Eamon Dunphy’s classic ‘Only A Game?’ is still as fresh and real as ever, 50 years later

The end of his love story began 50 years ago this weekend. On September 29th, 1973, Millwall coughed up a one-goal lead in the last eight minutes against Carlisle in the old Second Division. At training two days later, team coach Lawrie Leslie handed out the first-team bibs and it was only then that Eamon Dunphy found out he had been dropped. Within weeks, his nine years at the club were over and he was off to Charlton.

“It just happens,” Dunphy wrote in Only A Game?, his timeless account of the season. “A snap of the fingers, and you are gone. All the commitment, all the emotion, all the hard work, all the belief. Everything gone. Because some idiot fooled around at the back in the last eight minutes on Saturday.

“Seven games of the season had gone. And after all the struggle, all the worry, all the dreams, you are on the scrapheap. That is what the reserves is, when you are 28. No one had said a word to me. It was the same as if I had never given a damn. They had treated me as if I had never tried.”

Fifty years on, we’re sitting in his livingroom in Ranelagh. He’s looking at the cover of the book, tickled that you can still walk into Chapters on Parnell Street and buy it. This little book, all of 169 pages long, has lived on through half a century and the millions, billions, trillions of words written on soccer in the meantime. The tides come in, the tides go out. But Only A Game? hasn’t been eroded one bit.

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“I’m astonished that it’s still in print,” Dunphy says, gazing at the throat-length sideburns and knitted polo-necks that dominate the back cover photo. “That’s Brian King, he’s still alive. Gordon Bolland is still alive... Alan Dorney was my best buddy. That’s George Jacks and me. Kingy the goalkeeper was very good. He subsequently became a scout in Scandinavia, which was quite exotic for a former Millwall footballer.

“I was there for nine seasons. It was the club I was fondest of and the players that I got along the best with. We had some really good players. We finished third one season to a Trevor Francis-led Birmingham City. God rest Trevor, he only died recently.”

Dunphy took a couple of years to write Only A Game? It covers the early part of the 1973/74, season but it didn’t come out until 1976. Across the course of maybe 20 Sundays between July and November in 1973, he sat in his livingroom telling soccer writer Peter Ball about his week. Ball would go away and transcribe their sessions, and from that raw material, Dunphy wrote the book.

We got beat 5-0. We were hammered. And that game was lost as soon as they saw the short-sleeved jerseys. We had guys in that team who didn’t want to get cold

—  Eamon Dunphy on playing for Charlton Athletic in 1974

“Peter was the sports editor of Time Out,” he says now. “I used to do a little thing for Time Out on football, the matches at the weekend. I was dabbling. And said to him that I want to do this book. I don’t know why, but I have a great idea. And it’s basically, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Why am I doing it every year to myself? I should be doing something more productive with my life.’ So I wanted to do a diary of a year and the mood swings and everything.

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“I did it to try and understand myself. And also to try and give young lads a sense of what this game was really like. Because everybody wanted to be a footballer. But this is pain. And it’s aggravated pain. The way they suppressed you.

“Even to have an education – to get an education was impossible almost in those days. I set up an education scheme for the three clubs in South London. It is now the biggest thing and has been for the last 25 years that the PFA do. They produce graduates now through their programmes. But back then, to get time off for the Crystal Palace, Charlton and Millwall young fellas to get an education caused real trouble.”

Reading it now, it’s as fresh and vital as ever it was, still a sacred text for anyone with an interest in the realities of professional sport. Millwall start the 1973 season full of optimism, with Dunphy, by then a dressing-room elder, completely certain that they will be promoted. Even when they lose some early games, he talks about their unshakeable faith that they will make the top three or four.

I don’t believe in dwelling on things, so I tend not to dwell, because that’s when you become a bore

But gradually, the grind gets them. The manager is weak, the coach is flailing. The club captain doesn’t pull his weight. Day by day, cracks appear. Wins melt into draws, draws curdle into defeats. And through it all, Dunphy lays bare the truth of what it’s like. The petty grievances, the emotional bruising, the relentless doubt and fear and front.

“The harshness of it, if you survive it, is good for later life,” he says now. “That’s what the book is about. The harshness of it. You can survive tough stuff emotionally once you get through that. You’re able to go to those places and the ups and downs, and all that.

“I don’t believe in dwelling on things, so I tend not to dwell, because that’s when you become a bore. But that’s what the book was for and I’m really pleased it still has some sort of afterlife.”

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When it came out in 1976, there was a reasonable amount of critical acclaim. Dunphy reckons there were only ever two bad reviews – one in the Hartlepool Echo and another in the Evening Press, where Con Houlihan wasn’t overly impressed with it. But otherwise, people seemed to like it. There was even an extract in the Guardian, much to his surprise.

“I was very nervous when it was about to be published. Because the lads are in there, you know? And you don’t know what to say. We used to take the Guardian, as they say. Just as we take The Irish Times now.

“So we woke up one morning and came down to see a blurb on the front page of the Guardian – Eamon Dunphy: His Dazzling New Book. Serialised! The Guardian didn’t serialise football books normally but they had a whole broadsheet page, in small print. The publisher didn’t tell me it would be happening.

“And I saw it and went, ‘Holy f**k, how will I ever face the lads?’ Because there was stuff in there that was going to be tricky to talk my way out of. But then I remembered – it was the Guardian. The lads wouldn’t in a million years be reading the Guardian! So I dodged that bullet.”

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The book ends with him signing for Charlton in the Third Division. Tired of sitting on the sidelines at Millwall, he makes moves to get away. And even though his then wife Sandra wonders why he would drop down a division, he finishes the book on an up note. “Charlton have an excellent coach, they have some good youngsters, they want me. And I want to go somewhere where I can feel useful and wanted.”

Well, Eamo? How did that work out for you?

“Theo Foley was the manager who signed me. Theo had been an Ireland team-mate with me. He was a good coach. But he had a whole squad of chancers. Oh my God, they were terrible. Terrible, terrible chancers.

You’ve been in the game for 10, 15 years and here’s one of the glory days and you’re sitting in the car park crying your eyes out

“We went to play Grimsby, on the east coast. It’s f**king cold. It’s a fishing town and they’re hard in Grimsby, they kick the shit out of you. It was a poor Charlton team, which is why they were coming for me. Theo said, ‘Now I want you to show a bit of leadership here. That’s what we need from you.’

“We get to Grimsby, very cold day. Good Friday 1974 – you can look up the result. We walk out on the pitch for a look and when we get back into the dressingroom, the jerseys are all laid out. And they’re short-sleeved jerseys. Now, this is ridiculous but there was uproar in the dressingroom. ‘For f**k’s sake – where’s the long-sleeved jerseys?’ We got beat 5-0. We were hammered. And that game was lost as soon as they saw the short-sleeved jerseys. We had guys in that team who didn’t want to get cold.

“Theo got the sack when we didn’t get promoted. Andy Nelson came in but he hated me. He put up with me, kind of. He hated what I stood for, agitating for better conditions, all that stuff. He played me occasionally. The following season, when we did get promotion, he dropped me and Keith Peacock for the final game. Now, Keith Peacock was a Charlton legend, he played something like 600 games for them. And Nelson dropped him for that match, when we were about to be promoted. The f**ker.

“I was devastated in a way because it was the big celebration match – we only had to win to go up. But Keith was really devastated. We went out to the car park and sat in my car and he burst out crying. It was a terrible experience.

“But terrible things happen. You know you’re never getting that day back. That’s the hardness of the game. You’ve been in the game for 10, 15 years and here’s one of the glory days and you’re sitting in the car park crying your eyes out.”

Dunphy was 30 by then and knew he wasn’t long for Charlton. He left on a free transfer to go to Reading that summer, and all the while he got on with writing his book. When it came out, it was a fork in the road. He got asked to write for various outlets, local and national. In time, he’d move back to Ireland with John Giles and eventually take up with the Sunday Tribune. He became Eamon Dunphy, with all the good and all the bad that implies.

From the vantage point of a half a century later, maybe the most interesting thing about Only A Game? is that it’s all there. All the things Dunphy became famous/notorious for in his second career jump out from his writing about his first. He skewers sacred cows, he rails against authority, he is impatient with things being the way they always were. He is cruel and unreasonable at times too and often just plain petty. He is trenchant even when he is wrong.

He is, in other words, true to himself and true to the game, flaws and failings and all. No wonder it still feels so real, even half a century on.