Decent Journalism

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/apr/15/world-cup-stunning-moments-dennis-bergkamp-wonder-goal?CMP=twt_gu

[SIZE=6]World Cup: 25 stunning moments … No10: Dennis Bergkamp’s wonder goal[/SIZE]
On 4 July 1998 the Dutch forward took three divine touches, scored the perfect goal and sent Holland into the semi-finals

Bobby Moore never got a bathmat wet in his life. Mike Summerbee, who sometimes shared a room with Moore on England trips, said he was “the only man who could have a bath and get out dry”. Moore would flick the water off one leg, dry that with a towel and then step out on to the dry leg, before continuing the process with the rest of his body. Moore’s routine will come as no surprise to those who watched his immaculate, pristine defending. Nor will the fact that he brought such meticulousness to his wardrobe, where jumpers were hung up in order from dark to light. “It was,” says his first wife Tina in Bobby Moore: By The Person Who Knew Him Best, “almost an aesthetic pleasure to open the wardrobe.”
The fastidiousness demonstrated by Moore is one of the sub-genres of perfectionism within football. There’s also the impossible, self-torturing expectations of perfectionist-winners such as Soren Lerby and Roy Keane, whose business face should be the subject of a modernist painting entitled simply: ‘Standards’. Other significant manifestations include the perfection-making practice of forces of nurture like Peter Shilton or Cristiano Ronaldo, Spain’s obsessive-compulsive tiki-taka and Pep Guardiola’s need for control, and the artistic leanings of players like Eric Cantona and Dimitar Berbatov.
If you put all those types of perfectionism on a Venn diagram, the man in the middle might be Dennis Bergkamp, [U]the perfectionist’s perfectionist[/U][/URL]. Thierry Henry said he loved “Every. Single. Thing” about Bergkamp, but the thing he loved the most was the way Bergkamp trained, because “everything had to be perfect”. Bergkamp also had unrealistic expectations – of himself, if not necessarily others - and was a sucker for cleanliness. The Guardian’s [URL=‘https://twitter.com/amylawrence71/status/381674080618835968’][U]Amy Lawrence noticed how starched his socks were during an interview 10 years ago[/U], a revelation that would not surprise Patrick Vieira. “To make his kind of passes you have to like things to be perfect,” says Vieira in Stillness and Speed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if his clothes are really well organised. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.” Finally there is perfection as aesthetic idealism, the thing with which Bergkamp is most associated and which informed so much of what he did on a football field.
Bergkamp’s imagination was his gift and his curse. It elevated him above his peers, but it is also meant he was in danger of driving himself round the bend aiming for something that he could not explain and which might not even exist; he was almost striving for Godot. The life of a perfectionist is not easy. Or so we’d imagine. Most people are casual perfectionists at best, and confuse perfectionism with self-loathing, yet it’s comforting to indulge that vague notion because the reality – that adulthood is what happens while you’re busy making compromises on your youthful ideals – is too dispiriting to acknowledge. Yet every now and then you come across someone for whom perfectionism is a way of life, who has no choice but to embrace an existence in which anything less than the best is a felony.
Perfection is a recurring theme of Stillness and Speed, Bergkamp’s excellent book. One chapter is called ‘It Has To Be Perfect’, which is both his mantra and an indication that his co-author David Winner wasn’t a Fairground Attraction fan. “Well, you set yourself goals, targets,” he says in [U]this extract from the book[/U]. “And once you’ve got there you want to move on and go further. You keep raising the bar and therefore it’s never good enough. You want perfection. It’s never good enough but it’s within your reach. You climb one mountain and see the higher one.”
On 4 July 1998, Bergkamp climbed the highest mountain for 2.11 seconds – the time it took for him to produce the three divine touches and score the penultimate-minute winner against Argentina that put [U]Holland[/U][/URL] into the [URL=‘http://www.theguardian.com/football/world-cup-football’][U]World Cup[/U] semi-final. “Perfect” was Ruud Gullit’s description on ITV that night. “You never play the perfect game,” said Bergkamp later, “but the moment itself was, I think, perfect.” Both stalled over the P-word, as if they would be sent straight to hell for sacrilege should they misuse it, before realising that, actually, yes, that was the only way to describe it. Given Dutch football’s obsession with creative purity, you know something special has happened when a Dutch footballer describes something as perfect.
In One Moment In Time, her rhapsodic treatment of spiritual fulfilment, Whitney Houston beseeched: “Give me one moment in time, when I’m more than I thought I could be.” For Bergkamp, this was it. “You’re in that moment,” said Bergkamp. “That’s the feeling. After the first two touches … that moment! You give absolutely everything. It’s like your life has led up to this moment.”
[SIZE=5]The reprieve[/SIZE]
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/columnists/2014/4/15/1397520955436/Dennis-Bergkamp-009.jpg Holland fans celebrate with a cut-out figure of Bergkamp. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
One man never gets the thanks he deserves for his part in Bergkamp’s goal. Not Frank de Boer – whose creation of the goal is regularly acknowledged – but José María García-Aranda. He was the Spanish referee who inexplicably declined to send Bergkamp off for stamping on Sinisa Mihajlovic during Holland’s 2-1 win over Yugoslavia in the second round five days earlier. Bergkamp misplaced the plot, as was his occasional wont, and should have walked. “I haven’t the faintest idea why I did that,” he says. “I was startled by my own behaviour.”
He was not alone in that. On the morning of the game, most papers focused not on the prospect of an immense quarter-final but on Arsène Wenger’s criticism of Bergkamp, who had been the Player of the Year in Arsenal’s domestic double that season. It may have been on Bergkamp’s mind, because he was quiet for large parts of the game. Indeed apart from producing one of the World Cup’s greatest goals and one of the most imaginative assists, he did the square root of bugger all.
Bergkamp argues that he did two great things that day, and he’ll be thrilled to know that we agree with him. The first came in the 12th minute, an ingenious falling header to create the opening goal for Patrick Kluivert. The more you watch it, the better it gets. Bergkamp almost invents a new type of pass, the square through ball. He was always as much an architect and geometrician as he was a footballer – as a child he was obsessed with geometry – and was forever highlighting that a football pitch was so much bigger than it seemed as 20 men were magnetised towards the ball. Bergkamp could find acres of space and strip a defence naked with one pass, as shown in Jeroen Henneman’s diagram (“One moment the pitch is crowded and narrow. Suddenly it is huge and wide … A miracle”) in Winner’s book Brilliant Orange.
In football it’s often said that the run makes the pass. With Bergkamp, the pass regularly made the run – either by ushering a player like Nicolas Anelka into a certain area, or because those like Anelka and Kluivert know from experience what Bergkamp would explore. In this case, forewarned was dangerously forearmed.
Bergkamp was among that small, counter-instinctive group of players who seemed to get as much joy from an assist as from a goal. Thus in many ways this pass to Kluivert, rather than the goal, was truly representative of his career: the awareness and creation of space, the quick wit and, of course, the gentle touch. In a split-second, he worked out all the angles – in both senses – and utilised an extra-sensory perception in a way that evokes those breathless, [U]deductive visual analyses[/U] so beloved of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes every time he meets a stranger or finds a dead body.
Ronald de Boer’s pass is flat and hard and waist high too high to control with my foot and too low for my chest so I have to fall to my left and squash my body so that I can cushion it with my head but where do I cushion it out of the corner of my eye I see Kluivert making a run off Chamot if I head it towards him between Sensini and Chamot the control will be too difficult at high speed besides there isn’t much space there the space is between Sensini who has come towards me and Ayala who has gone out to meet de Boer so I need to play almost a square pass with my head the other side of Sensini into the angle of Kluivert’s run I can’t cushion it as gently with my head as with my foot but that’s fine because the space is fairly big and if I head it too softly Roa will stay on his line and stay big so it’s okay to put a fraction more on it to entice Roa from his line because if he comes out Kluivert has a much easier finish.
It’s often said of more prosaic footballers that they are much better when they don’t have time to think. Bergkamp was one of the most thoughtful footballers of all, yet the same rules applied to him. His greatest gift was his instinctive intelligence. When he had time to consider things he was often less effective – look at his penalty record for a start – and his best work was done when he had barely a split second to compute everything. When he was in that moment.
“It’s like solving a puzzle,” [U]he said in FourFourTwo[/U]. “I always had a picture in my head of how things would look two or three seconds later. I could calculate it. There’s a tremendous pleasure in doing something that someone else couldn’t see.”
The Dutch have always seen football through different eyes to the rest of the world. Yet for all the grandiose talk and pompous riddles of someone like Johan Cruyff, the way the Dutch play football has always been very simple and unpretentious. With the exception of that goal at Newcastle, not so much a blockbuster as a brainbuster, Bergkamp’s work was always straightforward and accessible, [U]which is not always the case with great footballers[/U]. Bergkamp was a reminder of the economy, minimalism and humility of most great sportsmen. He frequently played one-touch and there was scarcely any indulgence or attempt to show how clever he was. It’s so much harder to make something complex look simple than the other way round. That was one of Bergkamp’s greatest qualities. “I don’t like tricks,” he says. “My game is about first touch, control, passing. Art for art’s sake isn’t interesting.”
If Bergkamp was accessible to the layman, that doesn’t mean those who played alongside him didn’t find an extra layer to appreciate. Bergkamp was very much a players’ player, the subject of rare reverence from those he played against and particularly with. “I honestly didn’t think a professional player could be that good,” said Paul Merson. Ian Wright said he was “the greatest signing Arsenal will ever make” and Henry, whose list of team-mates includes Zinedine Zidane and Lionel Messi, says Bergkamp was the greatest he played alongside. Moments like the Kluivert assist explain why he was so revered.
After Holland took the lead Bergkamp began to drift out of the game. Claudio López equalised for Argentina in the 17th minute, nutmegging Edwin van der Sar in a manner so cocky as to remind us why the one-on-one is football’s greatest masculinity-waving contest. Thereafter the game flowed beautifully, and has a strong case for being the best match in a World Cup full of excellent contests. It was the kind of classy, open game you only get when two teams are formidably comfortable both in their own skin, and with the ball at their feet.
It was also a match loaded with significance, the first competitive meeting between the sides since Argentina beat Holland in [U]the 1978 World Cup final[/U]. That match was Bergkamp’s first memory of football: he was eight years old, standing at his home at Amsterdam, watching with confused childish distress as Rob Rensenbrink hit the post in the last minute of normal time before Argentina went on to win in extra-time.
Twenty years later, Wim Jonk and Ariel Ortega rattled the post in the first half. In the second, Gabriel Batistuta staged an impromptu test of the quality of the craftsmanship of the official Fifa World Cup goalframe, walloping the post from 15 yards. The match seemed to swing Argentina’s way in the 76th minute, when Arthur Numan was sent off for a second yellow card. Holland moved tactics expert Philip Cocu to left back and, although Argentina inevitably dominated possession thereafter, Holland were not unduly stretched – until the 87th minute, when a sensory overload of action changed everything.
Ortega, a strong contender for the player of the tournament at that stage, ran at Jaap Stam in the box and dived. The referee gave nothing – a brilliant decision that could easily have gone the other way, with the dive only really apparent in slow motion. As Van der Sar came to remonstrate, Ortega, bristling with the kind of righteousness that only the guilty can summon, rose from the floor to stick his head into the underside of Van der Sar’s chin. What was going to be a yellow card for diving morphed into a red, and both sides had a couple of minutes to consider the changing circumstances before entering a 10-a-side golden goal period.
It didn’t get that far. Fifty-three seconds after play restarted, Bergkamp produced his masterpiece. The quality of the goal is what is most spoken about now, but at the time the savageness of the swing was the most significant aspect of the overwhelming joy it created among the Dutch fans. One moment Holland had been hanging on with 10 men; the next they were 2-1 up and in the semi-final.
Bergkamp said it was like his life had been leading up to this moment. The game certainly hadn’t. For much of the second half, and particularly in the buildup to the goal, Bergkamp was dreadful. This is not the playful hyperbole of which modern writers are regularly guilty but a legitimate appraisal of his performance. He looked like he’d won a competition to play in a World Cup quarter-final.
Between the red cards for Numan and Ortega, Bergkamp touched the ball only three times in 11 minutes. Once he conceded a throw-in with a tackle, twice he misplaced simple passes – the second, in a dangerous area in his own half, launched the attack in which Ortega had a penalty appeal and was sent off. Even after that, in the 53 seconds between the restart and the goal, Bergkamp had time for his worst touch of the match – he tried to play a simple short pass to Marc Overmars, kicked it against his standing foot and launched an Argentina break. When that attack broke down, Holland pottered about at the back for a few seconds before Frank de Boer spotted some movement up front …
Occasionally great goals come in the context of dismal personal performances. It’s the great players’ beautiful interpretation of “winning ugly” – demonstrating the ability to bend games not to their will but to their skill. Ryan Giggs against Arsenal in 1999 is another significant example. Perhaps playing so poorly creates a certain freedom, an “oh-bugger-it” attitude (as Matthew Engel, on these pages, memorably described England’s cricket against South Africa during a famous victory in 1994). Or maybe, as with so much great sport, it just happened.
Frank de Boer got things going with a refresher course in the difference between a long ball and a long pass – “a stretch-limo of a pass,” as Cris Freddi describes it [U]in his definitive World Cup history[/U]. Indeed, needing only four touches as it did, this was that rarest of goals: the kind that could be appreciated equally by Johan Cruyff and Charles Hughes.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/columnists/2014/4/15/1397520582156/Dennis-Bergkamp-009.jpg Bergkamp flicks the ball past Roa. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images
After the pass came the holiest of holy trinities, three perfect touches from Bergkamp. The first would have been a breathtaking piece of control even if that was the extent of the exercise. Bergkamp was so high in the air that it’s almost a surprise his fear of flying didn’t kick in. He was also running at full pelt, yet still managed to kill the ball with a telescopic leg and a right boot made of velvet and velcro. Even in that split-second, Bergkamp processed that he had to control it with his instep rather than the side of his foot. [U]This interview[/U][/URL] gives an insight into the staggering amount of information a human being can process in just over two seconds: Bergkamp factored in everything from the wind to the line of the ball to the defender’s movement to the angle of an eventual shot and consequent need to use his right rather than his left foot. It’s easy to think Bergkamp is embellishing it but we have seen this so often; Diego Maradona, for example, [URL=‘http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2009/may/15/maradona-pele-platini-rivaldo-suker-falcao’][U]showed startling total recall[/U] during a similarly career-defining goal against England in 1986.
Bergkamp is unusual in that most of his great goals – Argentina, Leicester, Newcastle, Spurs – are remembered more for the first touch than the finish. He loved making goals, and it’s almost as if that was his way of supplying an assist for himself. If you wanted to go the full pseud, you could call it a pre-goal.
In this case, Bergkamp still had a serious amount to do even after the immaculate control. His game was all about the manipulation and creation of space – but usually that involved through balls into the spacious area behind defences. This time, with the sweeper Roberto Ayala roaring across full of misplaced determination, Bergkamp had a phonebox to work with at best. No matter; his second touch ushered Ayala off [U]towards the wrong fire[/U], and set him up for the shot.
“After the second touch I know this can’t go wrong,” he says. “No chance!” That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that with each brilliant touch, the pressure to make it count becomes greater. Look at Rivaldo here after another [U]long pass from Frank de Boer[/U]; Barcelona score, but he looks like a man who has just realised he’s accidentally put the family chihuahua in the slow cooker. His face is a picture of repressed distress because he knows he missed the chance to score one of the greatest goals in history.
Bergkamp took the chance to do so. By then he was in that zone – “that moment” – and nothing could go wrong. With the outside of his right foot, he flicked the ball past Carlos Roa and into the top corner, an appropriately elegant finish. Confirmation of the rare quality of the goal came from the BBC commentary box. “Beautifully pulled down by Bergkamp – OH WHAT A GOAL! DENNIS BERGKAMP HAS WON IT FOR HOLLAND. That was absolutely brilliant.” [U]Barry Davies had not shouted as loud in the commentary for 27 years[/U][/URL], since the [URL=‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxVtScYFT6c’][U]“Leeds will go mad” game[/U][/URL]. “The sound supervisor only just managed to keep my voice in range,” he said later. Davies is the greatest commentator there has ever been; when he cries wolf, you know the sheep are about to get eaten. The same with Martin Tyler’s commentary at the [URL=‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2dghleJxM#t=7m35s’][U]height of Serie A’s most dramatic game[/U].
In Holland it was even better, with Jack Van Gelder repeatedly screaming [U]“DENNIS BERGKAMP!”[/U][/URL] Van Gelder was not the only one who seemed on the cusp of tears. Bergkamp’s face almost dissolved. If he was startled by his own behaviour against Yugoslavia, when he stood on Mihajlovic, he was overwhelmed by it here. He thrusted his hands straight over his face in shock. Whether subconscious or coincidental, it became a charming nod to Rinus Michels’s similar reaction 10 years earlier when Marco van Basten scored his [URL=‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMIFWM2yJW8’][U]staggering volley in the European Championship final against the USSR[/U]. The Dutch have a football imagination like no other, yet sometimes they even shock themselves.
As Bergkamp collapsed on his back, the camera showed a sea of Holland shirts behind the goal on a gorgeously sunny day: brilliant orange in the stands, blindingly brilliant orange on the pitch. After the game, Bergkamp was coming to terms with what he had achieved. In his post-match interview, he was a picture of self-satisfaction – the good kind. He looked like the cat who first discovered cream.
Bergkamp has not watched the goal since 1998. “It’s still in your mind,” he says. “I don’t really need to see it on television, I know exactly how it went.”
[SIZE=5]The consummate footballer-artist[/SIZE]
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Sport/Pix/columnists/2014/4/15/1397521458999/Dennis-Bergkamp-003.jpg Bergkamp wheels away after scoring the winning goal. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images
Dennis Bergkamp is rarely ranked among the 10 or 20 greatest players of all time. Last year, when World Soccer asked 73 journalists, managers and former players to select their all-time XI, Bergkamp did not get a single vote. He never won the Ballon d’Or (though he did finish second in 1993). Yet he will endure, and with good reason. It will be seen as a bit pseudish, but the fact is that to many people Bergkamp is the consummate footballer-artist. We all want to align ourselves with the beautiful people, and Bergkamp was inevitably the subject of a kind of aspirational admiration, as if “getting” him would somehow imbue the 5.24am train commute and the rest of your life with greater romance and meaning.
For all the brilliant things that footballers do, the pass and the first touch is the really good stuff, and Bergkamp specialised in those. His best moments represent football at its most profound. Bergkamp had a supernatural capacity for creation that hinted at a tantalising level of intelligence and technique we could appreciate even if we couldn’t understand it. He specialised in moments – or rather, in moments – and Argentina was the pick of those. It was übergkamp.
“You play football with your head,” says Cruyff, “and your legs are there to help you.” If the brain is the most erogenous zone of all, then Bergkamp might be the sexiest football of the modern era. Yet all this would be try-hard horse pucky if it didn’t amount to anything. Bergkamp practised what he preached when he said that “art for art’s sake isn’t interesting”. And that’s why the goal against Argentina meant so much to him, more than any other.
“Every boy has a dream: ‘I want to score in the World Cup.’ Score the winning goal in the final, of course. But in this way … to score a goal like that, in my style? The way I score a goal, on that stage, in a game that really means something, because that’s important to me too. I love good football, nice football but it has to mean something.”
It was deep and meaningful against Argentina. “I should be more of a killer,” Bergkamp says in Brilliant Orange, “but it’s just not a quality I have.” He had it for those few seconds. He was creator and killer, everything he knew he could be and something he thought he couldn’t. That context is why the goal is so special to us, too. It’s the point at which the two schools of football – football as art and football as a results business – come together in harmony to create a unique moment, and a perfect goal.

Wonderful from Kimmage, as per usual.

http://www.independent.ie/sport/other-sports/cycling/paul-kimmage-navigating-the-rocky-road-30242027.html

This is a great piece by Don Banks for SI Longform. Gives great depth and insight into the shambles that was the early 80’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/longform/nfl-draft-82/index.html?eref=sihp

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/may/21/harold-larwood-england-frank-keating-book-extract

Great piece from the RTE site - Tracing the River Liffey to its Source - http://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/travel/features/2014/0417/609466-tracing-the-river-liffey-to-its-source/

“Hitting Newbridge the river is still a roaring size and a superbly designed wooden bridge and boardwalk lines the way as it passes the village and turns eastwards as it moves again through lush countryside past Kilcullen and numerous studs which highlight the prominent horse rearing that takes place in the county.”

[QUOTE=“Watch The Break, post: 948662, member: 260”]Great piece from the RTE site - Tracing the River Liffey to its Source - http://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/travel/features/2014/0417/609466-tracing-the-river-liffey-to-its-source/

“Hitting Newbridge the river is still a roaring size and a superbly designed wooden bridge and boardwalk lines the way as it passes the village and turns eastwards as it moves again through lush countryside past Kilcullen and numerous studs which highlight the prominent horse rearing that takes place in the county.”[/QUOTE]
You just cant help yourself can you.

[SIZE=6]Paul Kimmage talks to Tony Cascarino: Still in love with the game and the intrigue of Roy Keane[/SIZE]
http://cdn3.independent.ie/incoming/article30301901.ece/f03de/ALTERNATES/h342/cascarino.jpg
Tony Cascarino: ‘I love football. I love how tribal it is and find it amazing what it does to people.’ Photo: Damien Eagers/SPORTSFILE
A Tuesday morning at Luton airport. He’s sitting in a coffee shop, wrestling with his wallet and talking on his mobile phone, when I enter the arrivals hall.
“The what?”

“Sorry?”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Hold on, please.”

He hands me a tenner, gestures towards the counter, and I’ve just placed the order — skinny mocha for him, espresso for me — when he comes striding towards me with his credit card raised.

“Just hold on please . . . Paul, what’s that number?”

“Which one?”

“The three on the back.”

“778.”

“Hello? Yeah, it’s 778.”

He has left an open wallet lying on the table.

“Sorry? You want the expiry date?”

He’s wearing a blue, patterned, short-sleeved shirt . . .

“Paul, what’s the expiry on that?”

. . . a pair of knee-length khaki shorts . . .

“12/16”

. . . and canvas shoes he has converted to slip-ons by trampling on the heels.

Meet Tony Cascarino, the tallest, funniest, and most unfootball-like footballer, I have ever known.

Twenty years have passed since I interviewed him for the first time. It was my first assignment for the Sunday Independent and I’d been sent to the south of France to write about his remarkable transformation as goal-scoring hero of Marseilles. It went well. Cas was a great story and easy to love . . . unless you happened to be married to him.

On my second evening in the city, we went for a stroll along the sea front to the Vieux Port, where he asked me to wait a moment as he slipped into the hotel opposite the harbour. After 15 minutes he emerged and waved to a woman on the sixth floor. He never explained who Virginia Masson was, and I never asked until five years later when we sat down to write Full Time, the story of his life.

There was a lot of pain in Full Time but it was a story with a happy ending: Tony and Virginia were married in June 2000 and looked rock solid for the eight years that followed. Then, out of nowhere, the marriage was gone and Virginia had left for France with the (three) kids. Tony was distraught and as angry as I had ever seen him.

It took him a long time to find his feet. He met Jo James, an old flame of his friend, Teddy Sheringham. They started dating, bought a house, and on Tuesday, when they welcomed me into their Hertfordshire home, the plan was to shoot the breeze about his last game as an international, against Turkey, Ireland’s opponents in Dublin this evening.

I wasn’t expecting a hurricane.

1 FULL TIME

The final minutes of the game flash like seconds. Six are added for injuries and stoppages and though I reach and stretch and strain every sinew, nothing drops for me or the team. When the final whistle blows, ecstatic Turkish players and officials come swarm

ing on to the pitch, but for me, there is only the painful sting of failure and the seething frustration that losing brings.

‘Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino’

Paul Kimmage: Tony, what do you remember of your last 10 minutes as an international footballer?

Tony Cascarino: I came on and the centre-half who was picking me up was holding onto me and doing the usual stuff. But he spat at me a couple of times and I remember thinking, ‘If we get knocked out here, I’m going to go for you’.

PK: And you did.

TC: Yeah, and it was typical of me that I’d always do the daftest thing at the daftest moment — there were 40,000 crazy Turks in the stadium!

PK: Remind us what happened.

TC: The game ended and he ran across and started mouthing at me. I flicked out my foot and he tripped and the next thing he has just lumped me. I was shocked to be still standing, to be honest. I thought: ‘Cor! I can take a good punch’. And then I went for him and within seconds it was mayhem. A few of the police hit me with batons. I remember saying to one of them: ‘You’re meant to protect me, not hit me!’ Tony Hickey (the FAI security officer) got me out. We went back to the dressing room and there were cuts all over my face and Keaney was there and he just looked at me but said nothing. It was a really weird ending because I left the team at the airport.

PK: You were going back to France?

TC: Yeah, I was (playing) at Nancy and left the team at the airport in Turkey and that was it. My international career had ended in a horrible . . . well, I say horrible, most things end horribly in life, but it was weird.

PK: You say that most things end horribly in life but you read the epilogue in Full Time and it’s almost the perfect ending. You have this brilliant career in France that no one would have imagined, marry a lovely French girl and look all set to live happily ever after.

TC: Fucking hell! How wrong could I have been? I’ve been divorced twice. I have three kids living with their mum in Tahiti that I haven’t seen in 18 months. I’ve got a sack of emails (from his former wife) you just wouldn’t believe and it has really hurt me. I look at the damage and wonder, ‘How did we get married? Why did we have children?’ And I point the finger at myself because I’m the common denominator. The cover of my book says ‘Full Time’ but I keep thinking it should be ‘Fool Time’. And it has been really weird how things have panned out, but we instigate a lot of it ourselves with the decisions we make.

PK: What did you instigate? What was your weakness?

TC: In a way, I’m cannon fodder for a certain type of woman and easily manipulated.

PK: But is that not absolving yourself of responsibility? You said the common denominator in all of this is you.

TC: And it is.

PK: So is it that you’re attracted to the wrong type of woman or . . .

TC: Do you want me to simplify it for you?

PK: Please.

TC: Giuseppe is rowing away from his home on the shore in a boat; his wife is on the balcony pleading with him.

‘Giuseppe, where are you going?’

‘I’ve had enough. I’m not coming back.’

‘What about the kids?’

‘I don’t care about the kids.’

‘What about me?’

‘I don’t care about you.’

‘What about this?’

She raises her skirt above her hips and he starts rowing furiously back to the shore: ‘Coming’. (Laughs) That’s been my ultimate problem. I can’t explain it any other way without it sounding like bullshit.

PK: But that’s not just your problem, that’s our (the male) problem.

TC: Yeah, but some of us are more vulnerable than others and I was vulnerable. And I think having no father was another part of it.

PK: You did have a father — he just beat the crap out you.

TC: Yeah, but he wasn’t a ‘dad’. I didn’t have a role model, someone who can nurture you, and guide you and teach you the rights and wrongs. Now I don’t want to sound like I think I’m unlucky because I haven’t been unlucky at all. There’s an independence about me that has got me to where I am.

PK: Because you’ve done well, really well, since retirement.

TC: Yeah. I’ve been (a columnist) with The Times for 13 years and have just signed a new deal; I’m an ambassador for Ladbrokes and do a column for the Irish Sun. I work for Sky Sports News at least once a week and do a slot with Today FM (‘The Last Word’). So yeah, I’ve done really well and have loved every moment of it. I’ve survived two divorces and still have a nice lifestyle and am trying to do the best I can in a difficult situation.

PK: What has been the most difficult?

TC: Well, obviously the kids are the biggest issue because I’ve got three living in Tahiti.

PK: And they’re not going to have a father, either?

TC: No. I haven’t seen Josh (7) or Maeva (18) since February of last year. Will (13) is coming over in June for two months and the flight costs for him are £2,500. Multiply that by three and you’re talking about £10,000 per trip for flights, which is absolute madness. And there will never be an end to the problems, I’ve realised that for about a year now. So I just have to try and deal with it without (pauses) . . .

PK: Allowing it to destroy you?

TC: Yeah.

PK: When you were talking about the Turkey game, you said it was typical of you to do something crazy at the worst time. What are the other crazy things you’ve done?

TC: I’ve done some pretty mad personal things in my life.

PK: For example?

TC: That would take another book.

PK: (Laughs) What can you say that won’t get us into trouble?

TC: I just think I have a self-destruct button at times. People have told me I’m streetwise but every now and again I’ll hit the self-destruct button. For the last year I’ve been seeing a therapist because I couldn’t deal with it. I thought I could deal with it myself but I can’t, so I had to seek help to try and understand how long I was going to be angry.

PK: About the kids and breakup of your marriage?

TC: Yeah.

PK: Has it helped?

TC: Yes it has. I’ve realised that I had to stop being angry because I was getting myself into a right state. In the last year, I’ve done things with money that I would never have dreamt I’d have done.

PK: You’re talking about gambling?

TC: Yeah.

PK: But you’ve always been very disciplined about that? You keep an account of what you have won and where you are going; you know the games you cannot play in (with the high-rollers) and you know when to fold and run?

TC: Yeah, it’s all documented. I’ve got it all written down.

PK: So what happened?

TC: I went into a casino at the Ritz Hotel in London one night and lost about £13,000 playing cards. I got a bit a unlucky — it can happen — Teddy (Sheringham) was in the game and was down a few quid as well. It was about two in the morning and we walked across to the roulette

table. Normally, we’ll put 50 quid on a number before going home but I’d been talking to solicitors all week and the cards had really stung and it was a moment of madness really. I thought: ‘Fuck it! I’m going to spin it up’. I put £20,000 on red.

PK: What does ‘spin it up’ mean?

TC: To double it, I was going to chance my luck basically, like flipping a coin. And I could see Teddy looking at me from across the table but the ÂŁ20,000 came in.

PK: You won?

TC: Yeah. I’m driving home and the phone rings, it’s Ted. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said. ‘I’ve watched you playing cards for years and you’ve never done anything as stupid as that.’ I tried to make an excuse that a lot had happened that week but he was right. I’d paid for two divorces by playing poker and being disciplined but this was car crash; this was how you go skint. I couldn’t afford to do 20 grand.

PK: But that was a one-off?

TC: No, I’d done it before. And Teddy didn’t know I’d done it before. He’d just seen me on this occasion.

PK: And before? Did you win?

TC: I lost a 20, won a 20 and lost a 13.

PK: So you’re ahead?

TC: Yeah, but you’re going to lose because you’re spinning coins when you’re on the wrong end of the odds.

2 The Messiah

Brian: I’m not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!

Girl: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.

Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah.

Followers: He is! He is the Messiah!

‘Monty Python: The Life of Brian’

PK: There’s World Cup coming up. Does that excite you?

TC: I love the World Cup; 1970 is probably my earliest memory of football, being at my (paternal) granddad’s flat in Elephant and Castle and listening to him

slaughtering the Italians after they lost the final. And maybe it’s just nostalgia getting the better of me, but that still feels like the most amazing World Cup I have seen.

PK: Apart from the two you played in, obviously.

TC: Yeah. I played one in Italy, which is an incredible place to play. And I played one in America, which isn’t. You’re walking down the street and some guy says, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing here? Oh, the soccer World Cup? Yeah, we’ve heard about that’. To play in a World Cup in South America would have been my dream but this tournament to me will bring back memories of the '70’s and I’m looking forward to every game.

PK: Given your memories of your Italian grandfather in 1970, it must have felt odd when you played there for Ireland 20 years later?

TC: It did, everybody knew me. There were numerous occasions at the hotels where someone would say, ‘One of your family is at the gate’. And I’d go out and there’d be some distant relation looking for tickets but I’d have no idea who they were. If there was an O’Malley (his mother’s maiden name) playing for Italy at the World Cup, everyone would say, ‘Well, he must be Irish’. But it was very strange.

(I walk across the room and take a small, framed portrait of the team from Italia '90.)

PK: Tell me about this?

TC: That’s the only thing I’ve got hanging up from my football days. Jo (his partner) put it there. She got all of my caps cleaned and has been pushing me to hang them up: ‘Why would you not show what you’ve achieved?’ But I don’t want a shrine. I look at the letters and the shirts and it feels really good but it doesn’t make me want to put them out.

PK: Where are they?

TC: They’re all in the garage.

PK: So that was Jo’s pick?

TC: Yeah.

PK: It was interesting that she chose a photo from Cagliari?

TC: She didn’t choose it; she just liked the picture and showed it to me. I said, ‘That was 1990, a great experience’.

PK: Mick McCarthy described it as the ultimate experience of his career. Was starting against England that day the ultimate experience in your career?

TC: At the time, most definitely; I can remember the build-up and doing the pre-match interviews with Jack and it was as close as you can get to a World Cup final for us. And we were a better team than them. I think we underachieved from '88 to '94. Everyone talks about it as our most successful period but I think we could have gone further. I think we had a really good side. But playing for Ireland was, without a doubt, my greatest experience. Anything I experienced at club level didn’t come close. And yet, somebody told me a few years ago that I hold the European record for coming on and going off (as a substitute), which is not an achievement you should be proud of (laughs).

PK: What about these other guys in the photo (Chris Morris, Steve Staunton, Packie Bonner, Mick McCarthy, Paul McGrath, John Aldridge, Kevin Sheedy, Ray Houghton, Andy Townsend, Kevin Moran)? Do you still keep in touch?

TC: Andy (Townsend) is a good friend. I’ve known him since I was 11 and we played on the same Sunday team, but they’re all good lads. I look at Sheeds who has been battling cancer for the last year or so, and I was close to Sheeds. I really liked Kevin.

PK: Why?

TC: He was calm and a great footballer, not that being a great footballer mattered, but I just thought he was a good lad, a nice lad, and someone I enjoyed being around. I haven’t seen Sheeds or Chris Morris for years but if we met tomorrow, we’d give each other a big hug. And I would say all of that team would be the same and that takes a lot of doing for a whole team.

PK: So what was it? What made that?

TC: We were like a group of mates playing football together.

PK: You got a jersey signed after your last game in Turkey.

TC: Did I?

PK: It’s in the book.

TC: Okay, I must have done so.

PK: One of the names on the shirt was Roy Keane. ‘We have always got on well,’ you said. But it didn’t last?

TC: No, it was a bit like my marriage. In fact, the day I knew it was all over with my missus, was the day he finished as Sunderland manager and I went on radio and let him have it. (Laughs) I wasn’t in a great frame of mind.

PK: What was your criticism based on?

TC: The way he handled his players. Roy has a lot of qualities but I think one area where he has always struggled is dealing with people. I remember one incident with Jason McAteer before a game; we were sitting around the dinner table and Jason says, ‘Roy mate’ and Roy stops him and says, ‘I’m not your mate’. And Jason says, ‘What?’ And Roy says, ‘You said mate. I’m not your mate. I don’t have mates in football’. Jason was just a kid at the time but Roy went for him and totally embarrassed him. And I remember saying to Roy at the time: ‘What did you do that for? He’s just a kid’. But that’s enough about Keaney.

PK: No, tell me some more, everyone is fascinated by him.

TC: Well, I am.

PK: You are?

TC: I was fascinated by his comments the other week when he mentioned the horoscope.

(In a recent interview with the Irish Independent, Keane said he had made the decision to become a pundit after consulting his horoscope: “There’d always been offers and I’d always said no,” he says. “But I was offered the Champions League final between United and Barcelona at Wembley. I really wanted to see the match but didn’t want to be bothering anyone for tickets. ITV got in touch through my lawyer on the Wednesday. They called at 11:45am and said they needed an answer by 12pm. In that 15 minutes, I looked at my horoscope and it said something like ‘You can’t keep saying no to things’. So I said yes.”)

TC: I thought that was hilarious. It was so Roy.

PK: I don’t know, for me that doesn’t sound like him at all. I can’t imagine him checking his horoscope for anything.

TC: Well, what I meant by ‘so’ Roy is that there’s some stuff I don’t believe from him, and yet there’s other stuff . . . Do you know what he used to call Mick McCarthy?

PK: Go on.

TC: Phoney hard man.

PK: Phoney hard man?

TC: Yeah, I remember him telling me once, ‘He’s a phoney hard man’. He didn’t believe Mick was a tough Yorkshire lad because he had tested him in '92, remember?

PK: The incident on the bus.

TC: Yeah, on that famous (US) tour. Mick didn’t get involved, he was just taken aback like everyone else, but in Roy’s mind Mick had backed away and he was always looking for that challenge again. I can remember training sessions where you just knew he was testing Mick, and for me Saipan was the ultimate.

PK: The ultimate test?

TC: Yeah, I mean, you talk to the people at Man United — and it wasn’t just Teddy who told me this — but he carried on like that with Fergie; he undermined Fergie on numerous occasions or moments in the dressing room when he should have been challenged but was let go. It happened with Jaap Stam; he had a right go at Jaap Stam and all of the guys were like. ‘Ahh, Jaap’. They thought Stam might be the one to . . .

PK: To stand up to him?

TC: Yeah. And that’s what Roy did, he challenged people all of the time. He did it to me at

Heathrow Airport. We’d had a few drinks before we got on the plane, it might have been before that US tour, and he came up to me when I was taking a piss: “You fking big c*!” I said: “Have you had a few drinks, Roy?” And I washed my hands and walked off but he did that to certain people. That’s how he was. That’s how he worked.

PK: But he was obviously drinking then?

TC: Yeah, which we understood.

PK: And you made allowances for him?

TC: No, he got away with it because he was a good footballer. As a manager, you can’t clash with your best players; they’re the first person on your team sheet when they’re good, and the first person out the door when they’re not good. That’s my only answer. I don’t question Mick and I don’t question Fergie and I’m not saying they were afraid of him, but there was always a consequence when you clashed with Roy. Think about those two endings, Saipan and United. They were not little fall-outs; they were major disaster areas. I think if Fergie was brutally honest he would say that managing Keane was the most difficult thing he had to do in his career. And Mick would be the same. He (Keane) gave an interview to one of the papers (The Sunday Times) last weekend that was full of contradictions. He was asked how he would have managed himself in Saipan and he said, I wouldn’t have acted like that.

Q: As a manager how would you have dealt with a player like yourself in that situation.

A: It wouldn’t have happened if I was the manager.

Q: The preparation?

A: Not just the preparation, but criticising or questioning a senior player in front of a group of players. That would never happen.

PK: What’s the contradiction?

TC: Everything with Roy is a contradiction, that’s why we can’t get him. When I read that he wouldn’t have dealt with himself like that, it’s just absolute garbage because if the two of them had met in real life, it would have been a car crash.

PK: You mean Roy the player and Roy the manager?

TC: Yeah, I can’t think of a worse scenario. They would have been at each other’s throats.

PK: So, again, his flaw is his inability to deal with people?

TC: Yeah, and that’s what I find intriguing about his role with Ireland. I can understand why it was done; we had a half-empty stadium for internationals and needed to generate some enthusiasm and put bums on seats. So I understand the whole logic and Martin O’Neill is very good at dealing with people. Look at his career, he has dealt with some difficult characters, people like Stan Collymore, and they’ve all loved him and worked well with him. There’s a calmness about Martin, he’s a bit like a therapist, and he knows he can handle Keane because he’s a really sharp guy. So it’s a really weird structure and I’ve no idea how it will end but in some ways this is the last-chance saloon for Roy.

PK: In terms of his management career?

TC: Yeah, and being out of football is a scary prospect, even for Roy. Why else would he have done punditry? He hated it. He admitted he hated it.

PK: He looked at his horoscope.

TC: (Laughs) Yeah.

PK: You’ve obviously watched him on TV. What’s your opinion of him as a pundit?

TC: I’ve always admired the brutal honesty of Irish punditry. I watch the Irish channels and things get said in Ireland that would not get said in England. There are too many cliques over here, they’re friends with the Redknapps or pals with the managers and they don’t want to upset the applecart. But they’ve got to say something bad about someone so it’s always ‘Johnny Foreigner’ who gets it in the neck. That doesn’t happen in Ireland. People like Dunphy and Giles just call it as they see it and Roy has brought a bit of that to the table. When he was asked about Fergie (after Ferguson had released his book), you knew he would say something that would touch a nerve. We haven’t seen that on TV over here. People like Eamon Dunphy are whipped off.

PK: So why hasn’t Keane been whipped off?

TC: Because he’s the Messiah.

PK: The Messiah?

TC: Have you seen the Life of Brian? ‘He’s the Messiah. He’s the Messiah’.

PK: Of punditry?

TC: (Laughs) Yeah, and in some strange way, because he is such a huge name and isn’t really upsetting anybody, it’s working for him.

PK: Right, that’s enough Keane.

TC: (Laughs) I could give you 20 articles about him.

PK: Do you think any of them would make his book?

TC: I don’t know.

PK: Do you think he has the ability to stand back from himself and see his faults? Because that’s something you’ve always been good at, that ability to say: ‘This is where I fucked up’.

TC: Well, he may have the ability but whether he has the will, I don’t know.

3 EXTRA TIME

Yaya Toure’s Manchester City future thrown into doubt after ‘birthday snub’

Headline from Tuesday’s ‘Guardian’

PK: Okay talk to me about Ireland and the team now. What do you see as the challenges? Can we ever get back to the World Cup?

TC: No, not to a quarter-final, I can’t see it. And I think the end of Shay Given, Richard Dunne, Damien Duff and Robbie Keane is probably the last time we’ll see great players playing for Ireland. I can’t see it in the next decade. I don’t know if James McCarthy will be a great player; I think he’s a very good footballer but the John O’Sheas that have gone before . . . I don’t think we’re going to have them. I don’t see it.

PK: What about Seamus Coleman?

TC: Probably our brightest talent, Seamus, but our brightest talent is a right-back! And yeah, he’s a very good right-back but we had a very good midfielder, a very good right-back, a very good centre-half and a very good centre-forward. Look at that photo (the team that started against England at Italia '90): there’s three Liverpool players there, an Everton player, an Aston Villa player, a Blackburn player, a Celtic player . . . you know?

PK: There was also a bond with the fans that seems to be missing now.

TC: Well, they’re only going to love you if you’re successful. We didn’t win a World Cup or a European Championship, but we went deep and gave them a run and I think they loved us because they could still identify with us. I’ll give you an example: Barcelona signed this player and he turned up at training and told one of the regulars that he was thinking of buying a McLaren Mercedes. ‘You can’t drive that to the training ground,’ he was told. ‘It’s disrespectful to our fans. You have to drive the club car to the ground’. That’s how we were with our fans. We never shoved it in their face. But it’s all changed now. The fans can’t get to the players anymore. They can’t watch training or get to the ground and the players aren’t interested anymore. They live in different worlds.

PK: As we’ve seen today with Yaya Toure.

TC: How ridiculous was that? Every player I know would have seen that and laughed. These guys are so precious. Is the money not enough? What’s this big thing about wanting to be loved? They act like children. He’s a 31-year-old man!

PK: Do you like football?

TC: I fall out of love with the modern game every now and again, but I think most of us are like that. I think the biggest problem for the game is the penalty decision. How many football matches these days are decided by penalties? And when you think about how good these guys are now at diving and getting penalties, what’s it going to be like in 10 years’ time? It’s the biggest challenge for football. And you have pundits slowing down the replays.

How ridiculous is that? ‘I can’t see anything if we just run the replay but I’ll tell you everything if we can see it in slow motion’. And I’m only laughing because I’ve done it myself when I’m trying to make a point. But do I like it? Yeah, I love football. I love how tribal it is and find it amazing what it does to people — how they can hate someone because of the team they support. And I love watching football, I watch about seven games a week, Spanish football, English football . . .

PK: Is that not work?

TC: Yeah it is, and I do sometimes wonder would I watch it if it wasn’t but I would.

PK: But maybe not with quite the same eye?

TC: No.

PK: You mentioned pundits. Everyone has been raving about how good Gary Neville is but is there anyone you make a point of tuning into?

TC: To be honest, the best out of all of them are the journalists, the guys like Gabriele Marcotti who know football inside out. You’ve mentioned Gary Neville, and Jamie Carragher has also done well, but the reason they’ve done well is because they have listened to the way journalists have analysed the game and how it has become. You’ve now got footballers who are whizzkids with iPads and computers and they’re coming on with a lot of information.

PK: Because that’s the way the game is taught and played these days?

TC: Yeah, you have to do your prep work. One thing I learnt early on was that you have to do your prep work. In the old days, we could sit there and say (he mimics a grizzled old pro) ‘How much more do I fucking need to know? I’ve played the game for 20 years’. And of course, that does give you something the journalist doesn’t have but he still knows more than you. So it’s no longer a justification for not doing any work, and the reason Gary Neville has done so well is because basically he has done his homework. He talks sense because he has done his homework and 90 per cent of the guys they had before didn’t do any homework.

PK: Does Roy do his homework?

TC: I thought we were done with Roy?

PK: Sorry, we are.

TC: I think his role is a bit different, and there’s an unpredictability about Roy that keeps people on their toes. I don’t know if it’s deliberate but you just do not know what’s going to come out of his mouth sometimes. I’ve had loads of conversations with him over the years and thought, ‘That’s random. Where did that come from?’ I found him intriguing. I find him intriguing today. I mean, if we died tomorrow, we’d probably both put us in in our top three of people who have intrigued or mystified us.

PK: Yeah, he’s in my list . . . but you might not be far behind him.

TC: (Laughs) I keep thinking about another book. So many people have said to me in the last year, ‘Why have you not done another one? Hollywood does sequels for fun. That book was set up to have a sequel’.

He has the title.

[QUOTE=“myboyblue, post: 958944, member: 180”][SIZE=6]Paul Kimmage talks to Tony Cascarino: Still in love with the game and the intrigue of Roy Keane[/SIZE]
http://cdn3.independent.ie/incoming/article30301901.ece/f03de/ALTERNATES/h342/cascarino.jpg
Tony Cascarino: ‘I love football. I love how tribal it is and find it amazing what it does to people.’ Photo: Damien Eagers/SPORTSFILE
A Tuesday morning at Luton airport. He’s sitting in a coffee shop, wrestling with his wallet and talking on his mobile phone, when I enter the arrivals hall.
“The what?”

“Sorry?”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Hold on, please.”

He hands me a tenner, gestures towards the counter, and I’ve just placed the order — skinny mocha for him, espresso for me — when he comes striding towards me with his credit card raised.

“Just hold on please . . . Paul, what’s that number?”

“Which one?”

“The three on the back.”

“778.”

“Hello? Yeah, it’s 778.”

He has left an open wallet lying on the table.

“Sorry? You want the expiry date?”

He’s wearing a blue, patterned, short-sleeved shirt . . .

“Paul, what’s the expiry on that?”

. . . a pair of knee-length khaki shorts . . .

“12/16”

. . . and canvas shoes he has converted to slip-ons by trampling on the heels.

Meet Tony Cascarino, the tallest, funniest, and most unfootball-like footballer, I have ever known.

Twenty years have passed since I interviewed him for the first time. It was my first assignment for the Sunday Independent and I’d been sent to the south of France to write about his remarkable transformation as goal-scoring hero of Marseilles. It went well. Cas was a great story and easy to love . . . unless you happened to be married to him.

On my second evening in the city, we went for a stroll along the sea front to the Vieux Port, where he asked me to wait a moment as he slipped into the hotel opposite the harbour. After 15 minutes he emerged and waved to a woman on the sixth floor. He never explained who Virginia Masson was, and I never asked until five years later when we sat down to write Full Time, the story of his life.

There was a lot of pain in Full Time but it was a story with a happy ending: Tony and Virginia were married in June 2000 and looked rock solid for the eight years that followed. Then, out of nowhere, the marriage was gone and Virginia had left for France with the (three) kids. Tony was distraught and as angry as I had ever seen him.

It took him a long time to find his feet. He met Jo James, an old flame of his friend, Teddy Sheringham. They started dating, bought a house, and on Tuesday, when they welcomed me into their Hertfordshire home, the plan was to shoot the breeze about his last game as an international, against Turkey, Ireland’s opponents in Dublin this evening.

I wasn’t expecting a hurricane.

1 FULL TIME

The final minutes of the game flash like seconds. Six are added for injuries and stoppages and though I reach and stretch and strain every sinew, nothing drops for me or the team. When the final whistle blows, ecstatic Turkish players and officials come swarm

ing on to the pitch, but for me, there is only the painful sting of failure and the seething frustration that losing brings.

‘Full Time: The Secret Life of Tony Cascarino’

Paul Kimmage: Tony, what do you remember of your last 10 minutes as an international footballer?

Tony Cascarino: I came on and the centre-half who was picking me up was holding onto me and doing the usual stuff. But he spat at me a couple of times and I remember thinking, ‘If we get knocked out here, I’m going to go for you’.

PK: And you did.

TC: Yeah, and it was typical of me that I’d always do the daftest thing at the daftest moment — there were 40,000 crazy Turks in the stadium!

PK: Remind us what happened.

TC: The game ended and he ran across and started mouthing at me. I flicked out my foot and he tripped and the next thing he has just lumped me. I was shocked to be still standing, to be honest. I thought: ‘Cor! I can take a good punch’. And then I went for him and within seconds it was mayhem. A few of the police hit me with batons. I remember saying to one of them: ‘You’re meant to protect me, not hit me!’ Tony Hickey (the FAI security officer) got me out. We went back to the dressing room and there were cuts all over my face and Keaney was there and he just looked at me but said nothing. It was a really weird ending because I left the team at the airport.

PK: You were going back to France?

TC: Yeah, I was (playing) at Nancy and left the team at the airport in Turkey and that was it. My international career had ended in a horrible . . . well, I say horrible, most things end horribly in life, but it was weird.

PK: You say that most things end horribly in life but you read the epilogue in Full Time and it’s almost the perfect ending. You have this brilliant career in France that no one would have imagined, marry a lovely French girl and look all set to live happily ever after.

TC: Fucking hell! How wrong could I have been? I’ve been divorced twice. I have three kids living with their mum in Tahiti that I haven’t seen in 18 months. I’ve got a sack of emails (from his former wife) you just wouldn’t believe and it has really hurt me. I look at the damage and wonder, ‘How did we get married? Why did we have children?’ And I point the finger at myself because I’m the common denominator. The cover of my book says ‘Full Time’ but I keep thinking it should be ‘Fool Time’. And it has been really weird how things have panned out, but we instigate a lot of it ourselves with the decisions we make.

PK: What did you instigate? What was your weakness?

TC: In a way, I’m cannon fodder for a certain type of woman and easily manipulated.

PK: But is that not absolving yourself of responsibility? You said the common denominator in all of this is you.

TC: And it is.

PK: So is it that you’re attracted to the wrong type of woman or . . .

TC: Do you want me to simplify it for you?

PK: Please.

TC: Giuseppe is rowing away from his home on the shore in a boat; his wife is on the balcony pleading with him.

‘Giuseppe, where are you going?’

‘I’ve had enough. I’m not coming back.’

‘What about the kids?’

‘I don’t care about the kids.’

‘What about me?’

‘I don’t care about you.’

‘What about this?’

She raises her skirt above her hips and he starts rowing furiously back to the shore: ‘Coming’. (Laughs) That’s been my ultimate problem. I can’t explain it any other way without it sounding like bullshit.

PK: But that’s not just your problem, that’s our (the male) problem.

TC: Yeah, but some of us are more vulnerable than others and I was vulnerable. And I think having no father was another part of it.

PK: You did have a father — he just beat the crap out you.

TC: Yeah, but he wasn’t a ‘dad’. I didn’t have a role model, someone who can nurture you, and guide you and teach you the rights and wrongs. Now I don’t want to sound like I think I’m unlucky because I haven’t been unlucky at all. There’s an independence about me that has got me to where I am.

PK: Because you’ve done well, really well, since retirement.

TC: Yeah. I’ve been (a columnist) with The Times for 13 years and have just signed a new deal; I’m an ambassador for Ladbrokes and do a column for the Irish Sun. I work for Sky Sports News at least once a week and do a slot with Today FM (‘The Last Word’). So yeah, I’ve done really well and have loved every moment of it. I’ve survived two divorces and still have a nice lifestyle and am trying to do the best I can in a difficult situation.

PK: What has been the most difficult?

TC: Well, obviously the kids are the biggest issue because I’ve got three living in Tahiti.

PK: And they’re not going to have a father, either?

TC: No. I haven’t seen Josh (7) or Maeva (18) since February of last year. Will (13) is coming over in June for two months and the flight costs for him are £2,500. Multiply that by three and you’re talking about £10,000 per trip for flights, which is absolute madness. And there will never be an end to the problems, I’ve realised that for about a year now. So I just have to try and deal with it without (pauses) . . .

PK: Allowing it to destroy you?

TC: Yeah.

PK: When you were talking about the Turkey game, you said it was typical of you to do something crazy at the worst time. What are the other crazy things you’ve done?

TC: I’ve done some pretty mad personal things in my life.

PK: For example?

TC: That would take another book.

PK: (Laughs) What can you say that won’t get us into trouble?

TC: I just think I have a self-destruct button at times. People have told me I’m streetwise but every now and again I’ll hit the self-destruct button. For the last year I’ve been seeing a therapist because I couldn’t deal with it. I thought I could deal with it myself but I can’t, so I had to seek help to try and understand how long I was going to be angry.

PK: About the kids and breakup of your marriage?

TC: Yeah.

PK: Has it helped?

TC: Yes it has. I’ve realised that I had to stop being angry because I was getting myself into a right state. In the last year, I’ve done things with money that I would never have dreamt I’d have done.

PK: You’re talking about gambling?

TC: Yeah.

PK: But you’ve always been very disciplined about that? You keep an account of what you have won and where you are going; you know the games you cannot play in (with the high-rollers) and you know when to fold and run?

TC: Yeah, it’s all documented. I’ve got it all written down.

PK: So what happened?

TC: I went into a casino at the Ritz Hotel in London one night and lost about £13,000 playing cards. I got a bit a unlucky — it can happen — Teddy (Sheringham) was in the game and was down a few quid as well. It was about two in the morning and we walked across to the roulette

table. Normally, we’ll put 50 quid on a number before going home but I’d been talking to solicitors all week and the cards had really stung and it was a moment of madness really. I thought: ‘Fuck it! I’m going to spin it up’. I put £20,000 on red.

PK: What does ‘spin it up’ mean?

TC: To double it, I was going to chance my luck basically, like flipping a coin. And I could see Teddy looking at me from across the table but the ÂŁ20,000 came in.

PK: You won?

TC: Yeah. I’m driving home and the phone rings, it’s Ted. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said. ‘I’ve watched you playing cards for years and you’ve never done anything as stupid as that.’ I tried to make an excuse that a lot had happened that week but he was right. I’d paid for two divorces by playing poker and being disciplined but this was car crash; this was how you go skint. I couldn’t afford to do 20 grand.

PK: But that was a one-off?

TC: No, I’d done it before. And Teddy didn’t know I’d done it before. He’d just seen me on this occasion.

PK: And before? Did you win?

TC: I lost a 20, won a 20 and lost a 13.

PK: So you’re ahead?

TC: Yeah, but you’re going to lose because you’re spinning coins when you’re on the wrong end of the odds.

2 The Messiah

Brian: I’m not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!

Girl: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.

Brian: What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah.

Followers: He is! He is the Messiah!

‘Monty Python: The Life of Brian’

PK: There’s World Cup coming up. Does that excite you?

TC: I love the World Cup; 1970 is probably my earliest memory of football, being at my (paternal) granddad’s flat in Elephant and Castle and listening to him

slaughtering the Italians after they lost the final. And maybe it’s just nostalgia getting the better of me, but that still feels like the most amazing World Cup I have seen.

PK: Apart from the two you played in, obviously.

TC: Yeah. I played one in Italy, which is an incredible place to play. And I played one in America, which isn’t. You’re walking down the street and some guy says, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing here? Oh, the soccer World Cup? Yeah, we’ve heard about that’. To play in a World Cup in South America would have been my dream but this tournament to me will bring back memories of the '70’s and I’m looking forward to every game.

PK: Given your memories of your Italian grandfather in 1970, it must have felt odd when you played there for Ireland 20 years later?

TC: It did, everybody knew me. There were numerous occasions at the hotels where someone would say, ‘One of your family is at the gate’. And I’d go out and there’d be some distant relation looking for tickets but I’d have no idea who they were. If there was an O’Malley (his mother’s maiden name) playing for Italy at the World Cup, everyone would say, ‘Well, he must be Irish’. But it was very strange.

(I walk across the room and take a small, framed portrait of the team from Italia '90.)

PK: Tell me about this?

TC: That’s the only thing I’ve got hanging up from my football days. Jo (his partner) put it there. She got all of my caps cleaned and has been pushing me to hang them up: ‘Why would you not show what you’ve achieved?’ But I don’t want a shrine. I look at the letters and the shirts and it feels really good but it doesn’t make me want to put them out.

PK: Where are they?

TC: They’re all in the garage.

PK: So that was Jo’s pick?

TC: Yeah.

PK: It was interesting that she chose a photo from Cagliari?

TC: She didn’t choose it; she just liked the picture and showed it to me. I said, ‘That was 1990, a great experience’.

PK: Mick McCarthy described it as the ultimate experience of his career. Was starting against England that day the ultimate experience in your career?

TC: At the time, most definitely; I can remember the build-up and doing the pre-match interviews with Jack and it was as close as you can get to a World Cup final for us. And we were a better team than them. I think we underachieved from '88 to '94. Everyone talks about it as our most successful period but I think we could have gone further. I think we had a really good side. But playing for Ireland was, without a doubt, my greatest experience. Anything I experienced at club level didn’t come close. And yet, somebody told me a few years ago that I hold the European record for coming on and going off (as a substitute), which is not an achievement you should be proud of (laughs).

PK: What about these other guys in the photo (Chris Morris, Steve Staunton, Packie Bonner, Mick McCarthy, Paul McGrath, John Aldridge, Kevin Sheedy, Ray Houghton, Andy Townsend, Kevin Moran)? Do you still keep in touch?

TC: Andy (Townsend) is a good friend. I’ve known him since I was 11 and we played on the same Sunday team, but they’re all good lads. I look at Sheeds who has been battling cancer for the last year or so, and I was close to Sheeds. I really liked Kevin.

PK: Why?

TC: He was calm and a great footballer, not that being a great footballer mattered, but I just thought he was a good lad, a nice lad, and someone I enjoyed being around. I haven’t seen Sheeds or Chris Morris for years but if we met tomorrow, we’d give each other a big hug. And I would say all of that team would be the same and that takes a lot of doing for a whole team.

PK: So what was it? What made that?

TC: We were like a group of mates playing football together.

PK: You got a jersey signed after your last game in Turkey.

TC: Did I?

PK: It’s in the book.

TC: Okay, I must have done so.

PK: One of the names on the shirt was Roy Keane. ‘We have always got on well,’ you said. But it didn’t last?

TC: No, it was a bit like my marriage. In fact, the day I knew it was all over with my missus, was the day he finished as Sunderland manager and I went on radio and let him have it. (Laughs) I wasn’t in a great frame of mind.

PK: What was your criticism based on?

TC: The way he handled his players. Roy has a lot of qualities but I think one area where he has always struggled is dealing with people. I remember one incident with Jason McAteer before a game; we were sitting around the dinner table and Jason says, ‘Roy mate’ and Roy stops him and says, ‘I’m not your mate’. And Jason says, ‘What?’ And Roy says, ‘You said mate. I’m not your mate. I don’t have mates in football’. Jason was just a kid at the time but Roy went for him and totally embarrassed him. And I remember saying to Roy at the time: ‘What did you do that for? He’s just a kid’. But that’s enough about Keaney.

PK: No, tell me some more, everyone is fascinated by him.

TC: Well, I am.

PK: You are?

TC: I was fascinated by his comments the other week when he mentioned the horoscope.

(In a recent interview with the Irish Independent, Keane said he had made the decision to become a pundit after consulting his horoscope: “There’d always been offers and I’d always said no,” he says. “But I was offered the Champions League final between United and Barcelona at Wembley. I really wanted to see the match but didn’t want to be bothering anyone for tickets. ITV got in touch through my lawyer on the Wednesday. They called at 11:45am and said they needed an answer by 12pm. In that 15 minutes, I looked at my horoscope and it said something like ‘You can’t keep saying no to things’. So I said yes.”)

TC: I thought that was hilarious. It was so Roy.

PK: I don’t know, for me that doesn’t sound like him at all. I can’t imagine him checking his horoscope for anything.

TC: Well, what I meant by ‘so’ Roy is that there’s some stuff I don’t believe from him, and yet there’s other stuff . . . Do you know what he used to call Mick McCarthy?

PK: Go on.

TC: Phoney hard man.

PK: Phoney hard man?

TC: Yeah, I remember him telling me once, ‘He’s a phoney hard man’. He didn’t believe Mick was a tough Yorkshire lad because he had tested him in '92, remember?

PK: The incident on the bus.

TC: Yeah, on that famous (US) tour. Mick didn’t get involved, he was just taken aback like everyone else, but in Roy’s mind Mick had backed away and he was always looking for that challenge again. I can remember training sessions where you just knew he was testing Mick, and for me Saipan was the ultimate.

PK: The ultimate test?

TC: Yeah, I mean, you talk to the people at Man United — and it wasn’t just Teddy who told me this — but he carried on like that with Fergie; he undermined Fergie on numerous occasions or moments in the dressing room when he should have been challenged but was let go. It happened with Jaap Stam; he had a right go at Jaap Stam and all of the guys were like. ‘Ahh, Jaap’. They thought Stam might be the one to . . .

PK: To stand up to him?

TC: Yeah. And that’s what Roy did, he challenged people all of the time. He did it to me at

Heathrow Airport. We’d had a few drinks before we got on the plane, it might have been before that US tour, and he came up to me when I was taking a piss: “You fking big c*!” I said: “Have you had a few drinks, Roy?” And I washed my hands and walked off but he did that to certain people. That’s how he was. That’s how he worked.

PK: But he was obviously drinking then?

TC: Yeah, which we understood.

PK: And you made allowances for him?

TC: No, he got away with it because he was a good footballer. As a manager, you can’t clash with your best players; they’re the first person on your team sheet when they’re good, and the first person out the door when they’re not good. That’s my only answer. I don’t question Mick and I don’t question Fergie and I’m not saying they were afraid of him, but there was always a consequence when you clashed with Roy. Think about those two endings, Saipan and United. They were not little fall-outs; they were major disaster areas. I think if Fergie was brutally honest he would say that managing Keane was the most difficult thing he had to do in his career. And Mick would be the same. He (Keane) gave an interview to one of the papers (The Sunday Times) last weekend that was full of contradictions. He was asked how he would have managed himself in Saipan and he said, I wouldn’t have acted like that.

Q: As a manager how would you have dealt with a player like yourself in that situation.

A: It wouldn’t have happened if I was the manager.

Q: The preparation?

A: Not just the preparation, but criticising or questioning a senior player in front of a group of players. That would never happen.

PK: What’s the contradiction?

TC: Everything with Roy is a contradiction, that’s why we can’t get him. When I read that he wouldn’t have dealt with himself like that, it’s just absolute garbage because if the two of them had met in real life, it would have been a car crash.

PK: You mean Roy the player and Roy the manager?

TC: Yeah, I can’t think of a worse scenario. They would have been at each other’s throats.

PK: So, again, his flaw is his inability to deal with people?

TC: Yeah, and that’s what I find intriguing about his role with Ireland. I can understand why it was done; we had a half-empty stadium for internationals and needed to generate some enthusiasm and put bums on seats. So I understand the whole logic and Martin O’Neill is very good at dealing with people. Look at his career, he has dealt with some difficult characters, people like Stan Collymore, and they’ve all loved him and worked well with him. There’s a calmness about Martin, he’s a bit like a therapist, and he knows he can handle Keane because he’s a really sharp guy. So it’s a really weird structure and I’ve no idea how it will end but in some ways this is the last-chance saloon for Roy.

PK: In terms of his management career?

TC: Yeah, and being out of football is a scary prospect, even for Roy. Why else would he have done punditry? He hated it. He admitted he hated it.

PK: He looked at his horoscope.

TC: (Laughs) Yeah.

PK: You’ve obviously watched him on TV. What’s your opinion of him as a pundit?

TC: I’ve always admired the brutal honesty of Irish punditry. I watch the Irish channels and things get said in Ireland that would not get said in England. There are too many cliques over here, they’re friends with the Redknapps or pals with the managers and they don’t want to upset the applecart. But they’ve got to say something bad about someone so it’s always ‘Johnny Foreigner’ who gets it in the neck. That doesn’t happen in Ireland. People like Dunphy and Giles just call it as they see it and Roy has brought a bit of that to the table. When he was asked about Fergie (after Ferguson had released his book), you knew he would say something that would touch a nerve. We haven’t seen that on TV over here. People like Eamon Dunphy are whipped off.

PK: So why hasn’t Keane been whipped off?

TC: Because he’s the Messiah.

PK: The Messiah?

TC: Have you seen the Life of Brian? ‘He’s the Messiah. He’s the Messiah’.

PK: Of punditry?

TC: (Laughs) Yeah, and in some strange way, because he is such a huge name and isn’t really upsetting anybody, it’s working for him.

PK: Right, that’s enough Keane.

TC: (Laughs) I could give you 20 articles about him.

PK: Do you think any of them would make his book?

TC: I don’t know.

PK: Do you think he has the ability to stand back from himself and see his faults? Because that’s something you’ve always been good at, that ability to say: ‘This is where I fucked up’.

TC: Well, he may have the ability but whether he has the will, I don’t know.

3 EXTRA TIME

Yaya Toure’s Manchester City future thrown into doubt after ‘birthday snub’

Headline from Tuesday’s ‘Guardian’

PK: Okay talk to me about Ireland and the team now. What do you see as the challenges? Can we ever get back to the World Cup?

TC: No, not to a quarter-final, I can’t see it. And I think the end of Shay Given, Richard Dunne, Damien Duff and Robbie Keane is probably the last time we’ll see great players playing for Ireland. I can’t see it in the next decade. I don’t know if James McCarthy will be a great player; I think he’s a very good footballer but the John O’Sheas that have gone before . . . I don’t think we’re going to have them. I don’t see it.

PK: What about Seamus Coleman?

TC: Probably our brightest talent, Seamus, but our brightest talent is a right-back! And yeah, he’s a very good right-back but we had a very good midfielder, a very good right-back, a very good centre-half and a very good centre-forward. Look at that photo (the team that started against England at Italia '90): there’s three Liverpool players there, an Everton player, an Aston Villa player, a Blackburn player, a Celtic player . . . you know?

PK: There was also a bond with the fans that seems to be missing now.

TC: Well, they’re only going to love you if you’re successful. We didn’t win a World Cup or a European Championship, but we went deep and gave them a run and I think they loved us because they could still identify with us. I’ll give you an example: Barcelona signed this player and he turned up at training and told one of the regulars that he was thinking of buying a McLaren Mercedes. ‘You can’t drive that to the training ground,’ he was told. ‘It’s disrespectful to our fans. You have to drive the club car to the ground’. That’s how we were with our fans. We never shoved it in their face. But it’s all changed now. The fans can’t get to the players anymore. They can’t watch training or get to the ground and the players aren’t interested anymore. They live in different worlds.

PK: As we’ve seen today with Yaya Toure.

TC: How ridiculous was that? Every player I know would have seen that and laughed. These guys are so precious. Is the money not enough? What’s this big thing about wanting to be loved? They act like children. He’s a 31-year-old man!

PK: Do you like football?

TC: I fall out of love with the modern game every now and again, but I think most of us are like that. I think the biggest problem for the game is the penalty decision. How many football matches these days are decided by penalties? And when you think about how good these guys are now at diving and getting penalties, what’s it going to be like in 10 years’ time? It’s the biggest challenge for football. And you have pundits slowing down the replays.

How ridiculous is that? ‘I can’t see anything if we just run the replay but I’ll tell you everything if we can see it in slow motion’. And I’m only laughing because I’ve done it myself when I’m trying to make a point. But do I like it? Yeah, I love football. I love how tribal it is and find it amazing what it does to people — how they can hate someone because of the team they support. And I love watching football, I watch about seven games a week, Spanish football, English football . . .

PK: Is that not work?

TC: Yeah it is, and I do sometimes wonder would I watch it if it wasn’t but I would.

PK: But maybe not with quite the same eye?

TC: No.

PK: You mentioned pundits. Everyone has been raving about how good Gary Neville is but is there anyone you make a point of tuning into?

TC: To be honest, the best out of all of them are the journalists, the guys like Gabriele Marcotti who know football inside out. You’ve mentioned Gary Neville, and Jamie Carragher has also done well, but the reason they’ve done well is because they have listened to the way journalists have analysed the game and how it has become. You’ve now got footballers who are whizzkids with iPads and computers and they’re coming on with a lot of information.

PK: Because that’s the way the game is taught and played these days?

TC: Yeah, you have to do your prep work. One thing I learnt early on was that you have to do your prep work. In the old days, we could sit there and say (he mimics a grizzled old pro) ‘How much more do I fucking need to know? I’ve played the game for 20 years’. And of course, that does give you something the journalist doesn’t have but he still knows more than you. So it’s no longer a justification for not doing any work, and the reason Gary Neville has done so well is because basically he has done his homework. He talks sense because he has done his homework and 90 per cent of the guys they had before didn’t do any homework.

PK: Does Roy do his homework?

TC: I thought we were done with Roy?

PK: Sorry, we are.

TC: I think his role is a bit different, and there’s an unpredictability about Roy that keeps people on their toes. I don’t know if it’s deliberate but you just do not know what’s going to come out of his mouth sometimes. I’ve had loads of conversations with him over the years and thought, ‘That’s random. Where did that come from?’ I found him intriguing. I find him intriguing today. I mean, if we died tomorrow, we’d probably both put us in in our top three of people who have intrigued or mystified us.

PK: Yeah, he’s in my list . . . but you might not be far behind him.

TC: (Laughs) I keep thinking about another book. So many people have said to me in the last year, ‘Why have you not done another one? Hollywood does sequels for fun. That book was set up to have a sequel’.

He has the title.[/QUOTE]
Even in that piece Cascarino does nothing to shake the idea that he’s a cock.

A so-called professional poker player who showed his hand to the table when he folded in a televised tournament before. Fucking clown.

[QUOTE=“Rocko, post: 958976, member: 1”]Even in that piece Cascarino does nothing to shake the idea that he’s a cock.

A so-called professional poker player who showed his hand to the table when he folded in a televised tournament before. Fucking clown.[/QUOTE]
I don’t think he’s ever come out of any interview looking well, a man child of the worst description. The 3 kids thing is incredibly sad and you wonder what they would make of him fucking 20k on a roulette wheel and then moaning about the cost of flights for them to come visit him.

No surprise to hear he’s still friends with the likes of Teddy Sheringham and Andy Townsend either.

Article of the year.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/donal-og-cusack/donal-og-cusack-keane-carries-pain-to-the-next-battle-271159.html

[QUOTE=“caoimhaoin, post: 961751, member: 273”]Article of the year.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/columnists/donal-og-cusack/donal-og-cusack-keane-carries-pain-to-the-next-battle-271159.html[/QUOTE]

Good article and like all DOG articles it’s thoughtfully written with a good turn of phase. However, like most Cork people, he has severe over-awe of Keane. It’s cult-like down there.

I actually think we understand him better.
There is a difference between not being afraid of mistakes and not being intelligent, and that’s a distinction a lot of people fail to make.
He’s no genius or anything, but it’s clear many people misunderstand him.

I presume your article of the year claim is a wind up. I really like Donal Og’s articles but he’s written much better ones on the GAA.

The obsession with Keane in Cork is ridiculous. Rather than being able to understand him better I think they are unable to see past this warrior image they have of him and recognise his flaws.

[QUOTE=“Fran, post: 961756, member: 110”]I presume your article of the year claim is a wind up. I really like Donal Og’s articles but he’s written much better ones on the GAA.

The obsession with Keane in Cork is ridiculous. Rather than being able to understand him better I think they are unable to see past this warrior image they have of him and recognise his flaws.[/QUOTE]
That’s the thing Fran, we recognize and embrace his flaws. Not like the over protective dubs when it comes to their working class footballing Keane.

It’s an understanding of where he came from, knowing of his family (father in particular) an real understanding what makes him tick, what makes him angry, where his sarcasm and ability for self deprivation humour comes from.

We’re not all perfect like you and Rocko and the likes Fran. So us in Cork are comfortable in our own skins and we see that in Roy. Now seeing as he had a brilliant career for a reasonable footballer talent wise and the emotional attachment we all would have to the successful local boy it’s hardly surprising he is loved, warts and all.

[QUOTE=“caoimhaoin, post: 961758, member: 273”]That’s the thing Fran, we recognize and embrace his flaws. Not like the over protective dubs when it comes to their working class footballing Keane.

It’s an understanding of where he came from, knowing of his family (father in particular) an real understanding what makes him tick, what makes him angry, where his sarcasm and ability for self deprivation humour comes from.

We’re not all perfect like you and Rocko and the likes Fran. So us in Cork are comfortable in our own skins and we see that in Roy. Now seeing as he had a brilliant career for a reasonable footballer talent wise and the emotional attachment we all would have to the successful local boy it’s hardly surprising he is loved, warts and all.[/QUOTE]

Roy Keane was unprofessional and he was a coward yet the image Cork people paint of him is completely different. He was a horrible little bully who was very selective in his targets and preyed on an image built on posturing. Big Mick exposed him to the world for the weak, weak person he is.

[QUOTE=“caoimhaoin, post: 961758, member: 273”]That’s the thing Fran, we recognize and embrace his flaws. Not like the over protective dubs when it comes to their working class footballing Keane.

It’s an understanding of where he came from, knowing of his family (father in particular) an real understanding what makes him tick, what makes him angry, where his sarcasm and ability for self deprivation humour comes from.

We’re not all perfect like you and Rocko and the likes Fran. So us in Cork are comfortable in our own skins and we see that in Roy. Now seeing as he had a brilliant career for a reasonable footballer talent wise and the emotional attachment we all would have to the successful local boy it’s hardly surprising he is loved, warts and all.[/QUOTE]

In other words being a bunch of cunts in cork makes it easier to identify with a massive cunt like keane

Nail on head. We don’t mind being disliked.

Ya someone with average pace and smallish in stature and became one of the best players in His position while playing must have been unprofessional alright. That definitely tallies.

The amount of midfielders with average pace and are/were smallish in stature that were world class midfielders is along as the list of people you know.

the tax cheat is a cunt just like keane is