When I asked Andy Reid if he wanted to do an interview, he was very interested in what we would be talking about.

Reid was always a footballer who had a curiosity that went outside football, but this was more to do with how he wanted to see himself and how, by extension, he wanted others to see him.

Reid worked with some of the biggest names in football. He could do well on the circuit, when the circuit returns, delivering stories about Giovanni Trapattoni and Roy Keane. He can tell those anecdotes, but he is also smart enough to know that if you spend your time telling stories about how it once was then people might be less interested in how you want it to be.

They said that players who played under Alan Ball used to have a bet on how long it would take for him to mention that he won the World Cup in 1966, while some managers can never forget their talents and use them to diminish and highlight the failings of their own players.

Reid is working at the club where it began for him, Nottingham Forest, coaching the U-23 sides and planning a future which he hopes will involve coaching at the highest level.

When he looks back on his career, it is in terms of how the footballer of the future could progress.

Reid has been conscious, perhaps too conscious at times, that he doesn’t want to be that guy, the ex pro who lives his life looking backwards. A reputation as a player can help, he says, but only briefly.

“It’s a very, very short space that that lasts for. You have to get out of the training pitch and actually show them that you know how to coach,” he says. “You have to show them that you know how to deal with people. The reputation thing doesn’t last for very long. I think we’ve probably seen that with plenty of experienced players and top level players who haven’t made it as a coach.”

There have been moments when he has hesitated to demonstrate how things should be done for fear that he would look like that old pro when he wants to think like a coach and ask himself how would a coach deliver the message.

“I’m very, very conscious that it’s not my career anymore, that it’s the young players’ career,” he says.

As a player, it was sometimes necessary to be selfish but “as a coach, you have to get your head round the whole team. You’re not just looking after yourself anymore”, he says.

To connect, you have to believe

The important thing he believes is to connect with the players and, in a more important sense, to believe in them. The name he comes back to throughout the conversation is Brian Kerr, who managed the Ireland sides he had – particularly the underage teams which won European Championships – with a sorcery that combined modern methods with an innate understanding of every player.

When Kerr became manager of the senior Ireland team, there were some in the squad who complained about the long team meetings and video analysis, elements that are accepted today, but his departure was felt for a decade in terms of player development, Reid believes, and even longer in changing a culture.

“We were having video meetings for our U-16 European Championships, you know. There were first teams in in the UK at the time, really high level first teams that weren’t having video meetings. And we were having them at the U-16 European Championships. [Brian] was very, very ahead of his time.”

But what Kerr and his assistant, the late Noel O’Reilly, had more than anything was an insight into human nature. “The people skills that they had, people wanted to play for him,” he says, adding that Kerr and O’Reilly would be observant to the players’ moods and knew how they worked.

“He knew how to get the best out of players. He understood people. He understood how players thought. He understood the thought process that they were going through. He understood how to get that connection with the player. And not everybody will be treated the same, You’d have to treat somebody a little bit different to how he’s treated. You might have to treat him a little bit different. He’s all right left alone, because he wants to be left alone. He needs an arm around, he’s looking a little bit down. ‘Noel, go over and see what’s wrong with Reidy, he’s looking a little bit down today. We need him to play tomorrow. Get him up’.  Noel would come over to me, talk to me about Bob Dylan for a little bit. Come back over. ‘Brian, yeah, Andy’s good to go’. Play the next day, go out and hopefully win the game. But he understood that because he was always watching and he always took everything in and I think that was his super strength.”

When Ireland went to Paris to play France in 2004, they came away with a scoreless draw and could have won the game if John O’Shea had taken a simple chance.

Andy Reid takes on Mikael Silvestre in the Stade de France in 2004. Pic: Brendan Moran/SPORTSFILE

But Reid remembers Kerr’s decision to send him on when Clinton Morrison got injured. Kerr could have gone with an orthodox forward – “the easy thing to do would have been to send a big fella on” – but Kerr sent for Reid instead because he wanted somebody to get hold of the ball and play, “not just kind of booming it all over the place and fighting for it”.

Ireland did that back then and they could have done it for longer if another orthodoxy hadn’t taken control. Ireland didn’t have the players, this idea went, during the time of Trapattoni and Martin O’Neill. And if they did have the players, those like Reid or Wes Hoolahan, there was too much of a downside in selecting them. It is an orthodoxy which has attached itself to Stephen Kenny too who is criticised for trying to get his players to play football when the more valid criticism might be that, so far, this Ireland team aren’t playing any.

Ireland suffered for a long time because of the decision to dispense with Kerr, Reid says, and not just at senior level.

“I think the underage age stuff as well. I think we probably wasted 10 years from the underage stuff from the time Brian left the FAI.  Having been involved in it [Reid was coach of the Irish U-18s before moving to Forest last year] and knowing the people involved in it now, it’s really come back strong.,” he says.

“In the last six or seven years, the quality has really really gone up with the players, the coaching, the structure, the setup, how professional it is. It really has gone up. But from the time that Brian left for 10 to 12 years, I don’t think we got a player through, it just absolutely died a death. So that’s Brian stepping away from the youth side of it into the senior set up and then when Brian leaves, there’s a massive hole there and nobody filled it for a helluva long time. And we suffer the consequences of that.

“People say, ‘where are the young players?’ and yes they’re coming through now. But they weren’t coming through, because they weren’t nurtured, because the setup wasn’t nurtured the way the way it should have been and we missed out on a lot of players and we’re feeling the effects of it really long term. And they’re the things that that we lost when Brian stepped away.”

A footballing philosophy

The wilderness years saw Reid exiled from Trapattoni’s squad and looked upon as a curious example of Ireland’s misguided idea that they could play football.

Reid believes football is a balance. He wants to stretch the play with his forwards running behind defenders and creating space for midfielders, but that is still a long way for Ireland got to under Trapattoni.

Reid has worked with Stephen Kenny and thinks he is right to be thinking ambitiously, even if he needs to win matches in the short term and maybe not just against Andorra as Ireland did on Thursday.

“I totally understand where he’s coming from. We need to get away from the idea that we can’t play out from the back. In my opinion, if it’s my game plan, I’m mixing it up, there’s a little bit of both in there. I get it in the respect that we were brainwashed for too long into people telling us, ‘No we don’t have the players to do that.’ What do you mean we don’t have the players to do that? Some of the players that we’ve had come through, some absolutely phenomenal technically gifted players that were just pushed to one side and said, ‘No we can’t do that, we’re not good enough, right – boom the ball long’. It’s disrespectful and it’s always been disrespectful.”

A manager needs to win, he believes, but a manager has to build a philosophy or ideally a philosophy is there for him.

“I found it a little bit disconcerting that there wasn’t a philosophy that ran through. At Forest, we’ve got a syllabus document, there’s moments in a game. It’s a big wheel, where you’ve got all different types of things that might happen in a game,” he says.

“All the things that we want to be good at as an academy that run all the way through. I know there’s been talk about developing it. It probably comes from the top and Stephen will want to work on developing something like that. I think the FAI needs something like that and I think they will be moving towards something like that. It is more difficult to do for international football because with club football you get to work with the players every single day so you can impose your philosophy on them every single day.

“You get limited time at international football, so it will have to look different but I do think it’s needed so there’s a style of play. I think that’s what Stephen’s trying to develop at the moment. If he can get some short term success and pick up a few results, it just gives us time to blood some of these young players. There are some really good young players coming through, look at Jason Knight, Adam Idah, Jason Mulumby. People like that coming through, Andrew Omobamidele, who I had on one of my under 18 squads there not too long ago, fantastic player, really, really good promising players. If you can have a bit of time to bed them in, to really nurture them, build their style of play, build their philosophy over the next couple of years, I would be very, very hopeful that we will get somewhere where we would have some sort of success.”

Stephen Kenny needs a time and the FAI need to know where they want to go if the same boom and bust cycle or – in Ireland’s case – bust and bust cycle isn’t repeated.

Those baffling days under Trapattoni when he was left out following an incident in a hotel bar in Wiesbaden when the manager tried to get him and some other players to go to bed while Reid played guitar is a long time ago even if it removed Reid from the international stage in his prime.

“I don’t think about it. It doesn’t really bother me, it doesn’t really affect me. I know how I behaved, I know what I’ve done. And I firmly stand behind, as you know, because me and you have spoken about it loads of times. It’s quite interesting, because I think some bits have come out about what it actually was like around that time and I think playing a couple of songs on the guitar was definitely not the worst thing that was going on around then,” he says.

“I honestly don’t give it too much time. I would like to think that I treat my players with the respect that they deserve.  I’d like to think that I don’t just treat them as football players, but treat them as good human beings as well. They’ve got families, they’ve got parents, they’ve got brothers and sisters and they deserve respect and I will always try to treat my players with the respect that they deserve.”

As somebody who has observed the media and been in the middle of those kind of issues, I wondered what he felt about Naomi Osaka’s problems. Reid has had his own issues when his parents died within eight months of each other after his retirement from playing which was a dark time for him.

“I think there’s the media, but I also think the social media side of things. You have to be really, really careful with what you put up. I think I’m well placed to speak to my players because I work in the media. I have a lot of contacts in the media and have worked in a lot of different types of media, with the telly, with the shows that we’ve done and I do quite a bit of radio work now. So I’m well positioned to kind of talk to them about the dos and don’ts and where it can be advantageous and where it’s best to probably stay away from it,” he says.

“I’m probably in as good a headspace as I’ve ever been throughout my whole life at the moment. My life feels really, really settled at the moment. My family are my absolute rock. I’m getting married next week. I honestly feel as content in life as I probably ever have been. Which if I think back probably three or four years ago, not long after I finished, I probably would have struggled to see myself in this place and in this frame of mind. I think they’re the things that I get across to the players that there’s help, we can help you. You can help yourself, you don’t have to suffer. We know a lot more about this than what we did 20 years ago, because if I had been what happened to me four years ago, if that had happened to me 20 years ago when I was playing, there was that stigma attached, when people probably didn’t know how to deal with much, would I have come out the other side of it so well? Would I have come out the other side of it at all? I don’t know.”

While his family, his fiancee Candice and his two children at home and his grown up daughter Saoirse have been the reason for that, coaching has enthused him too. Reid loves coaching and he wants to coach at as high a level as he can. His players will test him and he expects that.

Andy Reid coaching at Nottingham Forest

“I think they know more now and I think they want to test you. They want to see if you know what you’re talking about, and rightly so because I’d have done exactly the same and I did. I did it throughout my career when a manager was up there, and he was talking. ’Do you really know what we’re doing here? Are you just winging it?’ So players ask questions. And I love when players ask questions, because I’ve got to be on my toes. Because they cop on pretty quickly and say he doesn’t know what to do. And I don’t want that ever to be said about me.”