IT’S ALMOST FOUR years to the day since Stephen Carr announced his retirement from football for the second and final time.
The Dubliner misses the thrill of matchday and the dressing room banter more than anything else, but he has still managed to detach himself almost entirely from the game he once played with such passion.
Making the transition to ‘ex-player’ can be notoriously difficult, but Carr has seemingly passed this test with flying colours.
Life at the age of 40 is good for the former Ireland international, who now lives in Spain with his family. Since 2010, along with fellow former Birmingham teammates David Bentley and David Murphy, he took a stake in the Marbella-based Sala Group. The ‘La Sala’ venues range from nightclubs, restaurants, bars and beach clubs, and in the years since Carr became a shareholder, the business has thrived, expanding further afield to Gibraltar and Chigwell in recent times.
“The main restaurant ‘La Sala’ has been going for just over five years,” Carr tells The42.
Then we’ve got another restaurant, a nightclub, we’re opening a new beach club this year, so it’s all go, it’s very busy.
“I’ve been a shareholder for quite a while now with a good few other people, footballers and different types.
It’s a completely different thing to what I’m used to, you learn a lot, so it’s been quite interesting. You don’t realise what goes into running a restaurant.”
Though Carr no longer lives and breathes football 24/7, he still watches it “a bit” and is especially interested if one of his former teams is playing. He has been particularly impressed with Tottenham’s “very exciting” team.
“I think (Mauricio Pochettino) is a top manager,” he says. “He gets us playing great football.
I don’t know whether they’ll (win the league), it’s going to be quite tough for them because Chelsea are strong.
“But it would be amazing, with the history of that club, to win the title in their last year at White Hart Lane.”
Carr is reluctant, however, to agree with his former boss at Newcastle Graeme Souness by calling them the best Tottenham team ever — at least, not yet.
It’s all judged on success at the end of the day. We can all say that it was the best team ever, but success is what makes a top team. It’s getting tougher now because there’s more money being spent.
“I don’t like judging it because I played with some great players — the Sheringhams, the Klinsmanns, the Ferdinands, Dumitrescu, Popescu — they were great players.”
Carr, of course, knows Tottenham better than most, having effectively grown up there.
An avid Manchester United-supporting football fan as a kid, thanks in part to his father, who played in the League of Ireland with Shelbourne, he fell in love with the game from a young age.
“Football was everything for me — I didn’t care about anything else,” he says.
Most players who end up becoming professional I think have to have that dedication to succeed.”
Carr agrees with his former Newcastle and Ireland teammate, Damien Duff, who last year suggested young Irish players are no longer as obsessed with football as they were when he was coming through the ranks.
I read Duffer’s piece and everything he’s saying is 100% right,” Carr adds. “Whether that’s the kids’ fault, the parents’ fault, society… It’s just different now, with social media, they’re into different things. It’s sad really, because I think you miss out by not being able to just come home and go out for hours. But can you do that? People don’t think their kids are safe anymore.
“There are loads of things that pile into that. It is sad and I think you can get that in Ireland, Liverpool, Manchester or London. It just doesn’t happen anymore.”
Carr, like many of his contemporaries, is also not overly keen on the academy system in England.
Academies were set up to make it better,” he says. “I’m sure there are elements that make it better, but there are also elements that just take away the rawness of being a kid playing football.
“I don’t think I would have liked being in an academy at 13, being told what to do. Whether it makes them better, maybe, only time will tell. But I just think it’s too protected now. Young kids and youth teams, they’re out of touch with the reality.”
Carr himself was a product of the Dublin schoolboy system, playing for Trinity Boys, St Kevin’s and Stella Maris as a midfielder rather than right-back, where he would spend the majority of his professional career.
In the league I played in, the Cherry Orchards and the Belvederes were all very strong. I don’t know what it’s like as much now. But in those days, they were good teams and if anyone was decent, you’d get sent away to different clubs (in England). Loads of players went on trial. It’s easy to send a kid on trial. It doesn’t cost much money and it’s not a gamble for them.
“I would have been one of the decent players. I wouldn’t have been one of the most gifted. But I knew what my capabilities were and I’d work hard at them.”
It was of survival of the fittest even then, as Irish youngsters invariably struggled with homesickness among other issues when sent to try their luck at various British clubs, and Carr was no exception.
It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you say, it’s hard. I didn’t enjoy it. It was hell. You’re going away from your friends and family to a different family that you’ve never known. You have to adapt to their ways, you’re training twice a day. But for me, I don’t know, I didn’t have anything else and I just thought… I loved training, I loved playing.”
Even back then, many Irish teenagers of a similar level of talent to Carr returned home dejected with their dreams of becoming professional footballers harshly ended before they had really begun.
Carr, who turned down Arsenal in favour of a move to Tottenham in 1991, says that as well as a degree of mental toughness, Irish youngsters need “that little bit of luck” to succeed.
20-year-old Ryan Manning is a prime example in more recent times. The Irish midfielder was being strongly linked with a QPR exit earlier this season without having played a minute of action since joining from Galway United. But when Ian Holloway replaced Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink as manager midway through the campaign, Manning suddenly found himself playing first-team football and is now being linked with a move to the Premier League.
Like Manning, Carr was fortunate enough to have a manager that showed faith in him from a young age.
The Donaghmede native was 17 years and 28 days old when he made his Premier League debut for Ossie Ardiles’ Tottenham, playing the first 45 minutes of their 2-2 draw with Ipswich on 26 September 1993.
Ossie Ardiles really liked me,” Carr recalls. “He got me training with the first team and gave me a chance. But there were other kids who never got that chance. You need a manager to take a shine to you. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. Kids can be so close between making it and not making it.
“That’s why it’s so tough for the kids that go across — I don’t know how much they realise it, but the parents and everyone sees the glam. I’d love to know the percentage (of Irish players who make it), it must be really low. That’s probably where the academies come into play now — they’re better educated.
When I was doing it, you’d have a lesson on a Monday. You’d have to go to school for an hour, and that was it. As you can imagine, a group of young lads, they’re just sitting there doing nothing. That was the education that you had to fall back on.
“It is a big gamble, you could go back to nothing. Then what do you do? It’s quite a reality check. I’ve known loads who went back (to Ireland).”
For some players, debuting in the Premier League at 17 would be a nerve-racking experience, but Carr insists he treated the situation in a relatively casual manner, while playing alongside the likes of Gary Mabbutt, Teddy Sheringham, Sol Campbell, Jason Dozzell and Gordon Durie.
I had a manager whose only piece of advice was ‘do not be afraid to make a mistake’.
“(It’s great) for a kid to go out on their debut and think: ‘you know what, he’s giving me the freedom to think — don’t worry about it, if you make a mistake it’s fine’.
And I didn’t find it too quick or anything. I just treated it as another game. I think that’s what youth does to you. It allows you to do that and not to think.
“For a young player, it was just total football, express yourself and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It’s a great philosophy.
“He had Steve Perryman as an assistant. He was quite a tough player and was more defensive. He played 500 games and was a legend at Tottenham. They had that battle because Steve would have liked to do more defensive work. But that’s not Ossie, he was pure attacking football. That’s how his teams played.”
Carr did not get any more chances in the league under Ardiles after the Ipswich game, and it wasn’t too long before the Spurs legend was shown the door at White Hart Lane, after the team’s underwhelming start to the 1994-95 campaign was exacerbated by an embarrassing 3-0 loss to Notts County in the League Cup.
More opportunities would follow for the Irish youngster under Ardiles’ replacement Gerry Francis. But it was through another player’s misfortune that Carr got the chance to establish himself as a first-team regular. A leg break suffered by first-choice right-back Dean Austin enabled Carr to play a run of games, featuring 26 times in the 1996-97 season and rarely looking back from there.
Down the road at Arsenal, Arsene Wenger had only just arrived and was slowly beginning to revolutionise English football. By then, however, a booze culture was still prevalent in the game in Britain, and as a young man with the world at his feet, Carr unsurprisingly was not immune to London’s temptations.
You loved having a drink after a game, I’m not going to lie. It’s a complete balance. I think every young player probably did drink too much then compared to what it is now.
“But the strictness wasn’t there. The pace of the game probably wasn’t there. You could get away with a bit more. You weren’t scrutinised as much.
But now, it’s so different. Especially now when they’re wealthy, it’s very hard to say to a young kid not to get distracted a bit — it’s just natural. It’s just keeping it in line because it can destroy you.
“You just need good people around you, a good agent, family to always keep you grounded. The most important thing is to stay grounded and not be flash and an idiot. Don’t lose the sense of where you’ve come from.”
Carr was firmly established as a regular by the 1997-98 campaign, featuring in all 38 of Tottenham’s matches. Nonetheless, the team performed poorly, finishing just four points above the relegation zone during Swiss coach Christian Gross’ brief, ill-fated reign as manager.
It was only when ex-Arsenal boss George Graham took over that the team’s performances started to improve, with Carr citing the Scottish boss one of the biggest influences of his career, particularly in helping to develop the defensive side of the Irishman’s game.
With Graham at the helm, Spurs also won a rare trophy, with Carr playing the full 90 minutes, as Allan Nielsen’s last-minute goal handed them a 1-0 win over Martin O’Neill’s Leicester in the 1999 League Cup final.
Despite this success, however, many of the Tottenham faithful never fully warmed to Graham owing to his past allegiances with arch-rivals Arsenal.
In April 2001, the Scot had been replaced by Tottenham legend Glenn Hoddle, who only two years previously had lost his job as England coach in infamous circumstances. The training sessions under Hoddle, Carr says, were among the best he had ever experienced.
What you saw on the pitch, that’s what training was. It was fast, quick, but technical. Even then he could still play the games and take the piss, he was unbelievable.
“Glenn was pure football, but probably not as blasé as Ossie. Ossie had just two defenders there: ‘It’s your job to defend, the rest of you go and attack.’
“There were some great managers and football played there, but Tottenham’s always been known for that.”
It was around the late 1990s and early 2000s period that Carr was playing what he admits now was the best football of his career. He featured in the Premier League PFA Team of the Year twice – 2000–01 and 2002–03. He was also the Tottenham Hotspur Members Club Player of the Year in both 1999 and 2000.
The full-back’s form was so good that rumours of a potential move to Manchester United began to circulate. However, all of a sudden, disaster struck. Carr picked up a serious knee injury that ruled him out for 14 months. He missed the entirety of the 2001–02 season as well as the World Cup the following summer, having played regularly for Mick McCarthy’s side prior to the setback.
With hindsight, Carr admits, he could have been wiser during this difficult period.
I played with a bad knee for eight months,” he explains. “To my own downfall a bit in the end, because then I ended up being out for too long.
“I played with that because I was playing well, but then to get my knee going, I’d hobble out to warm up, I’d play, it was fine and then I’d leave it.
I ended up being out injured for 14 months — it should have been less, errors were made with my rehab. Then I missed the World Cup because of it. But that’s life, it wasn’t meant to be.
“There are little things you can learn. With the foreigners and the way it is now, you don’t play with (injuries). But years ago, you did, you just kept playing and you didn’t think of the damage you were doing.
I was enjoying playing and I was playing well, so I thought ‘just keep going’.”
He continues: “I was meant to be out for four-to-six months. That’s what was most frustrating. If you’re told you’re out for 14 months, you train, you get your head right for it. It takes time.
But because there was a World Cup coming up and I had to go back to America – they said ‘you need to rest, you might be getting an operation again,’ then (the psychological strain) kicks in.
“You have to go through your whole rehab again, it’s not good for anybody in any sport. To not be able to do what you want to do.
You sit there and watch the team do well or not do well. You’re jealous one way and the other, you’re thinking: ‘Shit, they’re not doing well.’”
Carr returned in the 2002-03 campaign and picked up where he left with Spurs. And while the attacking football often thrilled spectators at White Hart Lane, the results increasingly failed to match the excitement levels.
David Pleat replaced Hoddle as caretaker boss the following season. Carr’s contract was running down at this point, and with Sol Campbell’s controversial free transfer to Arsenal fresh in the memory, the club was determined not to lose another one of its stars.
Most likely in part intended as a conciliatory measure, one of Pleat’s first acts was to make Carr club captain in the absence of the injured first-choice skipper Jamie Redknapp.
The situation did not improve under the new manager, though, and Pleat’s reign is probably best remembered for a humiliating loss to Man City in the FA Cup. Spurs had been 3-0 up at White Hart Lane by half-time with Joey Barton’s red card adding to the visitors’ woe. Yet somehow, a mixture of inspired City resilience and pure footballing incompetence from the hosts enabled Kevin Keegan’s side to earn a miraculous 4-3 victory.
For Carr, it was one of the low points of his career but also one of the best nights of his life. Hours after that painful defeat, he was in hospital to witness the birth of his child.
“I could have gone at half-time,” he remarks ruefully. “It was shocking and was probably typical of what Tottenham got a reputation for years ago.
Just thinking ‘this is easy, this is fine,’ but football changes very quickly as we found out that night.
“Then I get the high of my kid being born in the middle of the night. It was a really weird one.
Life is strange the way it works out, but yeah, I wished I had gone at half-time. When kids come along, you’ve a completely different responsibility, a different outlook, people need you.
“But you still wake up to the reality of: ‘What the hell?’ That (Man City game) gets re-played. People remember that — it sticks with you.
It’s not nice being part of any failure, it can be embarrassing, and that was very embarrassing.”
Despite having been awarded the captaincy, Carr did indeed leave Tottenham at the end of that season, joining Newcastle in a £2 million deal and waving goodbye to the club where he had spent 12 years of his life, playing more than 200 games in the process.
At the time, it appeared to be a significant step up. Carr was joining a side that, under Bobby Robson, had finished the previous Premier League season in fifth — nine places above Spurs.
Tottenham weren’t spending a lot then. My contract had another year and it was getting to a point with me where I didn’t think I was moving on.
” I didn’t see it happening the way I wanted it. So I thought: ‘You know what, I’ll take a gamble.’
It’s not easy, because I was so comfortable there. You just know everything, how it works, the whole club. You get on well with the fans and then you leave. I know fans hammer you for that, but there was nothing financial about it.
“Things could have changed for me at the club, but I thought my time was up to go and move on.
“Newcastle is a massive club, not in terms of success, but for fanbase. There was the stadium, great managers, the great players they always attracted. I had an opportunity to go there and I went.”
Unfortunately for Carr, the move didn’t really worked out as planned. He joined during a difficult period for the Magpies, while his time there was consistently interrupted by injuries.
I’d regard it as a failure for different reasons. I was injured four and a half months into my first season, so I never really felt like I got going.
“There were tough times up there with different managers. Bobby Robson signed me. He went in September. That was part of the reason I was going (to Newcastle), so that was a disappointment for me.
I worked under Glenn Roeder, Graeme Souness, Sam Allardyce. It’s a tough club because they’ve a massive demand (for success) and a full house every week.
“It’s a way of life out there. They go out. Work hard all week. Most have a very ordinary background. And they demand a win. They have a miserable weekend (if that doesn’t happen). They have to wait until the next game.
It’s not like London where you can get lost (in people) and there are multiple teams. It’s a very intense place.”
After four seasons and multiple injury issues, then-Newcastle boss Kevin Keegan decided against renewing Carr’s contract and just five years after being named in the PFA Team of the Year, he was without a club.
Months passed and no one called, though Carr continued to train on his own back in Dublin. By December 2008, he had lost patience and announced his retirement from football.
Nonetheless, the following February, Carr again was the recipient of ‘that little bit of luck,’ which all successful footballers need.
Ian McGuinness, Carr’s former doctor at Newcastle, had moved to Birmingham and subsequently recommended the free agent to manager Alex McLeish. That connection led to Carr being offered a trial and ultimately signing with the Championship club.
Nevertheless, his time out of football had been a sobering reminder to the Dubliner that football stardom was finite.
Whether people thought ‘he’s injury prone, he’s too much of a gamble, he never got enough of an opportunity,’ I don’t know what went on. Whether someone said something, I don’t know.
“I didn’t get a contract (at Birmingham straight away), I just went on trial, so that was quite different. After playing in the Premier League for that long, to go on trial at Birmingham in the Championship (was strange). At the end of the day that’s the position you’re in, you have to get on with it.”
Carr, however, exceeded expectations at St Andrews. He spent a further four years there, helping the Blues gain promotion to the Premier League and captaining the side to a famous League Cup final victory over Arsenal.
What McLeish had was a group of players that wanted to prove things to people,” he says. “You had me who couldn’t get a contract anywhere else, Barry Ferguson, Lee Bowyer, Ben Foster from United. We had a good team.
“We didn’t win the League Cup because we were better than Arsenal technically. We won it because there were people there who wanted to prove things.”
The experience ultimately turned sour, though, as Carr and his teammates were relegated in the same season “at Tottenham of all places,” having secured an impressive ninth-place finish in the previous Premier League campaign.
He would make a further 20 appearances in the Championship before the mounting injury problems finally got the better of him.
I went to the specialist and I had to reconstruct my knee. I think you know when your time’s up.
“Of course I was gutted. When I came back from injury (initially), I was flying. I felt fit. And then one time it didn’t feel right and my cartilage just disintegrated on me.
It’s not nice (to retire), but I didn’t want to finish the game with a knee that I couldn’t walk with.”
And while the transition into retirement was difficult, it was not as hard as it can be for others.
Football, I learned, I could leave behind,” he says. “If I lost, I’d go home and it’d hurt. But I never needed what went with football. And I think that’s quite an important thing.
“I’ll always miss training with the lads. But I don’t miss the importance footballers feel from people recognising them. It’s nice for anybody to get recognised, but I didn’t need it. And some people need that.
When you finish, you’re the past. It’s gone. New people come up, and others struggle with that. I don’t, I understand it.
“It depends what football is to you. Is it to feel important to other people and people to recognise you, or is it because you love playing and the great rewards that go with it, a great life for your family?
There comes a time where you have to move on. That’s probably why a lot of them need to go into coaching — it keeps them part of it.
“They’re lost without it. But if you’ve other interests like me, you can do something completely different.”
Carr was perceived as a somewhat reluctant interviewee during his playing days, and he always saw himself as immune to some of the more sycophantic elements of football stardom.
I just didn’t have an interest, I didn’t see the big point in it,” he explains. “Of course things can be misconstrued, but it wasn’t that (which put me off).
“I didn’t have an interest in people hearing my opinion or to be on telly. I don’t buy into it that much.
“I’ve done this interview. It’s a different stage. It’s looking back.
I never minded doing one every now and again, but I knew players that were doing it constantly. Do people want to really listen to you all the time? I don’t believe that they do, but maybe I’m wrong.
“I think there is a need for it. Fans are more involved in what is happening behind the scenes, so football has moved on.
But what you used to get years ago, you’d get marks out of 10 in the paper, and you could see what was happening. If you’d done a lot of interviews, you might get better marks — it’s bullshit.
“I remember players would come in and look at the papers and that would change their week, if they didn’t get good marks out of 10. That’s how powerful it is.
There was no point in getting an 8/10 when you knew you were s**t for different reasons. It’s about being honest with yourself.
“You’d look at your manager and he’d decide whether you were good enough. It didn’t matter what everybody said around you.
“That’s all I thought about. Was (the manager) happy? And he told me if I’d done well enough. And that’s the most important thing — not people on the outside, people who were involved in it with me. That was my attitude towards it.”
Despite the aforementioned 2002 World Cup disappointment, some of Carr’s fondest memories came while wearing the green jersey of Ireland — an honour that was bestowed upon him 44 times.
I remember playing Holland away when we were winning 2-0 (in a 2002 World Cup qualifier). That was phenomenal. I remember (Roy) Keano in midfield and (Jason) McAteer scoring a great goal and the atmosphere (was amazing).
“That, and away against France (in a 2006 World Cup qualifier), when we drew 0-0 and should have beat them. I think John O’Shea had a chance in the last five or 10 minutes.
But when you came out there, it was like being at home. Half the Stade de France was Irish. In the French end, there were gangs of them. To have that and the atmosphere, then singing along to the French anthem, the buzz in the stadium was unbelievable.
“We played a practice game the night before every game and I remember Brian Kerr having to stop it. We played the Dubliners against the country boys. We kicked the hell out of each other and I could see him thinking: ‘Shit.’ But it summed up how the players were going to play — the hunger and desire to win. And that’s what we took into that game.
It was an honour to play for my country. I didn’t play enough. There were too many injuries. But just to play was the most important thing because not everybody gets that opportunity.
“There are always bad memories and good memories — you just have to take the good ones.”
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