Andy Reid interview — February 2013

MORRISSEY caused a bit of a stir last week when posting a photograph of himself and Robbie Keane on his website.
And, according to the former singer with The Smiths, himself and Keane are cousins with relations on Captain’s Road in Crumlin.
It takes a lot for Andy Reid to become lost for words, but this news does the job.
“Morrissey and Robbie? Really? I am a bit jealous, actually, because I love The Smiths. They’re one of my favourite bands,’’ said Reid.
“My Granny and Granddad lived on Captain’s Avenue just around the corner so I wonder if they knew each other.
“The Smiths are up there for me. Morrissey is an incredible songwriter and nobody plays guitar like Johnny Marr.
“Sometimes, when I’m listening to The Smiths, I want to block everything else out and just listen to the guitar lines.”
So, if Reid could be Diego Maradona or Johnny Marr for a day, which would he choose.
“I don’t know. That’s a tough one. A draw?
“Johnny Marr is my favourite guitarist, and Maradona is my favourite footballer.
“I think probably Maradona though.”
The past year and a half has been a sort of homecoming for Reid.
He first set foot in Nottingham at just 16, and spent seven years at Forest.
Reid couldn’t resist the lure of the Premier League when Tottenham came calling in 2005.
He went on to play for Charlton, Sunderland, Sheffield United and Blackpool as well as Spurs.
But on July 1, 2011, he came home, signing as a Nottingham Forest player for the second time.
It was Steve McClaren who brought Reid back to Forest, and there has been quite a turnover of managers since then.
McClaren, Steve Cotterill, Sean O’Driscoll, Alex McLeish and now Billy Davies have all been at the helm.
But Forest are well placed under Davies to make a surge for a play-off spot in the Championship.
They are just four points adrift and have momentum behind them.
“Form wise, we’re as good as anyone over the last three games,’’ said Reid.
“We’ve won two and drawn one of the last three.
“And if anyone saw the game we drew with Bolton, they’d know we should have easily won it. With a bit of luck, we would have.
“We’re in good form, but we’re a few points off at the moment.
“So we’re not looking too far ahead. Just getting ready for each game in turn. Looking at the team directly above us and trying to reel them in as we go along.
“This is a very special place to me. If I can produce performances and help us to get promoted, it would be a dream come true to play in the Premier League with Nottingham Forest.”
Swansea, for one, have shown that promoted clubs can make quite an impact in the Premier League.
“I think the gap is closing. The quality in the Championship has greatly improved over the last four or five years,’’ said Reid.
“That’s been shown with the teams that have gone up.
“I do think that the teams that are promoted carry with them a fair bit of momentum and that carries them through the earlier part of the season.
“I think you see the same thing with the teams that are relegated.
“When they go down, they start to find it a lot more difficult now.
“They’ve been on bad runs, gone down and it’s hard to get going again. We’ve seen that this year with Bolton and Wolves.”
Reid gave an interview in 2011 where he talked of his belief that the next three or four years would showcase the best form of his career.
And he’s more than happy with the way he’s playing.
“I feel I’m producing some of the best stuff that I’ve produced,’’ he said.
“I feel really comfortable here. I’m enjoying my football and I think it’s showing on the pitch.
“I always felt that would happen when I came to this age. Starting to mature, starting to understand the game better than ever.
“I felt this would be a really big period of my career.”
Football has been Reid’s great passion, but it’s not his only one.
Everything from music to literature to history to politics engages him.
And he doesn’t feel this is particularly unusual.
“Footballers do get pigeonholed quite a lot,’’ he said.
“I’ve got plenty of interests outside of football, and I think it’s important that you do have them.
“Football really is so, so important to us and we love it when we play it.
“But you do need things to be able to get away from it and switch off from time to time.
“A lot of players do have interests outside of football. Some really good interests that maybe don’t get picked up on enough.
“It seems to be a lot of the negative stuff gets picked up.
“Over the course of a year, there are maybe 15 or 20 stories of a footballer doing something stupid.
“But think of how many players there are. There are far more who are grounded and looking after their families and helping out with charities.
“Music is one of my big loves. I found it far harder to sing and play music in public than playing football in front of big crowds.
“I feel I’m a good footballer, but I don’t think I’m as good a musician as a footballer.
“I’ve always thought that there’s a link between music and football.
“It’s something that can be inspirational and motivational before games too.
“For me, there’s a link between music and football and, to a lesser extent, with literature and books.”
Reid has a Che Guevara tattoo on his left arm, and one of his heroes is James Connolly, an iconic figure of the Irish left.
“The main reason why I like people like Che Guevara and James Connolly is because it can’t have been easy for them to go to a different country and try to liberate people from a
different country,’’ he said.
“People can fight for their own country because it is their own country.
“But to go and help other people from outside their country. To help them be free because they believe everybody should be free is a massive thing.”
Only a handful of footballers have ever written their autobiography without the use of a ghostwriter, and it’s an idea Reid has toyed with.
“I have thought about it at different times,’’ he said.
“At the moment, it’s not something that I would consider doing.
“I do a bit of writing myself between different bits and pieces, songs and poetry.
“As for writing a book? Maybe I’m not at that stage yet. But who knows, maybe later in my life, it could be something that I could look at.”