Tugay at Blackburn: It was like he was playing with a cigar in his mouth it was that easy for

This article is part of The Athletic’s series celebrating memorable debuts. To view the whole collection, click here.

“There was never a game when I was at Blackburn when a manager or a coach wouldn’t talk to me afterwards and say something along the lines of, ‘How good is Tugay?!’ or, ‘Where did you get him from?!’.

“I’ve played and worked with some players with incredible technique — Matt Le Tissier, John Barnes, Davie Cooper — but he’s up there with anyone you want to mention. He had the same technique as Zico.”

It takes quite a lot to impress Graeme Souness. So you can be pretty confident that when he enthuses this much about a player, they’re probably quite special.

And he’s not alone in that opinion. Tugay made his Blackburn debut 20 years ago this week, and in those two decades, he’s almost become a myth, a player any Rovers fan speaks about with almost disbelieving reverence and more affection than pretty much anyone else, even from the team that won the title in 1995, save for Alan Shearer.

The way people talk about Tugay reminds you of how people talked about players such as Garrincha, describing a lesser-seen, mercurial talent they almost feel duty-bound to try to make everyone understand how good they were. Nobody who ever coached “Toogs”, or played with him, or even watched him, has anything even remotely negative to say, about either his talent or his character. They’re Tugay proselytisers, keen to convert the remaining disbelievers to the cause.

He wasn’t exactly a sure thing, though. When Blackburn signed him he was a month away from turning 31 and had a style you wouldn’t immediately associate with the frantic Premier League — a player who would sit in the heart of midfield and pull strings, but who you probably needed to pair with someone else who could do his running.

After a decade at Galatasaray, he moved to Rangers (on former Ibrox player/manager Souness’s recommendation, having worked with him in Istanbul) but it hadn’t really panned out (after a season, Dick Advocaat decided he couldn’t play Tugay and Barry Ferguson together), and he had been sent home from Euro 2000 after throwing his shin pads at Turkey coach Mustafa Denizli.

That wasn’t just a warning sign about a fiery character: it almost scuppered his move to Blackburn entirely.

The row meant Tugay was ostracised from the national team for eight months, meaning that after Blackburn agreed a fee of around £1.3 million in May 2001, he hadn’t played the required 75 per cent of internationals over the preceding two years to qualify for a work permit. It took Blackburn manager Souness pleading special circumstances, and eventually winning an appeal, for his application to be approved in the August.

“I looked the (appeal judge) in the eye and said, ‘I’ve worked with this guy, he’ll be a real asset to the English game’,” Souness tells The Athletic. “I wasn’t telling any stories. That’s how it turned out.”

Tugay’s first real contribution in a Blackburn shirt — or at least, the first contribution that would offer a hint at what the next eight years would hold — came in his first league start, away at Ipswich Town.

He collected the ball on the halfway line, looked up for a split second and saw that his options for an attacking pass were limited to just Matt Jansen, who was making a run behind the defence. The chances of finding the striker were slim: it would require a lofted ball over the top with enough power on it to clear the defensive line, but not so much that it would go through to the goalkeeper.

There was probably about a three-square-yard spot he could have landed the pass in for it to come off.

Not only did Tugay land it in that spot, but he added just a hint of backspin that meant keeper Matteo Sereni briefly had the impression that the ball was his, when actually it just spun perfectly into Jansen’s path, for him to lob the onrushing Italian. It was like laying out a ribbon on the floor for a kitten, only to whip it away when Tiddles tries to pounce on it.

“He was effortless,” Jansen says now. “He was like the conductor of an orchestra — he just had time and could find you from anywhere. If you made a run, he would find you. I don’t know how — he would just find you. It was like he was playing with a cigar in his mouth because he was that relaxed, it was that easy for him.”

Morten Gamst Pedersen, another Blackburn team-mate, agrees. “He always had wisdom for the game,” he tells The Athletic. “For me, as a winger, he was a dream to play with — I would just make a run and the ball would land on my feet, every time. He was probably the best player I could have in the central midfield. He had a playfulness to his game. He wasn’t a player who always played the safe pass. He was a 100 per cent entertainer.

“You could have put Tugay in any centre-midfield of any top club in the world. If you had put him in Barcelona’s midfield, he would’ve been excellent.”

Mark Bowen, who worked with Tugay as Blackburn assistant manager under Mark Hughes from 2004 to 2008, simply says: “He was just a friend to the ball, nothing was too difficult for him.”

You could fill books with former colleagues and coaches waxing lyrical about Tugay.

Here’s Aaron Mokoena, speaking on the Talking Fitbaw podcast: “He made the team gel. Everyone loved him. As much as I have played with a lot of good players, Tugay stands out.”

Here’s David Thompson, speaking to Goal.com: “What a player! I didn’t know how good he was until I played with him. He was phenomenal. He was our Pirlo. And I played against Pirlo, but Tugay was up there, no danger.”

Gheorghe Hagi, a team-mate at Galatasaray, told The Athletic Tugay was “a complete midfielder” and “one of the best attacking and defensive midfielders in Europe”. Sam Allardyce, his manager for the last season of his eight years at Blackburn, called him irreplaceable. Hughes, Souness’s successor, said he was the “best I’ve managed” and once memorably responded to someone asking if he wished Tugay was 10 years younger by saying: “No, because if he was, he’d be playing in a Barcelona shirt.”

“People talk about Jorginho today,” says Souness. “Similar type of player — the modern term is a ‘continuity’ player, but in old language: he doesn’t give the ball away. In my opinion, Jorginho, who is deemed a star at a big club today, was not in Tugay’s league.”

And then there were the goals.

Oh, lord, the goals.

They were almost always screamers, but it’s really best to say nothing else and just appreciate a few of them. Enjoy:

Tugay was a player for whom exceptions were made, simply because he was so good.

“When we went to Blackburn, we wanted to make this team the fittest in the Premier League,” says Bowen. “Our training sessions were very tough, but we would look after Tugay. So if the rest of the players were doing six or seven repetitions of a drill, then we let him do, let’s say, three or four, to save his legs for the game.”

Which leads us neatly to the smoking. Tugay was comfortably a 20-a-day man in his pomp at Blackburn, something everyone knew about but didn’t really mention, or at least make an issue of.

“He was an absolute rascal,” says Souness. “At half-time every Saturday, he would disappear. You’d see plumes of smoke coming out of the toilet cubicle, and you’d ask, ‘What have you been doing?’. He’d say, ‘I’ve just been to the toilet’.” The innocent expression would usually just hold out until Souness turned his back, at which point a naughty schoolboy grin would spread across his face. Then there would be a quick spritz of aftershave, and back out onto the pitch, where he would continue to run the midfield.

Michael Gray, another Blackburn team-mate, told a similar story on Talksport radio recently, about a game at Tottenham when Tugay went missing at half-time and was eventually tracked down in a security guard’s office, where he was enjoying a quick ciggie.

⚽️ “We played at Spurs. Mark Hughes is giving a team talk at half time…”

🤷‍♂️ “Tugay went missing. One of the lads went out to find him.”

🚬 “Tugay is in the security office having a fag in his full kit!”

Brilliant story from @MickyGray33 on playing with Tugay at #BRFC. 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/AbJSdjhSDV

— talkSPORT (@talkSPORT) July 13, 2019

The inevitable question is: didn’t all of this annoy his team-mates? Wasn’t it irritating that another player was allowed to get away with smoking like a chimney? To which the unequivocal answer from everyone is: no.

“We all knew he smoked,” says Jansen. “It was a bit of a running joke. He’d done it for so long, so why change?”

Pedersen agrees: “He had respect for the team-mates. For me it was never an issue — that was Tugay.”

“They loved him, because they were all in awe of him,” says Souness. “These players don’t come along very often.”

If there was one other thing Tugay was absolutely world class at aside from passing and smoking, it was leaving the pitch. He turned walking off when being substituted into an art form.

First, the basics. “He would catch your eye with 15-20 minutes to give us a little wink to say, ‘Am I off?’,” says Bowen. “You’d say, ‘Yeah, next throw-in’. So when the next throw-in would come, he would have wandered off to the other side of the pitch.”

Generally, he would be gazing into the stands as the substitution board went up, “oblivious” to the news of his withdrawal.

Eventually, his attention would be caught, often only when it was announced over the PA. Obviously, he couldn’t be expected to make that long walk wearing his shin pads, so off they would come, carefully, as if they were ancient artefacts that needed to be handled with the utmost delicacy.

The ensuing trudge would become a walk when hurried along, but he’d find plenty to do along the way.

“He would do things like pretend not to understand the referee, shake the referee’s hand, shake all their players’ hands,” says Bowen — all four sides of the ground would be applauded until, finally, it was time to cross the line and allow his replacement to enter the action. “The opposition would be going mad.” But, crucially, his own fans would love him for it.

It was fitting that this is how he was seen off, his final act in a Blackburn shirt in his last game, with five minutes to go in a home match against West Bromwich Albion in May 2009, slowly walking to the dugout, three months short of turning 39, serenaded by Ewood Park singing, “Tugay — you are my Turkish delight” to the tune of Blue Moon.

Speak to those that worked with him and you get the sense that everyone liked Tugay, but not many would say they actually knew him.

A couple of people spoken to for this story asked after him, mentioning unreplied-to messages they had recently sent. The man himself politely declined to be interviewed for this article.

He enjoyed the dressing room and certainly wasn’t a loner, but then again you wouldn’t find him on every team night out either (though his tipple, apparently, was tequila), preferring to spend time with his young family in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

“On the coach, when all the other players were playing cards or whatever, he would come down the front and sit on the stairs by the side of the driver,” says Bowen. “It was almost like he wanted to keep a bit of distance with the players.”

He also seems to be a man you call if you want something sorted out, particularly in Turkey, whether that was a recommendation for a job, advice about going to play out there or something a little more unusual.

“My wife, my daughter and some friends of theirs went for a short holiday to Turkey,” says Bowen. “My wife rang me in a hell of a state and said, ‘There’s been a bomb scare in the hotel and they’ve locked us in our rooms’. I said, ‘Locked in your rooms? You should be out of the rooms shouldn’t, you?’. The hotel wouldn’t let them do anything, but they desperately wanted to leave and get to the airport.

“The first person I thought of was Tugay. I called him and, within about an hour, somebody came to the hotel and got them out, took their bags downstairs and two cars were waiting outside. They put my wife and my daughter in the car, took them to the airport, put them on a plane and brought them home. My wife still talks about him now.”

Tugay exists in a space that isn’t really there anymore, a sensational player for a smallish club who was never picked off by someone bigger, so he was just theirs, and theirs only. He was certainly good enough to be playing somewhere a little more glamourous than Blackburn, which leads to the inevitable questions of why he didn’t. “I was amazed that none of the big guys came in for him,” says Souness.

It was partly because those bigger clubs might not have been willing to accommodate a chain-smoker in his 30s who could run their midfield, but it’s also because he was just happy where he was. He was playing for a club that suited him, living in an area he liked, where his family was happy. In eight seasons at Blackburn, there was never any serious prospect of him leaving.

While it would have been wonderful for him to have a few more medals to his name (he was, sadly, suspended for the 2002 League Cup final win over Tottenham Hotspur), there’s something pleasing about him being a hero at a club like Blackburn.

The logical and true explanation for their decline is tied to the calamitous early days of the Venky’s regime, but it’s tempting to attach some sentimental significance to him leaving in the summer of 2009 and it all going horribly wrong shortly afterwards (Blackburn were relegated three years later and were a third division side by 2017). The spirit of Tugay might not have overcome their organisational incompetence, but it would have made everyone feel a little bit better.

“Not just players, the staff around the club — everyone loved him,” says Souness at the end of our conversation, before offering an instruction about the writing of this piece.

“Do a good job, please. Be kind to him.”

(Top photo: Getty Images/Design: Sam Richardson)

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Tugay at Blackburn: It was like he was playing with a cigar in his mouth it was that easy for