In football, Terry Venables believes, the only thing that isn't a game is the game. The 90 minutes are serious and are what matters to a person like Venables who remains, at heart, a football man. The rest -- the criticism, the abuse, the rumours -- are, he says, a distraction, something you must distance yourself from if the serious business is to be treated with the respect it deserves.
In a career in which he has made as many virulent enemies as committed friends, this isn't always easily observed. Over a couple of hours last Thursday in London, Venables didn't necessarily observe it himself as he fought back against the charges made by Eamon Dunphy on RTE and a process which he insists was merely "decoration".
He believes he was led along while Giovanni Trapattoni was being approached by a different route. He says Don Givens showed up an hour late for Venables' interview with the three-man panel and wonders why he received a message late in the day encouraging him to stay in the race.
Venables sat down in a Knightsbridge hotel still contaminated from the toxic half-life of Dunphy's attack on RTE last November which, Venables believes, blew his chances of succeeding Steve Staunton as manager. "Amazingly, I think everyone is terrified of him," he says.
But Venables can be ruthless, too, and while it would be wrong to say he isn't used to losing fights, he has an instinct which makes it impossible for him not to engage in battle, even some which have proved to be futile. He is certain he is on surer ground with this one and he is angry. You wouldn't always like him when he's angry.
"Something has gone on in my opinion but it's gone and I don't get up every morning thinking about it. I was disappointed and occasionally I am angry, I am angry now talking about it and I am pissed off again, I have got no divine right to get the job anyway so that's it."
But it has scarred him and he has been scarred before even though Dunphy and he inhabit a world which encapsulates the advice of George Black to his son Conrad, "Life is hell, most people are bastards and everything is bullshit." It is a tough world and Venables is eager to take Dunphy on as aggressively as he feels he was attacked.
It may have been the game around the game, but Venables believes there was a "change of heart" within the FAI once Dunphy had his say.
He has watched Dunphy's polemic on YouTube, enraged as he stated "facts" which Venables contests and he reveals his determination to fight Dunphy's toxicity with his own when he reflects on Dunphy questioning his character. "How can a self-confessed cocaine user who has been banned for drink driving and driving without insurance lecture me on my character?"
He wonders still about Dunphy's motives and the effect it had. "He had to get in there and try hysterical stuff. And who's going to know if it's true? It doesn't get to England normally and the people in Ireland probably won't know and most likely won't care. But all of a sudden they hear this stuff and it talks about me having six jobs that only lasted a year or less -- it was only four but even if I did, that was the time those jobs took."
He considered legal action and his lawyers told him he had a case but he has seen enough of courts to be sceptical about their form of justice.
Instead he wants to talk about his career, Dunphy and his decision to enter a process about which he had many reservations, even if he thinks Ireland have got a manager they can be proud of at the end of a procedure he still can't understand.
"I have never seen anything like this and I am not saying it is wrong. They have got a good guy in Trapattoni, I like him as a man, I like him a lot. If they go on and qualify and do well in it, you have got to say well done. Only time will tell."
He wasn't used to applying for jobs, it isn't something he's had to do in football but he was desperately keen for the job, believed that the players were excellent and he remembered Jack Charlton and thought he could do the same thing.
He was close to getting the job before Staunton, closer than many people realise, but this time he would play their game.
"Well I got involved last time. I didn't put in for it and then this time one or two people said. 'Well, they don't think you will do it or will go in for it.' So I thought to myself, okay I can remember what happened before, maybe they want to look like they're covering their arse which basically they have done anyway. I will go and speak to the people involved."
So he joined the race, but whatever enthusiasm for his application he detected began to disappear, he says, in the weeks following Dunphy's barrage.
"I didn't know about the Dunphy thing at the time; looking back now there was a change and I didn't know what it was, it was just different. I would see that. I wasn't talking to anyone. I never spoke to a player, people said, 'Are you talking to them?' But I never spoke to a player. I never spoke to Don Howe or Ray Houghton after that day. I just left it, I know that is the right thing to do, I virtually did what I normally do but I thought if that was going to be what it took I would do it."
He met Howe, Houghton and eventually Givens in a hotel a couple of hours from London. He laughed when he read about the panel's delight in being invited to Trapattoni's home and sharing a bottle of wine. Venables has always been hospitable, but that kind of convivial meeting wasn't open to him. Instead they sat in the lobby of a busy hotel and listened to his ideas for the future.
But it was confusing. For legitimate reasons, Don Givens was delayed so the interview began without him. Later, it was said that Venables had been impressive but he left feeling less pleased. "I heard that they thought it was a good interview, I don't know whether it was or whether it wasn't. If I was them, I would be thinking did we do a good interview? The only sort of thing that came out of it was they asked me about players and I knew about the players, I knew all about the players and the young players, I didn't get to talk about what I wanted to do, whether I should have is another question."
Ultimately, he felt it was unsatisfactory. "I thought it was alright, I didn't get to do what I thought I would. I mean Don [Howe] asked me about my game plan and Don Givens wasn't there so I thought I would wait till he came rather than do it all over again. Basically he came in, he wasn't there that long and then it sort of shifted as if it was ending because I had already been there a long while with the two of them. Don Givens was just sort of 'How are you doing? How are things going?' So it seemed like it had come to an end and so when it went quiet I thought it was time for me to go."
It went quiet for a long time after that. Venables heard nothing from any official source until the weekend after Trapattoni became the clear favourite. He received a message telling him to stay in the race. He had been part of races before and he recognised this for what it was: this was a game outside the game.
"I often find people have an idea but they don't think it all the way through. They don't say, 'Well we've got this process and if that happens, shit we have a problem and how do we get over that problem?' Do they think that far ahead or are they waiting and waiting and hoping that someone is going to come along, which actually happened? He didn't, he actually didn't go in and do the process. Can you say he did the process? No, I think he [trapattoni] picked them at a time when they needed him and they weren't happy with it and it came up."
Again he praises Trapattoni. "He's a great bloke, I like him a lot, got good results, I like to play my football differently, not better, not worse, just differently."
He regrets he won't get the chance with Ireland. He believes the players wanted him as manager. He says their expressions of support went beyond the holding pattern players take when dealing with a question they don't want to answer.
More importantly, he thinks they are a talented and "fearless" group for any manager to work with. "I am really disappointed. There is no reason why you think you should have it but actually, from my point of view, I really wanted it because I just believed that there is a terrific group of players. I can remember I was actually proud that Jack Charlton done the job that he did, I got on well with Jack in my life and I just thought what a fantastic thing to be able to do."
He had a detailed plan for the side and thinks it wrong for people to say the Irish players don't care. "People will always say that. When you are losing people will always say that. They will say they're not fit enough because they don't know the answer to that one and it is quite a good little line to have -- or they don't care. Do you honestly believe the Irish team don't care? They care, the English team care, the English team really really care, they do. They go there and want it but the pressure, they have got to do it under is extreme, extreme pressure. They have got to create, they have got to do this and do that and getting them to do that is what it is about."
Venables insists he didn't believe he was entitled to the job, but the idea that Dunphy soured it for him is one he finds hard to deal with.
"The panel know about me as a coach. They would already know everything about me. Maybe they thought nobody would say anything then Dunphy brings it up and they shit themselves."
Dunphy, brazenly, went to war on his character and it is an issue he has had to fight for a long time. "After Tottenham, basically I'm an easy target. I've had to take stick which I don't like. I don't talk about it because you bore people to death like you're getting bored now. People think you're bitter. But it gets harder when people say things like this that are wrong. That I lied and bribed? Wrong."
The years of fighting Alan Sugar, taking libel actions and being barred from directorships wounded him deeply. He remembers sitting at home one day watching CNN when Johnnie Cochrane came on the Larry King Show. "He said if you haven't got money, you can't get justice. The truest thing I ever heard."
But sometimes he pushed on for pride, even though he knew he couldn't win, that the lawyers would come out on top and his reputation would take another blow. It nearly cost him everything and while there are those who would believe that some of the sharp practices he has observed deserved punishment, the continued vitriol is disproportionate.
His battle with Sugar convinced him that Cochrane was right. "I didn't have any money, nobody believed it. I didn't even believe it. The club I helped save and I would have had to go bankrupt. My parents . . . Oh God. That would have been the end. I had to do admit that, I never got took to task. It was never contested."
He is talking about the carecraft, the company law version of the plea bargain which saw him barred from a company directorship for seven years as a result of not contesting charges. But it has damaged him to this day, damaged him when Dunphy put on his half-moon glasses and talked about his ten days' research -- Venables gets a laugh from that.
He didn't find much else of it funny and he was wounded at his career being dismissed because he had only won two trophies. "What's winning? Did Jack Charlton win the World Cup with Ireland? No, but he made people happy."
He goes through his career, charts the progress he made with sides and the mistakes he made too. Football, he says, is an individual game lending itself to the team. For the team to function, the individuals need to play. And to play, they need to relax and that is something he has usually been able to achieve.
Leeds was different. He said he found a group of players he considered "sour" and did something he always regretted. "I lost my tolerance with the players. I've always believed a coach should have tolerance with players and patience to get the message out. I made the mistake of being so angry, I lost my patience with players. I got too angry. Normally, I don't, whatever happens because I don't think it benefits the team. I lost patience with certain people."
So Leeds entered freefall and Venables acknowledged his errors. "I'm admitting that I didn't do a good job and I think everyone is not always going to be a winner but I think there is nowhere else where, hand on heart, I could say that."
He is proud of the job he did at Middlesbrough and the manner in which he rejuvenated English football at Euro '96. It is easy to forget now, but the renaissance of the English game after Italia '90 had reached a swift end during the Graham Taylor years when Venables came along and changed everything.
When Dunphy dismissed that achievement too, he knew that this wasn't an attack based on reason or accountability. "How can he get away with it and how can people listen to this on a continual basis? You have to laugh."
But as he goes through his record from Crystal Palace to Portsmouth, Middlesbrough and Leeds, making a case and admitting where he got things wrong, it is only a shame he didn't deal with them when Dunphy first brought them up, when Dunphy fell back on the people's right to know.
"Yeah they do have a right to know and that's why I am here. They can listen to him and the only way to even it out is to listen to me and maybe I am wrong even giving him the time of day, but I just think, it's not just me, that he shouldn't be allowed to bullshit his way through as he does."
He has no idea, he says, if he was treated fairly but says Howe and Givens are fair people. He confronted Givens after the appointment was made, after he'd heard that Givens had said that Venables would have been distracted by outside interests.
"He said 'I never said that'. I said you told someone and I know for a fact that I wouldn't get it because I had too many other things. He said 'no, that's not true', and I said 'you're bullshitting me'.
"At the time when I smelt it wasn't going right I would have been out of it. I said to you and you kept saying to me 'stay in there and stay in there' and then I get a call for me to stay in. They said take it which way you want was the words, I can't take it any other way because it would be wrong and I am sitting there like a p***k really. Now I am angry."
But the anger subsides, even if the regret remains. "I didn't think I ever would put my name forward and I think my intuition was right: if they want you they will come for you which happened to Trapattoni. Basically he didn't go in for it and I thought all the rest is decoration. I think it is just dressing it up, 'Look at us and how thorough we were.'
He has a different opinion and it comes back to Dunphy again. "If I had seen that at the time I'd have thought, 'Unless these people are particularly strong they will be frightened of criticism because Dunphy has already told them you've made a mistake.' Then again, I honestly think that if they are not strong enough to take their own decision I am better off not being there."
http://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/if-they-are-not-strong-enough-to-make-their-own-decision-then-i-am-better-off-not-being-there-1318986.html