Glenn Whelan is currently interviewing some former Ireland midfielders as part of his Pro Licence coaching course, though not Eamon Dunphy — he didn’t play at a major tournament and is therefore disqualified. Whelan however would be happy to go for a pint with his greatest critic were he to bump into him on the street. “We would have a good laugh I am sure. Going back to that time, I just felt it was a little bit harsh.”
Dunphy’s beef was that Whelan was an ordinary midfielder no better than he was, yet he owned two Ferraris. The last bit about the supercars was amusing but untrue. The first claim is an opinion which many agree with, but which Whelan seeks to put into context, going back to the time he gained promotion to the Premier League under Tony Pulis at Stoke City.
“Tony basically told me if I tried to make a run beyond the centre forward I would be sitting beside him instead for the next three or four months. It was a case of you had to stick to the way he played or you were not in the team. It was my first season in the Premier League. I had fought back from despair to get there, so I wasn’t going to give that up too easy.”
Whelan’s career is something of a paradox; he was a tough, proud midfielder who achieved success in large part because he was prepared to compromise. A powerful and passionate voice in the dressing room who ultimately bowed to the will of the manager. It is those traits that he is now trying to pass on to Ireland’s best youngsters coming through the ranks just as he once did.
Kevin Keegan taught him one of his biggest lessons. Keegan was Manchester City manager back in the early Noughties, subjecting the teenager from Dublin to some tough love. Whelan had made one Uefa Cup appearance for City when Keegan loaned him to Bury in what is now Sky Bet League Two and then told him on his return that he was not good enough for the Premier League and would not be getting a new contract.
“I didn’t get the choice, I was told you’re going to Bury. I thought I could get a bigger and better team in League One and he basically told me ‘No, I am sending you there.’ It was the best thing that happened to me,” says Whelan, who ended up signing for Sheffield Wednesday in League One on his return from the loan spell.
“At the time it felt like a kick in the teeth, but now I can say it was the best thing that could have happened and I appreciate what he did because he was being truthful. Sheffield Wednesday were a big club, my motivation was to go out and prove him wrong and get back to the Premier League as quick as I can.”
Promotions 4, Relegations 0 is Whelan’s record from his playing career. One of the promotions came with Wednesday where he got his fair share of goals as a box-to-box midfielder and he performed a similar role when Tony Pulis brought him to Stoke City in the 2008 January transfer window as the club made a successful push for the Premier League.
When Whelan did play in the top flight with Stoke, he thought it would be more of the same, but it was then that he got his rude awakening and was forced by Pulis to stew on the bench. He started the first game of the season, but was hauled off after less than an hour and it would be three months before he would be back in the starting XI in the league again.
“It was me training the way he wanted, him having a look to see if I am disciplined enough to do it. When you are out of the team for so long it is the worst thing ever and then you think I am going to have to do what he wants. It was his way and it was the right way because it kept Stoke in the league for a long time. With Giovanni Trapattoni it was basically the same thing.”
Whelan had been ignored by Trapattoni’s predecessor as Ireland manager, Steve Staunton; after all, he was not a Premier League footballer. Having been called into the fringes of a 40-man development squad that Trapattoni brought to the Algarve, he impressed and quickly became a mainstay. And so was born the Clondalkin Gattuso, a comparison with the famous Italy midfielder which was first made by Trapattoni.
“The first ten or fifteen games were probably the easiest for me, because I had the likes of Steven Reid and Kevin Kilbane beside me and I could always bounce off them and their experience,” Whelan says. “Then Steven got a serious knee injury and Kev ended up playing at left back. There were issues with Andy Reid and Stephen Ireland wasn’t available. It became clear quite early on that I was the linchpin or elder statesman in the centre of midfield, even though I didn’t have a lot of experience at international football. The manager would tell me to sit and protect. There were certain games where I wanted to get forward and be a bit more attacking, but what was I to do?”
Whelan’s midfield partners came and went. There was Darron Gibson: “He was at Manchester United at the time and wasn’t playing week in week out. Did he hang around at Man U for too long? He won major trophies at United, but he needed to play a lot more to have more credentials to play for Ireland.”
There was James McCarthy: “He played a lot of football when he was a young lad. From 16, he was a first-team regular. Did that hold him back a little bit further down the line? You would have to ask James that.”
There was Keith Andrews: “Keith got a kick in the teeth himself when he went down to the lower leagues [but] came back and proved everyone wrong by playing in the Premier League and international football. His journey was way harder than most.”
Such experiences are being imparted to Ireland’s under-16 squad who are in Turkey for the Aegean Cup, where Whelan is backing up the manager Paul Osam as part of his coaching apprenticeship. Watching Osam play for St Patrick’s Athletic at Richmond Park regularly on a Friday night was one of Whelan’s footballing memories growing up, his ambition of playing for his country already fuelled by the ticker-tape homecoming of the 1990 World Cup team from Italy. Many years ago, Whelan also played for Ireland Under-16, on one occasion against Andrés Iniesta of Spain, who he would face again at the 2012 European Championship.
Whelan wanted to play at the top to test himself against “superstars” and in that regard 2012 was right up there, even if Ireland were soundly beaten by Croatia, Spain and Italy. As well as Iniesta and Xavi, Luka Modric of Croatia was just about to sign for Real Madrid and Italy’s Andrea Pirlo was player of the tournament. “Me and Keith [Andrews] got hammered, but I would counteract that by saying we played an old-fashioned 4-4-2 with two wingers and every team we played against had three in midfield.”
His written assignment on Ireland’s midfield concerns preparation for major tournaments and that experience under Trapattoni was difficult. “It was a brand new experience and you didn’t know what to expect in the build-up,” he says. “We had a really tough season games-wise and mentally — we were always scrapping at Stoke. Then we got into camp, it was like a mini pre-season. I think we had 21 days straight of training. I am not going to tell Trapattoni what to do — he was an amazing manager — but the Irish and the English way was you would have a Wednesday or a Sunday off. Would you go back and do the same thing again? Of course not.”
The imbalance in midfield continued, Whelan believes, when Trapattoni was replaced by the management team of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane. Whelan remembers struggles alongside McCarthy in one of the early games against Georgia in Tbilisi.
“We were getting outrun in midfield and Roy had a pop in the dressing room at me and James about getting closer to certain midfielders. I had my opinion back which I was told was wrong. Then we sat down and went over the clips and the video and he was honest and he said I was probably right in what I was saying. We needed a little bit of help.”
Whelan believes Keane should be considered as a replacement for Stephen Kenny. “I would love Roy to go back in and be part of Ireland for what he gives to the country and the fans. Everyone loves him. For me personally it was unbelievable. Pick the brains of somebody who has not only played at the very top, but was a superstar in his role. We clashed, we had opinions, but it was all just learning for me.”
Lessons learnt and now passed on. Whelan brought his father Dave along to a recent under-16s training session and asked him for his thoughts.
“He says technically and coming forward now the lads have way more talent than we did at that age,” he says. “You can see it.”
Whelan however does have concerns about the priorities of young players, having tried to attract some talent from the Premier League clubs to Bristol Rovers, where he had a player/coaching role and helped them achieve promotion from League Two before hanging up his boots.
“If it’s money, if it’s cars, if it’s houses, if that is what is pushing you to be a better footballer, by all means crack on and keep doing what you are doing. I will never begrudge anybody trying to earn as much money as they can, but certain young lads would rather sit in their academies with the swimming pools and the saunas than going down a level and test themselves.”
For Whelan it wasn’t about the cars. The key to Whelan’s success is that he was a genuine team player and never was the collective greater than the sum of its parts than at Stoke — even with the infamous incident where Kenwyne Jones found a pig’s head in his locker and smashed Whelan’s car windscreen in the players’ car park, believing wrongly that the Dubliner was the culprit.
“That was banter that got a bit out of hand, it had nothing to do with me. I know who did it but I won’t say. It got to boiling point with Kenwyne and the club intervened and sorted it out. We held our hands up as players. There wasn’t any malice in it and we weren’t trying to hurt anybody.”
Whelan’s car in question was a four-wheel drive, not one of the two Ferraris which Dunphy said he had in his possession. “Even for games where I knew I had played well, he [Dunphy] was still coming for me. I was hearing and reading things and was taking it because as long as he was coming for me I was probably protecting somebody else, but it gets to a stage where you have to bite back. Something was said along the lines that I was driving Ferraris and bringing them back to Clondalkin. I just felt he was now coming for where I’m from. I made a comment that it wasn’t a Ferrari, it was a Lamborghini. I was only joking, because I never had a Lamborghini either.”
Whelan, now 40, had to work for his nice car. He was never fast-tracked as a player and doesn’t expect it to be any different as a coach.
