From the Anfield almanac to memories of Madrid, a Welsh giant is footloose again

Interview with John Toshack: He has made an impact wherever he has gone since leaving Anfield 25 years ago. Mark MacKenzie meets a manager having time out

In a mock-Gothic castle perched on a windy Umbrian hilltop 100km north of Rome, John Toshack is telling me about his latest job. Torre Alfina is the home of Luciano Gaucci, the former Rome bus driver who made headlines during last year's World Cup when, as owner of Serie A outfit Perugia, he sacked South Korea's Ahn Jung-Hwan for bagging the golden goal that consigned Italian hopes to a long sleep with the fishes. He also happens to be Toshack's new employer. At least for the next 48 hours.

For a quarter of a century after the leaving of Liverpool, the former Wales and Anfield icon, who once published an anthology of his own poetry, has carved out a singular career in European management and, despite a famously idiosyncratic approach to grammar, has managed to make himself understood in Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, French and, most recently, Italian. "I've never had a problem communicating in the dressing room, telling players my plans for the game," he says. "Mind you, I've been in trouble when the fridge has broken down."

But it is not Perugia who have called on the management expertise of the towering Welshman but Gaucci's other club. Catania is a city clinging to the east coast of Sicily by its fingernails, whose football club's hold on the bottom rung of Serie B is more tenuous still. So what is the former two-times manager of Real Madrid doing in this football backwater?

"I don't really think of it as a step down in class," he says, "and I was impressed by Mr Gaucci's plans. Coaching here is an interesting challenge. It's very different from working with the likes of Rivaldo or Raul. The average age of our players is 29 years and eight months, and most seem to have an individual rather than team mentality." Hardly surprising, given most are approaching pensionable age. Catania are currently fifth from bottom – four get relegated – yet Toshack's record of reversing decline allows him an objective take on the Latin sense of melodrama.

"In training recently, Gennaro Iezzo [Catania's goalkeeper] was getting stick from the fans. Suddenly, he throws down his gloves, makes a beeline for one of the supporters and starts clambering over the wire fence, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. I've never seen anything like it. I thought, 'Here we go'."

Catania's home ground is the impressive 21,000-seat Stadio Angelo Massimino, and Toshack concedes working beneath the currently active cone of Etna can be surreal. "When the volcano starts spewing lava into the air, it's an extraordinary spectacle and I've never worked anywhere like it. The Sicilian culture is fascinating, a different world." He checks behind him. "Mind you, you have to wear sunglasses after dark, if you know what I mean."

The Italian press is divided over Toshack's appointment. Some reports suggest it is a stepping stone to eventual control of Perugia, while others believe his arrival signals Gaucci's intention to invest heavily in the Sicilian club.

All of which becomes academic two days later. Catania lose 2-1 to Napoli and the club's chairman, Gaucci's 26-year-old son, Riccardo, vents his frustrations over his manager's team-selection to the press. Toshack considers the public outburst such a slight on his credentials that he resigns. Thus ends the latest remarkable chapter in the tale of the boy who played on the streets of Cardiff in the white shirt of Real Madrid before rising to take charge of the ultimate machine in world club football.

A week after the Catania débâcle, I catch up with him at his house in San Sebastian, home city of Real Sociedad, the Basque club he has managed three times over eight of the past 18 years. Despite walking away from his first Italian job three months into a one-year contract, he is philosophical. "Even if I sign for a year, I always work as if I'm at a club for 10, because it's in their best interests. I may have stuck it out at a bigger club but then public criticism from the chairman just wouldn't happen somewhere like Madrid." Loyalty is an important word in the Toshack lexicon. "If people interfere in my work, I take a stand."

Toshack's playing debut came in 1965, aged 16, part of a Cardiff City squad including John Charles, the greatest Welshman ever to lace a pair of football boots. Charles's stories of life with Juventus in Serie A lit the blue touchpaper under Toshack's imagination – more than can be said for his introduction to coaching.

"When I was 18, I took a coaching badge with John Charles. There were blokes who'd never kicked a ball in their lives but still they wouldn't pass John, which broke my heart. What a waste of all that experience. I'm not sure Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley ever had a coaching badge between them at Liverpool."

The move to Anfield came in 1970 and the influence of Shankly on the young striker had a profound effect. "The basis of everything I've done in coaching, I learned at Liverpool between 1970 and 1978. I've never seen anything to change my mind since. It's paying attention to the small things, what Shanks called the recipe."

It was presumably the recipe Toshack used to get Swansea City cooking after joining as player-manager on 1 March 1978. He took them from the Fourth Division to top of the First in a little over three years; Shankly was prompted to call it the greatest achievement in football since the Second World War."The day I signed, I drove with Emlyn Hughes to watch Swansea play at Rochdale. I'd been with the European Cup-winning side that morning and now I was struggling to even find the ground. After Swansea lost 2-1, Emlyn said, 'You daft bugger, do you have any idea what you're doing?'

"But when I left Liverpool, I had this idea in my head I'd be straight back once I'd got Swansea promoted. It sounds brash, but the mentality I'd learnt at Liverpool meant I never expected it to be different."

But different is how it was. In 1981, Bob Paisley had hinted he would vacate the Anfield manager's seat and Toshack was the obvious replacement. But at a meeting with the Liverpool board, Toshack was crushed when told Paisley had decided to stay on for another season. "Liverpool will always be my team but I felt let down. It was hard to take and something changed after that."

And so, after Swansea came a year with Portugal's Sporting Lisbon (1984), followed by the first instalment of the San Sebastian trilogy in 1985. As English clubs stagnated after exclusion following Heysel, Toshack was acquiring invaluable European knowledge. Proving more than the sum of his burly centre-forward's parts, he was sensitive to Sociedad's fierce Basque traditions, and describes the club's discriminatory policy of refusing to sign non-Basque Spaniards as "a delicate situation".

Further Liverpool offers came in 1992, when Kenny Dalglish resigned, and in 1998, when Roy Evans was looking for an assistant manager. "Roy's a good friend of mine and I'd never been a number two. I thought there were too many grey areas regarding team selection and training. I had other commitments, having just got Besiktas [of Turkey] into the Champions' League for the first time." His decision to decline Anfield's offer proved prescient. Gérard Houllier took the job and Evans left Anfield five months later.

In 1989 came the call from the Bernabeu. "The reality of clubs like Real Madrid is that you don't keep your job if you go five years without a trophy." Or, in Toshack's case, just one. After a rollercoaster of a first season culminated in the La Liga title, he was sacked just 11 games into the following campaign. The smart pesetas said he was the victim of his failure to land the European Cup but he still, understandably, rankles at the parting. "The year before we'd broken the club scoring record with 107 goals in 38 games, and in my 63 games in charge, I'd lost only eight."

If Liverpool informed Toshack's sense of coaching good practice, it is memories of Madrid that are burnt into his consciousness. "Barça versus Real is like nothing else in the world. In the build-up to the game, in the dressing room, something happens to your body, you can't help it."

Returning to Sociedad led to the only blemish on Toshack's distinguished CV. In 47 days that shook the Welsh, his ill-fated tenure as manager of Wales, a role performed in tandem with his Sociedad duties in 1994, proved a disaster. After a solitary 3-1 defeat by Norway and against a backdrop of internecine politics at the Welsh FA, he called it a day. "Looking at it now, you can't have a manager of a club side running a national side in another country, it's hard enough doing it in your own country."

Toshack says his reputation as a trouble-shooter, for telling it how it is, has contributed to the brevity of some contracts. "It's a very taxing way to work because you have to upset people and it's more intense than many people appreciate." Few are as prepared to deal so plainly, particularly in the rarefied hothouses of Europe's élite.

Just ask the so-called "Ferrari boys" of Real Madrid. Almost 10 years after his first spell at the Bernabeu, Toshack was invited back in 1999. Struggling in the league, the club's problem, it seems, was the attitude of "glamour" players such as Predrag Mijatovic, Roberto Carlos and Christian Panucci. Bringing them into line was simply a case of digging out the Shankly recipe book. "With players at any level you have to show you understand them, but at the same time you can't get too close. You have to deal with those whose behaviour effects the team," he says. "Vicente del Bosque [Toshack's successor] once said that in dealing with players, sometimes you have to look away. I can't do that, it goes against everything I learnt at Liverpool."

Toshack's Spanish is that of a native – a native of Cardiff. With a habit of importing British colloquialisms , he was once quoted by Spain's Marca newspaper as saying he would sooner "see pigs fly over the Bernabeu" than back down over team selection. The remark earned him his second P45 from Madrid when chairman Lorenzo Sanz assumed he was the airborne porcine in question.

"Getting started in management these days, is very difficult," he says. "It seems you get paid for almost everything other than coaching." Even so, given the names he has worked with, the Emilio Butra-gueños, the Bernd Schusters, there must be a Toshack dream team? "Hugo Sanchez [the former Mexico striker] is the best finisher I've seen. If you put him in with [Spanish goalkeeping legend] Luis Arconada and Nourredine Naybet [Morocco and Depor-tivo La Coruña], you or I could play and we'd still win."

So where next? "I've had offers but I'm taking a breather. I've been incredibly privileged to have travelled the world getting paid for a job I'd happily have done for nothing. Wherever I've been I've been asked back, and that means more to me than any financial incentive. If somebody had told me when I left Liverpool that Real Madrid would dispense with my services twice I'd have said, 'Where do I sign?' "

Biography - John Benjamin Toshack OBE

Born: 22 March 1949 in Cardiff.

As a player: Cardiff City (1966-70); Liverpool (1970-77 – 246 games, 95 goals). Swansea City (1978-84). Wales (40 caps, 13 goals).

As a manager: Swansea City (player/coach then manager, 1978-84), Sporting Lisbon (1984-85), Real Sociedad (manager three times, spells started 1985, 1994 and 2001), Real Madrid (manager twice, spells started 1989 and 1999), Wales (one game, 1994), Deportivo La Coruña (1995-97), Besiktas JK Istanbul (1997-99), St Etienne (2000).

Player honours: (all with Liverpool): three League titles (1973, '76, '77); one FA Cup (1974); two Uefa Cups (1973, '76); Charity Shield (1976).

Managerial honours: Took Swansea from old Fourth Division to First in successive years (from 1978-79 season). Real Sociedad (1987 Spanish Cup). Real Madrid (Spanish League title 1989).