Forged by GAA, polished by Pep — Brian Barry-Murphy ready for Cardiff job

Times

6 hours ago

Jimmy Barry-Murphy was a special one, but what about his son Brian? At 46, Brian reckons he has still to realise his full potential, having moved from his father's shadow into a place of relative obscurity, changing codes, countries and constantly challenging himself in order to realise his own sporting dreams.
After a perfectly respectable if unspectacular playing career, Barry-Murphy is now getting more notice as a coach. Having been appointed head coach of Cardiff City — the biggest club in Wales who were in the Premier League six years ago — Barry-Murphy is as close as he has ever been to finding out whether he is also a special one, and he is not afraid to admit it.
Cardiff, Barry-Murphy believes, is 'similar to my own situation, where there is the potential to achieve something that could be really special. That is the thing which has probably excited me the most.'
Of course what has attracted Cardiff to Barry-Murphy is not the father — the GAA legend who is famous only in Ireland — but the connection with Pep Guardiola and some of the bright young players who have come through the Manchester City ranks. Barry-Murphy is not a name dropper, but nor is he going to hide his light under a bushel and clearly Cardiff's controversial Malaysian owner Vincent Tan is hoping some of the Pep magic has rubbed off on Barry-Murphy. The Corkman had a highly successful two-year stint as lead coach of Manchester City's elite development squad, where he helped bring through the likes of Cole Palmer and Oscar Bobb.
'My association with players who have gone on to do what they have done probably didn't harm my cause,' Barry-Murphy admits with a slight laugh, but he knows that while it helped get him in the door at Cardiff, it could also hasten his departure should the owner feel let down.
Seven of the past nine managers at Cardiff — including Mick McCarthy — haven't lasted more than a season as Tan has thrashed around looking for the right man. Instead, the owner has created a climate of chaos, with Cardiff finding themselves back in League One for the first time in 22 years after finishing bottom of the Championship.
Shamrock Rovers duo Stephen Bradley and Stephen McPhail — a former Cardiff player — were linked with the job, but now was not the right time and Nathan Jones was identified as their top target, but would not leave Charlton. Barry-Murphy is prepared to take the plunge, referencing his friend and former team-mate Joe Thompson, who died in April of cancer at the age of 36.
'We spoke about this before he died, actually, and one of the things he said was, 'We don't have time to hang around or look back.' He was talking about this idea of things going wrong or what's going to happen if things don't go right. Really, it's just a waste of our time.
'We spend all of our lives proving people wrong. We have the opportunity to do something different and probably a large part of the reason I am here is a vow I made to him to do extraordinary things and fulfil what he would have wanted.'
Back in Cork, Barry-Murphy consulted his father about the move to the Welsh capital: 'He said don't think twice about it. He was speaking about the stature of this club and where it is and what an opportunity it is to put the supporters and the club on a path to something completely different.'
Brian played Gaelic games, but eventually found his niche in association football, playing for Cork City and Ireland Under-21, though he never won a senior cap at international level as the competition at the time was too fierce. Like Alan Sheehan, the Athlone man now managing at Swansea City who Brian knows well, he has had to bide his time, but the lessons learnt around the Barry-Murphy dinner table haven't been forgotten.
'A lot of how I work and how I try to bring people on this journey is down to what I witnessed from him growing up,' Barry-Murphy says of his father. 'I thought we could get away without mentioning him, but now that we have there was always an expectation in our household based on our father's exploits that we had to win and had to be winning trophies. That kind of stuff you become aware of from a very young age so I have lived with that my whole life.'
That's why, for Barry-Murphy, the Cardiff hot seat is more than bearable to sit on. In Welsh football, Cardiff are now lagging behind both Swansea and Wrexham, who have replaced them in the Championship and become the best known club in Wales internationally because of their Hollywood owners. Cardiff's huge band of supporters are feeling hurt, betrayed and left behind, and Barry-Murphy clearly feels the need to reach out to them.
Barry-Murphy does not play down the expectation of an immediate return to the Championship and is expected to work largely with what he has got in terms of the club's talented group of young players, most notably the midfielder Rubin Colwill, who played for Wales against England in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar but has since underperformed under a succession of managers.
'Everybody will be clear that we expect to be at the top of the table and looking to win the league, but the danger of that is that you don't have a clear idea of how to do it,' Barry-Murphy says. 'I have a very clear idea in my mind of how I want to do it and it involves a very clear way of playing and for the players to be super clear of what that looks like.'
There is an obvious split about the appointment, which I put to Barry-Murphy when we spoke in Cardiff on Wednesday. One media outlet called it 'obscure' while another said he was 'well-qualified'. Barry-Murphy's only other experience at the sharp end of league management was at Rochdale, when the club was very much a League One underdog trying to compete with a much smaller budget, a job he held before going to Manchester City's academy.
'We were trying to defy the odds and compete with the bigger teams and we thought the best way to do that as a club was to do something different and dominate the ball completely, but there were times when we weren't as progressive or effective as we should have been. It's like life. I wish I knew back then what I know now,' Barry-Murphy says.
'When you go somewhere like Man City you see how to turn that possession-based football into effective football where you have to serve the ball to a certain calibre of footballer who want it quicker. I always knew what I wanted to do, I didn't always know how to do it.
'That is what I got from Guardiola in terms of that training programme where you keep that ball for long periods, but for what reason? The longer you keep that ball the less effective you are at arriving at the last line of the opponents effectively.
'We have the calibre of player here who can attack quickly and if you link it back to a Cole Palmer or an Oscar Bobb, if you spend loads of time keeping the ball at the back with those players by the time it comes to the last line, the opponents are really well structured and organised and it becomes quite a sterile, negative experience. The way I want to see my teams play is to arrive much quicker and, once we have arrived, to finish attacks in a much more effective way.'
It is a message he has sold to the owner and the initial reaction of the Cardiff fans has been positive. If the players also get the message, Barry-Murphy could be on to something.