When it comes to Cole Palmer, a montage of magical moments spring to Brian Barry-Murphy’s mind, but one episode, a little more than four years ago, particularly sticks. Barry-Murphy was in charge of Manchester City’s under-21s on the evening when Palmer – fresh from replacing Bernardo Silva as an 89th-minute substitute in a 2-0 Premier League win against Burnley – strolled across the bridge at the Etihad Campus and reported for duty at the academy stadium, scoring a sensational hat-trick in a 5-0 victory over Leicester.
It is a story Barry-Murphy, now in charge of the League One leaders, Cardiff, recounts given Palmer could be in the opposition team when Chelsea visit in the Carabao Cup quarter-finals on Tuesday. “He said to Pep [Guardiola] and [his former assistant] Rodolfo Borrell the day before the game: ‘There’s an under-21 game tomorrow night, if I don’t get on, can I play?’” Barry-Murphy says with a smile.
“There’s a picture of him waiting to come on [against Burnley] and turning to Guardiola: ‘Can I still go and play?’ A lot of players would view coming back to the under-21s as a drop down. But he just wanted to play.
“So many times I saw him FaceTime his family and friends, telling them what he was going to do and, more often than not, he would do it. In those games, he would pick up the ball and go past five, six players. He made me look like a really good coach.
“When I first went into Manchester City it was like the Harlem Globetrotters: Palmer, [Roméo] Lavia, [James] McAtee, Oscar Bobb, Liam Delap … my first game in charge of the under-21s, I remember looking around the dressing room thinking: these guys are worth zillions. You have to coach them in a way that makes them believe in what you’re going to say and do.”
Barry-Murphy succeeded Enzo Maresca in 2021, when the Italian left for Parma, but worked closely when Maresca returned to join City’s first-team staff for 2022-23, the season they won the Champions League for the first time and completed a historic treble. Around this time last year Barry-Murphy visited Chelsea to catch up with Maresca and his assistant Danny Walker, whom the Cardiff head coach worked alongside when with City’s under-21s.
“I feel as if I know Enzo really well,” he says. “I replaced Enzo, but when he came back to work with Pep during those 12 months we spent a lot of time together and I watched them coach a lot. When you work in an environment like that with such a strong figurehead it can be quite intimidating to coach and give your opinion because of who it is, but he [Maresca] was willing to share strong opinions with the boss and Pep loves that.
“It is not always easy to do. At a place like City you can stay in the background for 10, 15 years, but Mikel [Arteta] left to test himself, Enzo wanted to do the same, and I looked at those guys as role models. You can stay, but Pep was always pretty strong on ‘keep pushing’ and look for different things. That’s probably why he’s so respectful of Mikel and Enzo.”
Barry-Murphy decided to leave City last year and in the summer, after six months assisting Ruud van Nistelrooy at Leicester, he returned to the frontline with Cardiff. Of his decision to leave City and Guardiola, he says: “I’d been there for enough time to learn so much from him, but in the last six months of my last season I felt like I had been doing the same thing for quite a while.
“While every single day when you go into work with a guy like him you’ll learn something new, for me it wasn’t enough because I wanted to see if I could put my ideas to the test again and go and work somewhere else. Essentially, I looked for the thrill of being tested.”
The links between Barry-Murphy and Chelsea do not stop there. At City, he worked with Lavia and Delap, while he signed Robert Sánchez on loan from Brighton when in charge of Rochdale, his first managerial post. “He was a 6ft 5in goalkeeper that came for every cross in the world and, as you can imagine, some were really successful and some weren’t, but he had the personality to keep on coming.”
The Chelsea loanee Omari Kellyman, a scorer in Cardiff’s 4-3 win against Doncaster on Saturday, is ineligible to face his parent club. Then there is Joe Shields, now Chelsea’s co-director of recruitment and talent, who together with Jason Wilcox, now director of football at Manchester United, convinced Barry-Murphy to leave a first-team setup for City’s development squad. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them … they were the ones who believed in me when I was just another coach in League One. I wasn’t sure how long Pep would stay: ‘If I don’t take this, I might not get the chance to work with him again.’”
Barry-Murphy grew up in Cork, his father, Jimmy, a Gaelic sports legend. As a kid, Barry-Murphy overheard people whispering “that’s Jimmy’s son” and went to the same school as the former Ireland rugby union captain Ronan O’Gara, now the head coach of La Rochelle. “They told us from a very young age: ‘You have to concentrate on your education because nobody becomes a professional sportsman.’ O’Gara was always someone who thought: ‘What they’re telling us isn’t automatically right. We can do things people don’t think we can do.’
“We speak a lot about it now. I love speaking to O’Gara. He is very straight down the middle – if you ask him what you think something should look like or be, he will tell you in about 1.5 seconds. That has caused him his own problems … I’ve just been checking his disciplinary record in the French league … terrible.”
The 47-year-old, a proud Irishman, led a mini-revolution at Rochdale. He introduced videos of training on the television screens in the canteen and overhauled the playing style. Detailed sessions quickly convinced veteran players of his managerial credentials. Barry-Murphy is emotionally intelligent, too. He was so taken aback by No Sad Faces, a poem Aaron Wilbraham, one of his former players, read at his mother’s funeral, which Barry-Murphy attended, that he pinned it up on the dressing room wall. He was touched by his former teammate Joe Thompson’s fight with cancer and wears a wristband Thompson’s family shared with Rochdale with the motto: “Don’t live life to survive. Live life to thrive.”
He acknowledges he was guilty of overplaying at Rochdale. “I had what I hoped would be a healthy obsession with giving players the feeling of being a possession-based team, something I always wanted throughout my playing career but didn’t always have,” he says, fresh from a run around the Vale Resort in Glamorgan, home to Cardiff’s training base.
“Looking back, because I was so obsessed with that way of playing, there were definitely games where we overdid it, huge possession stats, but not always as productive as we should have been.
“Guardiola would always say: ‘Remember where you’ve come from, our teams represent who we are.’ I’m from Cork representing Cardiff now and there’s a Celtic correlation there where you have to display the values of the people watching the games. If we rocked up at the Cardiff City Stadium and there was too much tiki-taka, the locals wouldn’t be having it. We have to always represent what they want to see. It’s a kind of agreement. We try our best.”
Saturdays usually mean business, but Sundays are usually reserved for adventures and pancakes with his wife, the broadcaster Sarah-Jane Crawford, and their daughters, aged five and four.
“Have you been to Barry? My daughters love that place,” he says. “The further west you go, there are beach towns and inland, into the valleys, is kind of like a throwback to what I associate with rural Ireland. Here it is all associated with mining. Visiting the Big Pit [coal museum] is on our to-do list.
“My daughters learn lots of interesting things at school about bouncing back from disappointment. They keep reminding me of the power of resilience. It is in the new school syllabus, managing emotion, marvellous mistakes. They see every mistake or setback as a joyous experience to overcome. Stuff I never had when I was younger. Sounds good, huh? I can use it with the players here.”
