Breen plays himself back into the frame

In Camden Town, between dawn and morning rush hour, the subbies cruise past the tube station in their battered vans taking their pick of the Irish labourers who line the sidewalk like ruddy-cheeked hookers. A familiar face, a pair of boots encrusted with concrete or big shoulders and hammy hands are the charms which get you picked first.

And every evening the vans return and spit out the men who build the roads and mix the concrete and carry the bricks, there to spend their hard cash and long evenings in the Worlds End and the necklace of pubs that run the length of the main drag in Camden Town. You could spend a week there without hearing a London accent.

So Camden is Ireland, only more so, a smog-topped melting pot where the realities of the modern emigrant blend uneasily with the sentiments of the 1950s. Gary Breen grew up here in a house with a mother from Clare and a father from Kerry and a constant stream of aunts and uncles coming and going. Summers in Ireland, nights in the Irish centre in Murray Street and a life a million miles away from that of the cashcarpeted halls of the English Premiership.

For entertainment he looked to Arsenal; for heroes he looked to Ireland.

"There's a cliche about footballers dreaming of playing in cup finals," he says, "but all I ever dreamed of was playing for Ireland, getting a green jersey and being like Paul McGrath."

That distinct sense of identity simplifies things. Best day? "Debut for Ireland."

Worst day? "Not playing for Ireland against Belgium."

Physically, Breen cuts an unusual figure in the rough and tumble of the typical English penalty area. He's not one of the game's hod carriers. Tall, bordering on gangly, with big brown saucer eyes that suggest a mournful placidity, he has an elegance of touch rarely found in a central defender. He's not in the mould of the blood and bandage centre half, forehead covered in the train-rack scars made by needle and catgut.

Mentally, though, he has himself sorted out to a degree which goes way beyond the cliche of good players being able to cover the first five yards in their heads. When people who know him talk of Gary Breen having a bit of devil in him, their meaning only unfolds when you speak with him and trace a finger back over his career path. Gary Breen covered the first five or six years of his football life in his head.

He was 16 when he first started playing league football, shoring up the back for fourth division Maidstone United before holes in the accounts took the club under. Breen had declined several offers of apprenticeships at big clubs, opting to stay in school, complete his A levels and, when the time came, head off to university to study law.

When Maidstone sank, Brian Kidd called from Manchester United asking Breen to take the train up. West Ham tried some persuasion. A few other clubs put in calls. Meanwhile, Damien Richardson, now of Shelbourne, then of Gillingham, made the journey up to northern London to the Breen family home.

"I knew as soon as I walked in there it was a real Irish family, if there is such thing. His mother and father commanded so much respect from the kids. Quiet, gentle, determined people," Richardson says. "It was the attitude which brought you back to Ireland straight away. You went in and had a cup of tea and you didn't want to head back out again. You see where he comes from and you realise he's very much an Irishman and you know what he is made of."

So Breen took the next step in the most clear-headed manner possible and side-stepped the risk of getting mislaid among the starry-eyed hordes at a major club. He followed Richardson to Gillingham and treated the opportunity as a belated apprenticeship, coming back in the afternoons to work on his game by himself. He asked questions incessantly.

"I almost had my own seat in Damien's office, I used argue with senior players so much," says Breen.

"As a manager you will always have arguments with Gary Breen," says Richardson. "Even then he had this very fine appreciation of the game, and he sticks by his guns and stands by his principles. He'd put up constructive arguments. It's a very impressive part of his character. I'd try and make his life a bit easier and tell him to not always be meeting people in head-on confrontation. He had to discover the other Irish trait of his, persuasion."

The dividend from Richardson's investment of time and energy was quick to emerge. The footballing evidence soon confirmed the manager's hunch that Breen was going to be a special player.

"He was a cross country champion for London when he was about 16, so he was a natural runner. His physique was made for running and he's much quicker than he looks. He gets out of trouble so well. He had that, and a cool, determined head and a really good spirit. It marked him out. He made an impression straight away, and even though he was in the papers a lot and there was a lot of interest in him, I never remember him coming in asking about transfers or who was interested in him. He knew where he was going and when he would get there."

Press the fast forward button and Breen has arrived. Just about. He is at the point beside which he placed a cross when he was only 16 or 17 and just setting out. There is ambition left and some way to travel yet, but he finishes this season as a full international and a player with security of tenure in a Coventry side which slipped the relegation noose from it's neck in record time. Following his career through his curriculum vitae gives only half the story. The succession of jumps up through the grades suggest either a charmed character or a unique talent. Breen was never going to outreach himself.

"I never doubted myself," he says. "I used watch Premiership players and internationals on the television and study them and wonder how good they really were. I felt I would be good enough when I got in among them. I had a bad spell at Coventry about two months after I came here, and I put it down to the fact that I had played 18 months on the trot really. Played in the American tournament for Ireland, and all the younger lads like myself got injuries and had some sort of break. I just played on. In the excitement of the move to Coventry I kept going and started like a house on fire, but it just got harder and harder."

About this time last year the incline seemed to become too steep. March was the most miserable of months, beginning with Coventry's concession of three goals to Manchester United and winding up with the loss of four to Newcastle and three to West Ham. Into the first Wednesday in April and three goals lost to Macedonia in circumstances where blame was being spread around like confetti.

By mid April Breen was wearing neither green nor sky blue.

He could have been forgiven for wondering if the leap-frogging from Maidstone to Gillingham to Peterboro to Birmingham to Coventry had eventually caught up with him. Instead, he sat down and figured it out.

"I watched the Macedonia game. I didn't set the world alight, but I have played worse. Two penalties and a shot from outside the box to the top corner, but a couple of us were made scapegoats and I was one of them. The argument was that we sat too deep when we went one-nil up. I knew straight after the game he was blaming me. He said it. Stressed that the back five sat back too deep. I didn't play again. I know what happened that day, but I'm not going to say. But I know I took the blame for it."

He wasn't the only Irish player in Skopje that day who got lost overboard by the time Ireland's next game with Romania came around. Breen began a period of penance and purgatory on the Irish bench. Splinters made him sore, but he resisted the temptation to retrieve his old seat from Damien Richardson's office and stick it in Mick McCarthy's living room.

"You don't expect the manager to come and tell you why. After that game, Mick played Kenny (Cunningham) and Ian (Harte) together. He always suggested that anyone playing in their club team would be selected, and anyone who wasn't, wouldn't be considered. That was around the time of the Paul McGrath incident and what was happening there, so I understood. I was dropped at Coventry anyway.

"I went into the new season though thinking, right: I would get back into my club team and see what happened. I got back in my club team and I still wasn't in the Irish team, yet other people who weren't in their club team were. That was frustrating."

He recounts all this in a manner most unsuited to headlines suggesting that "Breen slams McCarthy". It was a phase to be worked through. He apologises for using the cliche (the first professional footballer ever to apologise in such circumstances), and adds that the players are so tight with each other that when stuck to the bench the only perspective possible is to be fully behind whoever is on the field. On a more detached level, though, he was acutely aware of the professional embarrassment of being a centre half by nature while two centre halves by nurture were winning the caps and stopping the gaps.

"Exactly. Look at it professionally: Kenny and Ian weren't centre halves and I was. That was Mick's decision and you have to respect that. It's not for me to say anything, all I can do is play well for Coventry. I look back on the Belgian game and I was hugely disappointed I wasn't selected. It was the worst night of my career, sitting there as it all happened."

He'd made the sacrifices to be there, to be out on the heath in Brussels. The summer months had been spent ploughing through plates of food which he would later convert into muscle in long session at the gym. He stuck a stone-and-a-half onto a physique which had been betraying him as tiredness set in towards the end of the previous season.

Something told him that perhaps he should refuse when Gordon Strachan asked him in August if he would fill in at right back in the early part of the season at Coventry. Yet the rule about playing in your club team if you want your green jersey back was lodged in his head, so he went for it. "I put the Ireland situation first. I thought, hopefully, if I'm playing I'll get back in the team, like Mick said. I didn't enjoy my football there. I got picked for a while at Coventry but it was a waste of time. Now I just concentrate on what I am doing with my club and hope that it will be noticed. It's not my place to argue. I know how much I want it."

For all that, a green jersey next Wednesday against Argentina would be something more than a little souvenir of a memorable year. With Ian Harte playing in the left full back spot for Leeds at present and apparently seeing his future along similar lines, the time has come for a born-and-bred centre half to reclaim one of the spots in the middle of defence. Breen, at 24, is at a stage in his career where the progress is less in leaps and bounds and more in sweat and blood as he strives for the master craftsman's ticket. He returned to the Coventry team as a centre half late in September for the goalless draw at Blackburn and has started every game since. His form and sense of responsibility is such that Strachan has set him the target of becoming club captain within six months.

Tomorrow afternoon Coventry play Liverpool live on the television.

Breen doesn't say so, but there is sufficient devil in him that the thought must have struck him that Phil Babb, his main rival, will be at the other end of the field, and somewhere in a Dublin hotel room Mick McCarthy will be watching.

Breen is the man in possession though, a good comeback game against the Czech Republic last month was decorated by a goal, a confident chest down and shot to the net. There are 180 minutes of friendly football left before Ireland embark on the European championship trail. No more musical chairs. Breen doesn't intend to watch the European championship saga from the sidelines

`I hope I've done enough to keep the jersey. I think I'm a better player than I was a year ago. I have worked at it. Everyone in the Premiership is at the peak of their fitness, so strong. I had to get more physical, bulk up a bit. You can't sit and worry over it, you just have to get on with it all."

When Gary Breen was a kid with Munster blood in his veins and a north London flatness in his speech and an affection for Arsenal in his Saturday afternoons, he had one hero and the hero wore a green jersey with a number five on the back.

"Always Paul McGrath. I was in a few squads with him but never got to play a game with him. But I have one of his jerseys. That's a big thing for me."

Playing for the under-21 side and designated to wear the number five, Breen was surprised to be approached by McGrath. Players are given two jerseys before a game, one long-sleeved and the other short-sleeved. McGrath had been given two short-sleeved ones.

"So Paul came in and asked me to swap a short-sleeved jersey for a long-sleeved one. `Only thing is,' he says, `I've signed it "Best wishes Paul McGrath". Is that ok?' And I'm just looking at him. Paul McGrath's jersey. He's giving it to me. So I say. `Mmm yeah, that's alright. No problem Paul.' "

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