Terry Butcher’s first match in charge of FC Sydney came in the opening game of the Pre-Season Cup against Queensland Roar last month. During the warm-up at Carrara stadium, one of the club’s medical staff anxiously approached him. “Zdrilic has got a cork,” he said to the manager gravely. “A cork?” Butcher responded incredulously. “He’s been drinking during the warm-up! He sounds like my kind of player.”
In Australia, a dead leg is referred to as a cork and after injuring himself pre-match, David Zdrilic, the former Aberdeen striker, had to sit out the 2-1 victory to heal his leg. Butcher, though, enthusiastically tells the story with a chuckle, embellishing the reality with his own droll sense of humour and so poking fun at himself in the process.
As he acknowledges in his autobiography, there are two sides to his personality: Dr Jekyll, a man of conservative values who watches Rumpole of the Bailey and keeps his office and home obsessively neat; and My Hyde, who kicked a fire door at Easter Road, sending the lock flying past assistant manager Maurice Malpas’s ear, and who was so enraged after an Ipswich game that he put his leg through the wall (up to his thigh) at Upton Park. Dr Jekyll has been in Australia for three months, and six games; Mr Hyde has yet to emerge.
“There’s not been any need to kick water bottles around,” Butcher laughs gruffly. “They haven’t pushed me yet to the extremes. They’ve treated me very well and they’re getting used to my sense of humour. There have been no confrontations or histrionics, but there’s plenty of time and I’m sure they’ll happen.”
In May, Butcher was named successor to Pierre Littbarski, the former German international who guided Sydney to last season’s inaugural A-League title. Some in the local media questioned why an Australian was not appointed, while others warned of the introduction of a typical British long-ball game, yet relationships are beginning to find a truer shape.
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Butcher is an earnest individual, free of guile, and his honest and earthy wit were cherished in Scotland. He has made a favourable impression in Sydney, revealing the planes of his character to a nation that knew only a one-dimensional outline: the former England captain who spilt blood for his country, the former Motherwell manager. And a bloody Pom, too. In response, Australia is unveiling its nature to him. “You have to turn quite a way into the back pages to get to the football section,” he says. “Rugby league and rugby union are the biggest sports, then Aussie Rules. Cricket and football will be the main sports in the summer, especially with the Ashes coming [in November], although I’m not looking forward to that because England will get absolutely hammered out here, they’re ready for them.”
“They have these biscuits called Tim Tams. They’re like Penguins. My son keeps them in the fridge”
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ROSE BAY is a coastal suburb of Sydney, only a 25-minute walk from Bondi Beach and one of the few places in the city where you can see views of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge together. It is here that Butcher, his wife, Rita, and one of their three sons, Ed, are growing into their new lives. They have been on an open-top bus tour of the city, they’ve eaten in the restaurants around the Opera House and they’ve taken the ferry on a Sunday to the botanical gardens.
Butcher twice played in Australia for England, and he flew out to Sydney to look round the city and Aussie stadium before accepting the manager’s job, but it is essentially a new place to him. He had lived in Scotland for the majority of the last 10 years, and such an upheaval can be unnerving. Yet several voices are more reassuring than one and this move has been as much for his family.
“The social life is incredible,” he enthuses. “One of the first things we got was a barbecue. I’m practically a certified Australian now that I’ve got one. I have to say, it’s the best barbecue I’ve ever owned.There are barbecue shops out here, it’s incredible. There are some lovely little subtle changes. I mean, Woolworths is a supermarket here, whereas at home you buy your pic’n’mix there.”
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Throughout Butcher’s autobiography, he finds a handle to his recollections in food, revealing meals with an insatiable relish. So we learn that as a boy he once ate 13 Yorkshire puddings at one sitting (seven or eight for dinner and the rest, with jam, for dessert), and that he and Rita had their wedding meal (sirloin steak and chips) at Lowestoft golf club. He still connects with his surroundings through the food he encounters. “The meat and sea food here is phenomenal,” he adds excitedly. “We bought two dozen huge tiger prawns for something like A$7.50 £3. You just put them on the barbecue and then two minutes later you’ve got a fantastic meal. That blows your mind.”
There is a sense of invigoration to him, as though at 47 he has undergone a renewal. When Eric Black left Motherwell four years ago and Butcher, his assistant, replaced him, he found a form of redemption, having been sacked as manager at Coventry and Sunderland. Butcher took Motherwell to the CIS Cup final and two top-six finishes in the Premierleague, each time over-stretching his resources, and perhaps his time there had reached a natural limit. He also saw the Rangers manager’s job come and go without him ever being seen as a likely candidate to replace Alex McLeish, despite being a former Ibrox captain.
“There would have been no problem staying at Motherwell, it wasn’t a case of having to get out,” he insists. “You don’t often get an opportunity like this and it opens up quite a few moves out here that maybe I’d like to take up in the future.
I like to think Motherwell and I helped each other and I want to do the same at Sydney. It’s a chance to mould the future of football in Australia. It’s a chance to be part of history.”
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“I’ve never met a more crackerjack staff in my life. They’d baffle a psychologist”
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THERE is no transfer market to speak of, no reserve or youth football and no midweek matches. The A-League is the latest incarnation of football’s aspiration to exist in Australia and its first season was considered successful. FC Sydney, the glamour club, attracted an average attendance of 16,000, with Dwight Yorke the star allure. They have been described as Bling FC, with actor Anthony La Paglia — star of US TV show Without A Trace — a shareholder and stories regularly linking the club with signing his childhood friend, Christian Vieri, the former Italian international striker. The family of Frank Lowry, a billionaire who is Australia’s second richest man and also chairman of the Football Federation of Australia, are also stakeholders.
These are new circumstances for Butcher to contend with, for once as a manager he has been thrust to the forefront (Sydney have also been invited into the Asian Champions League). At Fir Park, attention was sporadic and glitz practically anathema. Now, his most significant player also doubles up as a TV star, with Yorke appearing last season as a fitness coach in The Biggest Loser, a reality dieting show. It is as though Butcher has accepted this not just to expose his family to a new existence, but to lay bare himself to more imposing scrutiny. “Sydney are the team everybody wants to beat,” he acknowledges. “It’s because of the hype and being the big city club. People will raise their game against us, like they do against Rangers or Celtic. Having been at Rangers, I’m used to that attitude.”
He describes the standard of the A-League as “easily that of the SPL” and when an Australia squad was selected for last weekend’s friendly against Kuwait entirely from home-based players who did not go to the World Cup, Sydney had the highest contribution with eight. “One of my players set up the first goal and another scored the second,” Butcher says proudly.
The A-League is a nascent competition, though, still striving to exist with confident assurance. The best Australian players want to move abroad, so it mostly consists of imports, young players and those approaching retirement. The clubs are limited to squads of 19 and a salary cap of A$1.6m (£640,000), although each team is allowed one privately-funded player, and Yorke is Sydney’s. Finance remains a frail commodity, with Sydney posting a lost last season of A$5.5m (£2.2m). “No club in the league made a profit,” reveals Ray Gatt, a sports writer with The Australian newspaper. “Most copped heavy losses and they are expected to lose heavily again this season. The FFA had to bail out several clubs.”
These, though, are vague considerations for Butcher; his immediate concerns are more prosaic. He is learning about his own players, the opposition, and even the peculiar demands of training during the cloying heat of the Australian summer. Yet there is familiarity to be found all around him. His assistant is Ian Crook, the former Tottenham and Norwich City midfielder, while Stuart Munro is a coach in Queensland and Ian Ferguson, another former Rangers teammate, is a coach of Central Coast Mariners, Sydney’s first league opponents next Sunday.
“Ian [Crook] is keeping me right,” Butcher says. “And the staff are great, although they’re nutters, completely off the wall. The directors have been very good to me, allowing me to do things that we did at Motherwell, like pre-match meals, suits and ties, player-of-the-week and worst-player-of-the-week awards. There’s one major difference: I might get brown legs instead of wet feet from being ankle deep in puddles. It just makes you happier when the sun’s shining and you’re coaching a top team instead of having to survive.”
“I don’t want to talk about Barney, I’ll break down and cry”
THERE is a pub — The Pyrmont Bridge Hotel in Darling Harbour — where Butcher watches Scottish matches live and he regularly talks to Malpas and Betty Pryde, the football secretary at Fir Park, on the phone. His ties to Scotland are inviolable, as is his interest in the SPL. “It’s been a good start, hasn’t it,” he remarks. “All the top teams are dropping points.”
For a brief moment, he almost sounds wistful. For all that this new existence is invigorating, Butcher clutches onto his past. There are family and friends that he misses, as well as his dog, Barney. “He’s 10 years old and we thought it would be too much for him to bring him out here,” he adds. “I used to love walking him on a Saturday morning.”
Butcher mentioned other avenues that could open up for him in the future, and perhaps success with Sydney might enable a move into international football, possibly with Australia. He will be judged on winning standards, which he was used to as a player, but whatever happens, the fact that it will occur where the game is not as established as Europe doesn’t matter to him. “I don’t care what other people think,” he says. “We just have to win [the title] first. If we do that, I’ll be delighted myself. All I can do is set my own standards.”
On the other side of the globe, away from all he has known, Butcher is attempting to discover more about himself. Moving to Sydney is not a final step, but a new beginning.