Monday morning, Newlands Cross. Stephen Bradley sits down, orders a vanilla cappuccino and laughs off the suggestion that he ought to have better things to be at. In this week of all weeks, shouldn’t he be way too busy to put an hour aside for this?
“Ah no,” he grins. “This is no hassle. I didn’t do a lot of media over the off-season so it’s no harm. All the work is done, really.”
And how.
Friday morning, back in Dublin. Bradley answers the phone and you can hear the Shamrock Rovers manager smile down the line. The 1-0 win over Molde has led all the sports bulletins and 16-year-old Michael Noonan is already back in school, his life changed with his debut goal. They got back to Dublin at 1am and the players have the day off to rest up. For Bradley, the next thing is the next thing.
“I get it. I know it’s an away win in Europe, I understand all that. But we’re in this round to get through. We’re not here just to be here. That’s never our mentality. That’s not what we talk about in the dressing room, it’s not what we talk about in the club, I don’t believe in limiting what we can do.
“Look, it’s a win. But that was our aim, to go there and bring the game back to Tallaght. We’ve done that but it’s only half a job. We have to enjoy it and move on quickly.”
[ Who is Michael Noonan, Shamrock Rovers’s 16-year-old European goalscorer?Opens in new window ]
Speed has been the hallmark of the Rovers' winter. Their off-season was the shortest of any team in Europe. After they played Chelsea in Stamford Bridge on December 19th, everyone had Christmas and new year and were back in on January 13th. Some of us have had toothaches that lasted longer than the break the Rovers players got.
“That was tough on them, it’s a really quick turnaround,” says Bradley. “For us as staff, three-and-a-half weeks was probably enough, in fairness. You miss it. You just want to get back. Players could probably do with a bit longer, it’s an unusual situation for them. But look, I said to them – it’s the price of being successful. So you can’t complain. It is what it is. If you have that every year it means you’re doing something right.”
‘Really we need money coming in from TV and that’s the next step. Exposure is fine, coverage is fine, but a TV deal needs to bring money into the league’
Though they came up a couple of points short of Shelbourne last year, nobody in domestic football has been doing more things right this decade than Bradley and Rovers. Spending their first winter since 2019 as something other than league champions was a jagged little pill. But the European campaign has fairly washed it down.
It’s been some ride. Next Thursday’s return leg against Molde will be their 16th game across the three European competitions since last June. Almost an extra half a season of matches, during which they’ve racked up six wins, three draws and six defeats. They’ve played 11 clubs and only been truly outclassed by three – Chelsea, Sparta Prague and PAOK.
Needless to say, they’d have taken a week like this when they first hit the road last summer. A February schedule of Thursday-Sunday-Thursday, a diet of knockout European football sandwiching a bumper league opener at the Aviva against Bohemians. Bradley has never lacked ambition, either for Rovers or for the league as a whole. Making this the norm is the next rung on the ladder.
“It’s a brilliant time for the league,” he says. “The fact that attendances are growing is great. I think the fact that Shels won last year is a good thing for the league as a whole. Not for us obviously, but it’s great for the league. The underdog winning the league, deservedly so, is brilliant.
“Damien [Duff] is great for the league, having Stephen [Kenny] involved, John Caulfield as well, still a top manager. Derry and Sligo making changes, Cork back in – these are all good things.
“I think that the new TV deal is just the start. You can’t get too excited about it, but it’s okay. It’ll bring more exposure over a longer period of time. But really we need money coming in from TV and that’s the next step. Exposure is fine, coverage is fine, but a TV deal needs to bring money into the league. We can’t get carried away. We can’t be thinking, ‘We have this now and everyone’s happy.’”
That restless, bristling energy has driven Bradley through his second football life, a legacy of the complacency that strangled his first one. Liam Brady signed him to the Arsenal academy at 15, swapping Jobstown for one of the most gilded youth football environments in Europe. He was training with the first team in the Invincibles season, waltzing through games for the reserves, looking every inch a sure thing.
Bit by bit, that certainty ebbed away. Once he started earning good money at 17, he stopped working. Arsene Wenger told him he needed to knuckle down, Brady did the same. But players were soon passing him out, including Cesc Fabregas, who was three years younger and playing in a similar position.
It all ended in disaster. Bradley spent a chunk of his new fortune on an expensive watch, the kind of frippery he’d roll his eyes at now. He did it to be seen, without giving a thought to who’d be looking.
“You get caught up in that lifestyle,” he told The Athletic last year. “And the wrong people noticed. I went out for dinner with some teammates. Within a minute of coming home, the door was getting kicked in. They put a gun to my head. One was saying: ‘Shoot him, shoot him.’ And the other stabbed me three times. That’s all I remember.”
Bradley never played for Arsenal again. He was lucky to play for anyone again – the surgeon told him the knife was millimetres away from piercing his brain. He went to Scotland for a while, came back to Ireland in time and won leagues with Drogheda and Rovers. But he retired from playing long before he turned 30.
“I always felt I underachieved as a footballer,” he says now. “I’d always felt that I never allowed my ability to have the best shot at fulfilling itself. And that was down to me. I f**ked up. I was the one that didn’t dedicate myself to the game as a player, in England especially. “And then I got stabbed and I had problems then – I couldn’t play for a while. I made a decision after I got stabbed. I messed around for a year. Didn’t want to know anyone, hated football, hated life, hated everything about it, was angry. And then my mam and my wife now got me back on track.
“I just made that decision very early – I think I was 22 at the time – that I wanted to be a young manager. Because I knew what I hadn’t had as a player in terms of support structures. Fix the person, fix the player. For me it’s number one. It’s been my number one aim since I came into the job.
“And you get some wrong. There’s some you just don’t get on with and just can’t fix, and that’s life. At the start, I took that personally. ‘How did I not see that? How could I not help him?’ But sometimes that’s life. You just have to learn to accept that.
“But yeah, I’m a firm believer in that idea and I really have always been, and I don’t see that ever changing. That’s one of our main principles when we’re looking at people and players – they might be a bit broken, a bit hurt, a bit damaged, but can we help them? Again, we don’t get them all right. Some we mess up. But that’s life.”
Bradley achieved his aim of becoming a young manager, taking over the reins at Rovers when he was still only 31. He’s 40 now and has four league titles and an FAI Cup to show for his stint in charge. In the usual trajectory of football management, he’d have taken a swing in a bigger league by now. But the life lessons have kept coming all the while.
For the past two and a half years, his young son Josh has been getting treatment for leukemia. He was eight when he was diagnosed and the hospital told Bradley and his wife Emma that one of them would have to give up working to care for him. Any instinct he had to walk away from football was ruled out straight away – Emma and Josh convinced him that the club would be their release, something for the family to look forward to between rounds of treatment.
“Josh is good. He’s just out of another round of chemo and steroids. So that was a tough week. When he’s on that week, he’s not great. The steroids and the chemo take a lot of him, like they do anybody. He becomes a different character on them – he’s angry and hurt and very emotional.
“But for a 10-year-old, he’s incredible at expressing his feelings. He could sit here and express himself probably better than most adults. He’d be able to tell you why he’s feeling sad, why he’s feeling hurt, why he’s angry. It’s special that he has that.
“You want to take his pain away. But you’ve learned to sit with it and be comfortable with it because there’s no other way. Other than that week when he’s in his heavy treatment, he’s doing really well. The hospital are happy with where he is right now. He was in last Thursday for a procedure – he gets a lumbar puncture into his back and spine to check on his cancer. Hopefully come July/August, we’re out the other side of it. That’s the aim.”
‘I can only do it because of my wife, is the short answer. She’s a special woman who has given up her job for this. As for how I manage the team, I don’t think I could have done without this job, as crazy as that sounds’
— Stephen Bradley
Bradley lost his mother to cancer when he was 31. She was a single parent who raised him and his two brothers, so he was very close to her and took her death particularly hard. He says it made him question everything about life, about his career, about how to deal with ups and downs. It taught him how to be comfortable in crisis.
“You don’t become immune to the pain or the hurt or the feelings,” he says. “You learn to live with them. When you’re having a bad day or a bad week, you learn to be comfortable with that. So I think my mam’s stuff helped me when Josh got sick.
“You’re thinking, ‘F**king hell ...’ It’s one thing your mam getting sick, but when it’s a kid ... When you get that news, when the doctor told me and Emma that it was it was cancer, it was scary. It was really scary. I was afraid, to be honest. My first thought was, ‘We can’t lose him. We can’t.’
“But we talked about it, me and Emma, and we said, ‘Look, this is the hand we’ve been dealt. We either play it or we fold.’ It can’t be any more simple than that. You have a decision to make. I don’t know how that feels to people or how it sounds to you, but that’s how we looked at it.
“It is what it is. We can’t change it. Nothing we can do can change it. We’ve got to face it and we’ve got to try meet as best we can. We’re going to have bad days. We’re going to argue, we’re going to fight at times. But this is what we have to do.”
In the middle of it all, he has a football team to manage. And not just any football team – the one with the highest expectations, the biggest budget, the shiniest sheen. He has signings to make, players to move on, a culture to set, tactical plans to finesse, all to the backdrop of the simmering tensions of internal politics at Rovers. That’s a lot for anyone, never mind a dad putting down days in the chemo ward.
“I can only do it because of my wife, is the short answer. She’s a special woman who has given up her job for this. As for how I manage the team, I don’t think I could have done without this job, as crazy as that sounds. It’s given me a real release. There’s times I’ve stood on the sideline when the result has gone against us. And am I disappointed for that moment? I am. But it’s helped me move on really quickly.
“Because you’re thinking, ‘Well I was in the hospital this morning with my son, talking to another boy who found a tumour in the back of his eye.’ This is important, of course it’s important. We’re in it to win. But it gives you a rare perspective on what’s really important in life.”
Three huge games in seven days to start the year sounds hectic. And it is. Bohs won’t be standing back admiring them for their win over Molde. The Aviva will be rocking, same with Tallaght for the return leg on Thusday. All in the first week of an eight-month season.
The road is long and you need a cool head to navigate it. Bradley has learned that better than anyone.
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