John Giles, national treasure

SPORT: A Football Man: My AutobiographyBy John Giles, with Declan Lynch, Hachette Books Ireland, pp310. €19.99

THE FIRST SPORTS book I owned was a slender volume called Forward with Leeds, written, I believed as an eight-year-old, by Johnny Giles on his afternoons off from being a fabulous soccer star in England. There was a picture on the front of Giles stroking a ball around in a way that would generally be described as authoritative. He was wearing the impossibly glamourous all-white strip of Leeds United. Naturally I fell in love with him.

That love hasn’t endured the turbulence and vicissitudes that, for instance, Eamon Dunphy’s love for Giles has come through, but then again I have met Giles only once. That was in Poland, and I was so dumbstruck that I think he assumed I was an idiot gone missing from my village. He was kind and charming and funny nonetheless.

Isn’t it odd that as a nation we are only cottoning on now to the treasure we have in John Giles? He is 70 and has been a name bandied about in our households since he was a teenager. For much of that time we have kept him at arm’s length, though. He is a taste we have acquired only lately.

He has always confused us. He left Manchester United to join Leeds United, which at the time was like leaving U2 to have a go on The X Factor. His style of play was so distinctive yet so frustrating that it gave rise to a bitter little joke in the days when he both managed and played for Ireland. Imagine a commentary in the lovely plum tones of Philip Greene: "Giles lays it out to Heighway, back to Giles, finds Daly, who plays it back to Giles, inside to Hand, to Giles, beautiful through ball to Mick Martin. Oh! Martin in the clear! He must score! Just the goalie to beat . . . and safely back to Giles. Giles to Heighway."

He had skills that were sublime, of course, but, not least because of the company he kept during his working week, he was marked down as a hard man. He loved playing for Ireland but was never corny about it and always wanted things to be better. And he put his career where his mouth was, attempting to introduce eras of perestroika to the international side and to Shamrock Rovers, the regents of the domestic game.

He was private, though, and more thoroughly a football man than many of us could appreciate. The game came first. He’d left Dublin for Manchester United not long after he began shaving. He’d learned a hard trade, lived in digs, been with Manchester United through the Munich air disaster, a calamity in which he lost colleagues and friends and heroes. All the while he had been impeccably true to his vocation. So the Giles we saw through the 1970s was never garrulous or unprofessional or hung-over or uncertain about his talents. We appreciated him but kept him at a distance.

Then he re-emerged as a pundit – probably the most astute of the television era here or in England – and his talents were obscured again. He was Noel Gallagher; Dunphy was Liam Gallagher, a lightning rod for all attention. Dunphy is having Johnny Giles’s baby. Ha ha.

Yet he is one of the few people a bad word is never spoken about, let alone proven. In the venomous profession of punditry and scribbling he is regarded as one of the most decent people ever to have enhanced the planet. And he has slowly let his personality percolate into the national consciousness, to the extent that the only reaction possible when walking into a bookshop and seeing his grinning face peering down from the covers of A Football Manis to grin back.

One day a few years ago I was ghosting a column with Paul McGrath when he told me of a lovely act of kindness. On one of his earliest appearances as a television pundit Paul, never comfortable with cameras, just froze. Luckily the ads were still running, and Giles was sitting beside him. Giles wrote down a line and told Paul to get it out. He would do the rest. So when the cameras rolled Paul, in blind terror, recited the line, and, as assuredly as ever, Giles intercepted: Yeah, Bill, that’s an excellent point Paul has made there.

A small kindness, but it meant a tremendous amount to Paul McGrath, and his eyes welled as he told the story and told how he would always be grateful. The next week I gave Paul my copy of Forward with Leeds. It just seemed right that the book should pass between two of the most decent and kind men ever to have represented Ireland at sport.

It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the book had to rest in covetous paws for more than three decades before the handover, and occasionally I miss its presence up on the shelf where it sat beside an almost identical tome produced by Jackie Charlton.

At last, though, Giles has produced a replacement volume – something more indeed: a book that expresses so much modesty and intelligence that it seems like an antidote for the times we live in.

Even for those whose healthcare workers warn against having too much soccer biog in the diet, this is a book that will nourish. Nobody has his reputation fed into a shredder, nobody who got kissed gets told on, nobody who didn’t get kissed gets laughed at.

A Football Manis like a gentle travel book, a journey through time and place from Ormond Square to Old Trafford and so many places beyond. Like Giles the football man, Giles the prose man takes his time with the pacing and keeps it simple. The portrayals of his family life, particularly his irascible father, Dickie, are perfectly done. We stop off at all the spots we expect to be dallying at and in the end come away with the impression of a decent man who got to do the thing he loved most in life. His last words define his attitude. "It was great."

It is hard to imagine Wayne Rooney evicting the bees from his bonnet for long enough to come to a similar conclusion.

Tom Humphries is an Irish Timessports writer