Johnny, I need to settle an old score

John Giles is a worried man. I have alerted him I am about to institute proceedings against him for a very large sum of money.

He airily has dismissed my alert, claiming the statute of limitations would disbar my claim dating back nearly 25 years.

But the clinching evidence has become available only in the last two weeks.

I had been a good friend of John Giles back then 25 five years ago, or so I thought. He was player-manager of the Irish football team and of Shamrock Rovers. I "ghosted" a column for him in the Sunday Independent. But I did more than that.

Often when John had nothing at all to say on football, or anything else, I would write the column off my own bat, unassisted by what passed for his insight into football. Under his name.

It was the excellence of these columns that established him as a world-renowned football commentator. But did I get any credit? No.

Instead, feigned displays of excruciating embarrassment for the words I had put in his mouth. I acknowledge I made the occasional mistake: associating a player with the wrong club or the wrong country, the odd error on football rules, the sporadic misunderstanding of the basics of football. That sort of thing.

Nothing to come between friends I thought, but you would never think that from his phoney outrage.

For all I did for John Giles in those days I thought I could expect a favour in return. Just a minor accommodation. I wanted him to pick me as a substitute on the national team, just once.

Call off Liam Brady or David O'Leary or some other waster and have me come on to the field with five minutes to go, so I could tell my grandchildren I played football for Ireland.

He might have been kind in his response. Instead, there was just derision. He said I could not play football. I could not head the ball. I couldn't/wouldn't tackle. I couldn't pass the ball.

He conceded I could hoof the ball up the field to no one in particular, when there was nobody around me, but that, he argued, was an insufficient qualification to play for the Irish national football team.

While this explanation had a superficial validity, I thought it didn't convince. Eamon Dunphy had played football for Ireland.

Giles insisted - triumphantly, I thought - that as manager of the national team he had never picked Dunphy and, anyway, he protested, Dunphy was not as bad as I was, being unable to specify in what way Dunphy was not as bad as I was.

Frankly, I thought him ungenerous, but I allowed the matter rest. I did not want to spoil what I thought was a valued friendship, and I wanted to help him further with football commentary (and how right I was, as his career since then has shown).

That was until Saturday week last. I have been to my solicitors and a consultation with two senior and one junior counsel is scheduled for Friday, after which I expect proceedings will be issued and a tale of betrayal, disloyalty, treachery and deceit will unfold in the coming months in the Four Courts. (By the way, John, when you have to pay the damages, send the cheque directly to me.) There is a basic requirement in law and, I would expect, in football, that people must be treated equally.

I am not saying it is necessarily unlawful to discriminate against people with no football aptitude in the choice of a national football team (that, I leave to be argued on another occasion and until then, take notice, question remains open). But I am saying that people of similar aptitude should be treated equally. That is the genesis of my case.

And the fresh evidence in support of my case emerged on Saturday week last and was reconfirmed on Wednesday last.

Clear for all to see on our television screens from Nicosia and at Lansdowne Road a week ago was proof that an inability to play football, an incapacity to head the ball, an unwillingness to tackle and a propensity to hoof the ball up the field to no one in particular are no disqualification for selection for the Irish national football team, as John Giles had disingenuously claimed nearly 25 years ago.

I was unfairly excluded from the Irish panel for reasons unrelated to my footballing inabilities. There was a secret agenda at work, made all the more hurtful in view of my unstinting services as his "ghost" columnist.

I will demand vengeance and compensation for the humiliation of being one of the few people in Ireland who can't play football not to be picked to play on the Irish national football team. I trust others will take courage from my brave initiative.