THE FATHER AND THE FATHER FIGURE

The Kerrs had started life in Belfast; as a boy, Brian remembers his eyes lighting up when reading about Joe Bambrick scoring six goals for Northern Ireland in 1930.

“Imagine, da, a fellah scoring six goals in a match!” Frankie Kerr peered over his newspaper and told his son that he was the man who laced the ball and brought it to the match.

Brian was 14 when his dad, Frankie, died aged 51 of pneumonia.

All the days they had were now over and there would be no more to come. How many thousands of matches and hours of chats would they miss?

Frankie was a multi-weight six-time national boxing champion, a European semi-finalist; he should have been an Olympian but like Bob Dylan’s Hurricane never liked to talk about it all that much.

He quit at just 22, then became a renowned coach. A born tutor.

The son never got to really know his father but he did absorb so much – meticulous methodology of Trinity training sessions, rigorous application of tactics, human empathy.

Brian Kerr could play football but he was always better at getting others to play. He would become a holistic teacher, like his father, at once able to impart both wisdom and knowledge.

The original ‘Rasher’, Liam Tuohy, the Grandmaster, would become his father figure in football.

Tuohy got him to train the Shamrock Rovers’ youths in 1971; that would begin a relationship which, along with another dear departed colleague, Noel O’Reilly, would see this Holy Trinity helm various Irish youth teams of the 1980s, qualifying for three European Championships, reaching one semi-final, as well as a World Cup.

Loyalty to Tuohy would park the journey, when Jack Charlton bounded into an Elland Road dressing-room, but a decade later he would resume it.

SAINTS ALIVE

Irish international Mick Lawlor also had Kerr as an assistant at Home Farm and Drogheda during this time.

“I became manager and knew instinctively I couldn’t put on training sessions. I went to Liam and said what about Brian? ‘Rasher’ said go for it.

“His attention to detail, enthusiasm and love for the game just oozed out of him. I ended up letting him take the team talks a lot of the time.

“He was that much on the ball. He was pin sharp. We had the club’s best two seasons together. We weren’t that long at Drogheda after before Pat’s came for him.”

Another opportunity in a lifetime of them impossible to refuse

There were many zealots who saved Pat’s from extinction in the early 1990s but the man who led them to a first title in a generation in 1990 was the chief Messianic figure.

Plotting football upsets from his full-time post in a UCD lab, testing yoghurts and breeding rats by day, taking sessions and scouting players by night.

He would mine his first title-winners from nuggets unwanted elsewhere; the second was forged on the fire of near-extinction, during a nomadic existence when their very survival was under threat.

He not only knitted fine footballers together, but forged a team whose friendships would endure a lifetime. Trust and integrity formed the bedrock.

“We all had different individual stories,” says Curtis Fleming. “I was thinking of giving up at 18 but he said he’d play me. And my late mother Mildred said ‘You can trust him.’

“We had a cause and he was the glue that held it together. He was ahead of his time in terms of coaching and planning and I noticed that when I went to England.

“He gave me the foundation for sport, for life. I played for Ireland, became a man and I owe so much of it to Brian.”

MUSICAL YOUTHS

Kerr helmed a golden age for Irish football. Ireland’s only World Cup medal, a bronze in 1997 and, in 1998, two European titles at U-16 and U-18 level, unleashing a generational glut of 21st century talent.

Whether playing Mozart to calm pre-match nerves or an impromptu sing-song with O’Reilly by the pool, he captured both the hearts and minds of young men who would shock the world.