Neville: Why I called it a day (Part 1 of 3)

[NL7]

Gary Neville sat down for an exclusive interview with MUTV to talk about his decision to retire, and to look back on some of his best moments in his career. In the first of a three-part serialisation of that interview, Gary explains how he came to make his decision...

You caught a lot of people by surprise, can you take us through the chain of events that led to your announcement?

It wasn’t just on the day; something like that doesn’t come as immediately as that. It’s been a combination of events over the last few months and I’ve known for the last few weeks having spoken to the manager. You don’t go and do something like that so quickly. I went away for a week and still came to the same conclusion: it just felt like the right thing to do and that my time was up. When your time’s up, your time’s up.

You could have played until the end of the season. Why stop mid-season?

Sometimes you just go off gut instinct, it’s the type of person I am. I felt it was right. Having spoken with the manager, I’ll continue to go in until the end of the season but not in the capacity that I have been doing in the last 19 or 20 years. I’ll maybe work with some of the young players, but that will be until the end of the season. I played my last game against West Brom and came to the conclusion pretty quickly after that that I didn’t feel right and my time was up. I didn’t want to delay it for four months. In my mind, it just wouldn’t have felt right for me. I felt that, for the manager and the club and everything they have done for me, they should know that as well. They accepted it and supported me in my decision.

So you came to the decision after the game against West Brom on New Year's Day?

It wasn’t after that game, it was during that game! [Laughs] No, it was probably a month or so before that. You don’t just give up after one bad game – I’ve had enough of those over the last 20 years to know that it can happen! The way I felt, at the start of the season picking up those little injuries, your mentality at this club is just to come back and go again. But you get a feeling in your mind that you can’t go again. That time had come for me. There was also the fact of being of use to the team and the squad. In the last two seasons I think I played 25 or 30 games in each season. There were games, or periods of games, where I felt I was contributing to the squad. Once you’ve lost that, you get to know in your own mind that it’s not quite right. You don’t want to be a passenger.

You’d perhaps have preferred to go out at the end of the season lifting a trophy; is it a low-key way to go out?

I don’t think it’s a low-key way to go; you can write scripts, but the reality is that life doesn’t happen like that. In the perfect world, of course, I’d have walked off having lifted the championship at the end of the season. But that’s not reality. That’s not real life. Things happen in life at moments in which you wish they wouldn’t. But I can’t look back and believe that there is a bad way to go. After everything that’s happened, it is what it is.

Who did you consult when you came to your decision?

I didn’t consult anybody. I made the decision myself. I spoke to my mum and dad, my wife, but the decision was made. They weren’t going to try and talk me out of it. They know me well and they know my mindset and the way I have been for 20 years at this club. When that fire stops burning a little bit you know something’s not quite right. The injuries you get deflate you, so they get to know your mindset. It wasn’t a case of consulting them, it was more just talking to people and telling them basically. Knowing me, they accept it; they might be disappointed for me, it’s the sort of thing you don’t want to come to an end for your son or your husband. But that’s life.

What did the boss have to say?

He was fine. Initially he said to go and have a think about it, it’s not the sort of decision you make lightly. He’s been really supportive and brilliant towards me. It just comes. Better players than me have left, greater players than me, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s a big thing for me, obviously, but the most important thing is that the team is doing well. We’re five points clear at the top of the table and hopefully we go on to win the title.

Did you talk to your team-mates?

I spoke to Paul [Scholes] and Ryan [Giggs]. They probably knew a few weeks ago. We’ve been playing football for 25 years together and I’ve known Scholesy since I was 12 and Giggsy since I was 14. So I spoke to them. They’ve lived everything with me. They’re in completely different moments, though; they are absolutely incredible football players and still outstanding performers, still two of the best players in the Premier League let alone at United. I hope I can continue to watch them for the next few years.

You’ve been going into United every day for over 20 years, training and playing. How do you suddenly cope with not doing that? It’s a total change of lifestyle…

It is, but it’s not come suddenly for me. With what’s happened in the last few years, you have an acceptance that your career is coming to an end. It could have happened at the end of last season. The club only contacted me a few weeks before the end of the season and I was quite relaxed about that. I did genuinely feel I was playing my last two or three months at the club. I was prepared for it then. The club phoned me up and David [Gill] and the manager asked me to have another year. You can’t say no. I thought, 'you’re Gary Neville and you play for Manchester United, that’s what you do'. I’ve supported the club all my life and anybody in my shoes would have said no. In the off-season, I did four weeks training to prepare for another tough season, and then I pulled my calf on the first day of pre-season and was out for four weeks. I got back to what I believe to be reasonable shape in training fitness but just without the games. Then my ankle flared up in October, the injury I’d done four years ago. My ankle had been really good and hadn’t given me much trouble. But that’s when you say, ‘enough’s enough’. You get to that point.

Manchester United Official Web Site - Neville: Why I called it a day

 

[HappyH]

Not being dismissive, honestly as I thought he was a fantastic full back for club & country, especially when he linked up with David Beckham but one of the papers today (Daily Mail maybe?) reckoned it was because he wasn't gonna be in the list of 25 for the next phase of the Champions League?
HH.

 

[gasman]

Not being dismissive, honestly as I thought he was a fantastic full back for club & country, especially when he linked up with David Beckham but one of the papers today (Daily Mail maybe?) reckoned it was because he wasn't gonna be in the list of 25 for the next phase of the Champions League?
HH.

It was the Daily Fail although I am not sure how much truth there is to it.

For anyone that's interested this a rather telling article on Nev's career and give's an insight as to how he made it at Utd. It start's badly but by the end I had a deeper respect for the Nev.

On Thursday 3rd February 2011, @OliverKayTimes said:

A 1,000-word tweet dedicated to Gary Neville, the great overachiever ...



There was, it is fair to say, a lively response last night when, in tribute to Gary Neville, I called him "one of world football's great overachievers", adding "If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it really isn't."

And it isn't. It's an enormous tribute to a guy who, as a good friend of his reminded me this morning, started out as a midfielder and realised in the company of Scholes, Beckham and others that he wasn't good enough to play there. He moved to centre-back and was told he wasn't tall enough to play there. He moved to right-back and found himself up against John O'Kane, who was quicker, stronger and, as he saw it, more gifted.

I suggested last night that Glen Johnson and Micah Richards were "more gifted than Neville ever was, but Neville's attitude made him a far better player." That went down pretty well ... My point is that Johnson and Richards, like O'Kane, were born with the technical/physical gifts to play at the highest level and are falling short, i.e. underachieving. To my mind -- and his own -- Neville wasn't born with those gifts, so he had to work harder, in my view, than any other modern English footballer to achieve what he has done. To me, that constitutes overachievement.

People cited Neville's world-class crossing as an example of what a STUPID C*** I must be. Sorry, but that too was the product of hard work. Watching Neville in the 90s, he was never anything like as good a crosser as he became. By his own admission, that is something that he had to develop later in his career because there was a trend towards more attacking right-backs. You might not believe this, but a link with Hatem Trabelsi (he who bombed at Man City) was what taught him he had to work relentlessly on his crossing. Over time, he became an extremely good crosser, but it was not because it was something at which he was gifted.

Neville's gifts were his intelligence, his desire and his work ethic. They gave him the attitude to identify his limitations and work endlessly to improve in area he could. He couldn't make himself taller or quicker, so he worked on his stamina and his upper-body strength. He even, as Lee Sharpe said a little scoffingly in his autobiography, practised his throw-ins.

Neville did not set out to be a top-class full-back. Who does? He felt that, because of his limitations, it was the only position in which he could try to carve out a career at United, the only club he ever wanted to play for. He could have stayed in central defence or in midfield, but not at United. And he certainly wouldn't have 85 caps -- it would have been far more but for injury -- as a midfielder (though I fancy he would have had more chance than most English players of developing the skils to play in the holding role that is now en vogue).

There is an art to great defending, but to a large extent the required skills -- positioning, marking, tackling -- are either self-taught or coached. You might say it is the same of every position. I would disagree; Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs were born with the technical ability and creative flair to excel in what they do.

Those areas -- intelligence, positioning, marking, tackling -- are the ones in which Johnson and Richards remain hopeless, which is why I said (and many people ignored) that, despite their gifts, they are far inferior players to Neville. A more interesting case to monitor is Rafael. He has far more of the raw physical/technical materials than Neville. Time will tell whether he can be anything like as good a full-back.

Is overachiever an insult? Did people think that, because we're talking about a team sport, I was calling him a useless player who won medals because he played in a brilliant team? That is not how he sees the term "overachiever". Nor is it how the word is seen by Frank Lampard, another who has worked phenomenally hard to elevate himself to the top echelons of the game.

As Lampard put it when I interview him a few months ago, "When I was 15, I was decent, but I was a bit chubby. There were better players than me in West Ham’s youth team. There was a boy, Michael Black, who played in my Sunday team. He was the bee’s knees. He didn’t quite kick on. There was Lee Hodges, who was at West Ham and is still a good friend of mine. He got injuries that halted his progress. But there are countless ones I could name just from my Sunday and school teams and I always felt that I had to find a way to be better than them."

That could easily be Neville talking. In fact, in an interview with The Times over a decade ago, Neville said: "When I was 14, I was average among players. was just a sub for my county team, Greater Manchester. Nicky Butt, my brother, Phil, David Beckham, John O'Kane, Keith Gillespie and Ben Thornley were all playing for national teams. They were the stars. They were playing for their country at schoolboy level and I thought they were the bee's knees. I was nothing like that and I realised when I was 16 that if I did not give it my all, then I wouldn't have a chance."

That is the point. Gillespie, Thornley and O'Kane underachieved in their careers. Nicky Butt and Phil Neville achieved. Giggs and Scholes became the world-class players they were always destined to be. Beckham? That's another debate entirely ...

And Gary Neville? A fantastic overachiever. An average midfielder who became a too-small central defender who, over time, became a top-class full-back. Not through innate talent, but through the attitude, desire and hard work which, ultimately, made him a far more talented player than he could ever have imagined in his teens. That has been a common theme in the tributes from Sir Alex Ferguson, Steve Bruce, Arsene Wenger and many others. As well as that, it is how he regards himself.

Congratulations, Gary Neville, on a great career. You were a world-class overachiever, an example to young footballers everywhere.