IF YOU believe in the afterlife, then maybe Joe Kinnear will get to have a view of Mount Everest from above after all.
When intros that were memorable — for the wrong reasons — are discussed one inevitably gets a mention, relating to an interview with Kinnear when he was manager of Nepal in the 1980s.
In attempting to set the scene, the journalist suggested that his subject’s office overlooked Everest.
The impossibility of this serves as a reminder to us all to choose our words carefully, even if it is advice that Kinnear was never inclined to follow.
For a younger generation Kinnear, who passed away on Sunday aged 77, will be associated with a foul-mouthed rant to mark the start of his reign as Newcastle United manager in 2008, but there was more to him than that.
The 1990s and early 2000s was a short-lived golden era for Irish managers in the English Premier League.
David O’Leary led Leeds United to fourth place and the semi-finals of the Champions League.
Martin O’Neill won the League Cup twice as well achieving four top-half finishes with Leicester City.
But neither of them, nor any other Irishman for that matter, won the League Managers Association Manager of the Year Award, as Kinnear did at the end of the 1993-94 campaign.
He was recognised by his peers for his feat in Wimbledon finishing sixth, the club’s highest placing.
Three years later, they came eighth while also reaching the semi-finals of the FA Cup and League Cup.
In the season after his 6½-year tenure came to an end because of heart issues, Wimbledon were relegated.
Yet, while popular with team-mates and players he managed, Kinnear was never held in quite the same esteem as either O’Leary or O’Neill were at that time.
Even the news of his passing has been well down the sports bulletins.
DIFFERENT LIGHT
The argument that it might have been because of the route-one football for which Wimbledon were famous might have held sway if there had been large-scale objections to the style used by Jack Charlton to get results for Ireland for the best part of a decade.
And it would be a bit rich if, as a nation of cursers, we held our collective noses because of his propensity to swear.
Maybe he lacked the sophistication which O’Leary and O’Neill appeared to possess.
If so, that would sound a lot like snobbery.
If we are honest, there was probably a bit of judgement attached to his accent, and an ignorance about how it was acquired, in an era when the FAI was increasingly footloose with the qualification criteria.
For example, Jason McAteer claimed recently that his link was through a great-grandfather — a generation out — with a random name put down for his grandfather on his application for an Irish passport.
Ironically, though, O’Leary was born in London, to Irish parents, before moving to Dublin aged three, while Kinnear was born, as Joseph Reddy, in 1946 and grew up in Crumlin and Kimmage until the age of six.
His mother Margaret had walked out on her husband Joe and went to look for work in England.
With their dad awarded custody, Joe and his older sisters Carmen and Shirley were initially divided between their grandparents.
Margaret returned for her children after setting up home with Gerry Kinnear in Watford. They adopted their stepfather’s name, with the couple having two more kids together.
PLAYING DAYS
Having failed to secure a contract after a trial with the Hornets, the family’s only boy became a professional the hard way, playing part-time for St Alban’s City as well as starting an apprenticeship as a printer before being spotted by Spurs.
He won two League Cups either side of a Uefa Cup in the 1970s but his first major honour was the FA Cup in 1967 when, as a 20-year-old, he was part of a Tottenham team which included Pat Jennings, Alan Mullery, Dave Mackay, Jimmy Greaves and Terry Venables.
They defeated Chelsea 2-1 in ‘the Cockney Cup final’, the first contested by two London sides.
Although footballers’ wages were still relatively low, his bonus amounted to £2,500.
Hunter Davies’ book The Glory Game recorded that his mother was given £500, each of his four sisters received £30 and a new outfit, with a TV and armchair purchased for his grandmother in Dublin.
He did splash out £600 on himself to buy a Ford Corsair but the rest was spent on a six-week family holiday to Ireland, an indication that he had not forgotten where he had come from.
Football was to afford him more opportunities to return home having won his first cap, away to Turkey, in February 1967.
The same opposition bookended his Ireland career at Dalymount Park in October 1975.
SIGNING OFF
A year previously, Kinnear had played his part in Ireland’s most notable victory to date, with Don Givens scoring a hat-trick as Liam Brady made his debut as the USSR were beaten 3-0 in Dublin.
With 16½ years between his 26th and final Ireland appearance and his re-emergence into top-level football, when he was promoted from reserve-team manager at the Dons following Peter Withe’s sacking, many younger football supporters simply did not know who he was.
In the pre-internet age, his coaching in the UAE, Malaysia, India and Nepal — bar the odd exalting interview — received little coverage.
He worked alongside Mackay at Doncaster Rovers and served as caretaker boss when the Scot left for Birmingham City, but was passed over for the job on a permanent basis, after which he joined the Dons.
His promotion in January 1992 meant he was 45 years of age taking on his first manager’s job in English football.
At a time when money was flowing into the game, he kept Wimbledon punching above their weight.
His pre-match prediction that Ireland would beat Italy 1-0 at the 1994 World Cup has received belated praise since his passing but he did not enjoy the popularity that other RTÉ panellists did.
MEDIA VIEW
And Apres Match’s depiction of him at that time threatening Frank Stapleton — ‘I’ll rip off your head and s* in the hole’ — may have been prescient given the vitriol directed at journalists who had dared to highlight him giving the Newcastle players a day off in one of his first acts as manager.
But a working relationship with the squad and media was established before heart problems forced him to step down from another role.
A subsequent spell as the club’s director of football between June 2013 and February 2014 was not a success.
How much of that was down to his shortcomings or the limitations of the Mike Ashley regime is a matter of debate.
But the inaccurate and contradictory claims he made in interviews, as well as getting names wrong, were put in perspective by the later revelation that he had been diagnosed with dementia in 2015.
To judge him on that period would be incredibly harsh. Four major trophies as a player and 302 games managed in the Premier League — a tally only one Irishman, O’Neill, can better — means the ‘other’ JFK deserves our respect.
Joe F*king Kinnear, in case you were wondering.