost impossibly glamorous by the dowdy fashions of Irish football today. Brady stands among a handful of Irish footballers who command the respect of world football and the supporting cast of this film prove it. There are wonderfully genial chats with Marco Tarelli and Claudio Gentile; Paul Pogba and Max Allegri stop to warmly embrace Brady; now-former Juventus Chairman Andrea Agnelli takes time out from his Super League scheming to deliver a lyrical tribute.
Brady with Claudio Gentile.
Brady moved in rarified circles, naming Zico, Michel Platini and Diego Maradona as the three best players he faced before then unfurling an Argentina jersey emblazoned with the number 17, swapped with a young Maradona. “That was before he started wearing 10″, grins Brady, “you could say I was a good scout.”
The peaks and the handful of lows of his playing career are well-told and belatedly brought to audiences too young to remember them. One suspects it was Brady’s modesty that has kept his story from screen for so long.
For those who know Brady primarily from his work on RTE, he will appear here in a very different light: a generous, friendly spirit far removed from his sometimes curmudgeonly punditry. These are qualities stretching back to his playing days, as archive footage shows him speaking with surprising perspective on Juventus’ abrupt decision to sell him in order to recruit Platini.
The tale of Brady’s Irish career is held for the end, with the familiar tale of its end under Jack Charlton given a new twist.
The final song on the soundtrack is another Dylan classic, Like A Rolling Stone. The version Brady picks is not the studio version but a live recording, more mellow than the original and smoothed of its harsher, interrogative edges.
A fitting choice for a story which still holds a languid, irresistible kind of magic.
Liam Brady: The Irishman Abroad is on RTÉ One on Monday, 13 February at 9.35pm
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TV Wrap: RTE's magical new documentary casts Liam Brady in a new light
ASIF KAPADIA’S DIEGO Maradona biopic has up to now laid claim to the greatest opening scene of a football documentary, but another great from Italian football in the 1980s has weighed in with some competition.
Kapadia’s first shot is point-of-view footage of a car scurrying around the chaotic streets of Naples, scored to the pulsing, claustrophobic synth of Todd Terje.
Liam Brady: The Irishman Abroad also opens in a car on Italian roads but with an abrupt ping! as Brady plays John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over over the speakers.
“Makes me cry, this song. Christmas 1980, I’ve been here five months, we are driving along and the news comes on. And [Antonio] Cabrini says, ‘John Lennon è morto.’”
If you can’t picture Liam Brady as the kind of man to cry at memories of John Lennon’s death, then you don’t understand the depth of his love of music. In the documentary, he explains that the greatest benefit of breaking into Arsenal’s first team was that he could now afford to buy a new LP every week, and unlike his future TV colleague Eamon Dunphy, Brady didn’t read the newspapers during his time in England. Instead, he read the NME.
Music is one of the documentary’s richest threads, and Brady picked the entire soundtrack himself. Lennon and the Beatles are there, along with the Luke Kelly, Rod Stewart, Puccini, and a healthy dose of Bob Dylan.
But it all begins with John Lennon’s words.
“We are both falling in love again/Just starting over.”
There’s no real thing as starting over in football, but the warm reminiscence of documentaries like these are the next best thing. We sit with Brady in his home as he idles through a rich trove of photographs and memorabilia, and join him as he revisits the spartan fields of his youth and the ornate cities of his fame.
Arsenal, Juventus, Sampdoria, Inter Milan…Brady’s career seems almost impossibly glamorous by the dowdy fashions of Irish football today. Brady stands among a handful of Irish footballers who command the respect of world football and the supporting cast of this film prove it. There are wonderfully genial chats with Marco Tarelli and Claudio Gentile; Paul Pogba and Max Allegri stop to warmly embrace Brady; now-former Juventus Chairman Andrea Agnelli takes time out from his Super League scheming to deliver a lyrical tribute.
Brady moved in rarified circles, naming Zico, Michel Platini and Diego Maradona as the three best players he faced before then unfurling an Argentina jersey emblazoned with the number 17, swapped with a young Maradona. “That was before he started wearing 10″, grins Brady, “you could say I was a good scout.”
The peaks and the handful of lows of his playing career are well-told and belatedly brought to audiences too young to remember them. One suspects it was Brady’s modesty that has kept his story from screen for so long.
For those who know Brady primarily from his work on RTE, he will appear here in a very different light: a generous, friendly spirit far removed from his sometimes curmudgeonly punditry. These are qualities stretching back to his playing days, as archive footage shows him speaking with surprising perspective on Juventus’ abrupt decision to sell him in order to recruit Platini.
The tale of Brady’s Irish career is held for the end, with the familiar tale of its end under Jack Charlton given a new twist.
The final song on the soundtrack is another Dylan classic, Like A Rolling Stone. The version Brady picks is not the studio version but a live recording, more mellow than the original and smoothed of its harsher, interrogative edges.
A fitting choice for a story which still holds a languid, irresistible kind of magic.
Liam Brady: The Irishman Abroad is on RTÉ One on Monday, 13 February at 9.35pm
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
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